German Chancellor Olaf Scholz urged Israel on Saturday to permit humanitarian aid availability to Gaza on a bigger scale, ahead of a two-day trip to the Middle East. Scholz will travel to the Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba on Saturday to meet on Sunday with Jordan’s King Abdullah before flying on to Israel to attend a meeting organised with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “It is required for aid to step into Gaza on a bigger scale now. That will be a topic that I also have to have a conversation about,” Scholz told journalists ahead of his trip.
He also passionately talked his stress about Israel’s planned offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than half the Palestinian’s enclave’s populations of 2.3 million have taken shelter. “There is a peril that a comprehensive offensive in Rafah will result in many terrible civilian casualties, which must be stringently prohibited,” he said. Germany’s air force said it dropped pallets with four tons of relief goods by air into the enclave on Saturday. “Each package counts. But airdrops are just a drop in the ocean,” the foreign ministry conveyed on the social media platform X. Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza, triggered by Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, has displaced most of the population and left people in huge requirement of food and other required things.