American, Israeli and Egyptian diplomats are working frantically to establish a truce in southern Gaza to allow people to leave and humanitarian aid to enter.
Egypt had announced early in the morning that the deal was closed, but shortly after, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Beniamin Netanyahu denied it.
The pressure from the United States on its Israeli ally to respect the lives of the civilian population has been constant for days. Their intention is to establish a safe zone in southern Gaza that will prevent an even more serious humanitarian tragedy and also reduce the tension that threatens to spread the conflict throughout the region.
Egyptian sources had approved an agreement to reopen the Rafah post starting at nine this morning for a period of several hours.
The Israeli armed forces would stop the bombing and Palestinians with dual nationality would be able to leave the strip.
This agreement was the result of an intense night of diplomatic negotiations, the first good news in Gaza after a week under the heaviest bombardment it has ever suffered.
Aviation, navy and artillery subject northern Gaza to intense fire. Sunday night was one of the hardest for the 700,000 people who still live there.
Another half a million Gazans living in and around Gaza City have heeded the Israeli army's order to go south so as not to interfere with a ground invasion that may be imminent.
Dozens of trucks queue south of Rafah, the Egyptian city that borders Gaza, loaded with humanitarian aid.
American diplomacy has been working around the clock for days so that the population forcibly evacuated from their homes does not suffer further hardship. On Sunday he managed to get Israel to restore water supplies in the south of the strip.
It is urgent that the trucks with the aid can enter today. The UN has warned that in 24 hours the most vulnerable displaced people will begin to die due to lack of food and medicine.
For now, however, the border remains closed.
Israel requires that trucks be searched for weapons, but in Rafah there are no instruments to scan the cargo. The Israeli bombings have left the facilities badly damaged, and the same is true at Kerem Shalom, a post further east through which goods used to enter and which is closed.
President Joe Biden insisted last night that Israel must respect the lives of civilians, a message that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeated ad nauseam. This is essential to appease the anger of Arab public opinion and avoid a regional escalation of the conflict.
Israel insists that it ordered the evacuation of the northern strip to protect civilians because they are not its enemies and it will never attack them.
In this sense, a military spokesperson has assured that the army is not responsible for the attack on Friday against a caravan of evacuees. About 70 people died, most of them women and children. The spokesman claims that it was Hamas that bombed the convoy. "They are the ones who can benefit the most from these images," he said.
Propaganda and the spread of massacres through satellite channels have opened up deep unrest in the region. Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that threatens Israel from southern Lebanon, takes advantage of this. It launches mortar shells and other projectiles daily, which has forced the evacuation of populations in northern Israel.
The Palestinian Authority, which until now had been low profile, with ambiguous statements about the war, has finally condemned the Hamas attack on Saturday the 7th against Israel. "It does not represent the Palestinians," says President Mahmoud Abbas.
Very discredited on the street, especially among young people, who admire Hamas, Abbas knows that he has a chance to regain control of Gaza if the Islamist movement is defeated.
