US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday addressed the press about the current situation in the Gaza Strip and said that there is currently a "very strong" deal on the table.
At the beginning of his remarks, the American official discussed efforts to supply Gaza with humanitarian aid. He noted that a new entry point for aid had been opened in the northern Gaza Strip and that a large shipment of flour had left the Ashdod Port for Gaza.
Blinken also called for a better system for distributing the aid in Gaza. He explained that "one of the challenges that we have now is that lawlessness, insecurity, all of that purveys in Gaza, combined with desperation. When you put those things together you have situations where aid goes in and then people immediately charge at the trucks. You see looting, criminal gangs, and again, just ordinary civilians who, in the absence of sufficient aid, may believe that their only chance to get a piece of bread is to go at the one truck that they see."
He added: "When you have a sustainable, predictable, and constant supply of assistance coming in, that will give people confidence that food is there, it will keep coming, they can rely on it. That will also decrease both the overall insecurity and the sense of lawlessness, prices will come down for goods that are being looted and then sold on the black market, and that will undercut the gangs that are engaged in that practice."
With this, Blinken insisted that the most effective way to bring aid into Gaza would be with a ceasefire. Regarding such a ceasefire, he stated: "There's a really strong proposal on the table right now, the question is will Hamas take it? Does Hamas want to end the suffering that it's provoked? The question is there, but I can tell you that we are intensely engaged every single day, almost every single hour, with Qatar, with Egypt, to see if we can get, a ceasefire agreement that will get the hostages out, get more aid in, create a pathway perhaps for more a more lasting, secure solution."
The Secretary of State also mentioned the announcement that the body of dual US-Israeli citizen Itay Chen is being held by Hamas: "The hostages remain front and center on our minds and our hearts. We just learned that one of the dual US-Israeli citizens who we believed was taken on October 7th, Itay Chen, was in fact killed, on October 7th. I met with his family multiple times over the last several months. I spoke to them yesterday, to Rubi, to Hagit. There are no good words, no one should have to go through what they've gone through and what the other hostages' families are going through. That's another reason that getting the ceasefire would be so crucial, to enable us to bring the hostages home."