On Wednesday, hundreds of people ran along a seaside road on the outskirts of Gaza City to collect bags of flour and boxes of water and canned food donated by Turkey and Egypt and were part of a shipment trucked in from southern Gaza.

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron met with Benny Gantz, a visiting member of Israel’s war cabinet, and pressed him to increase the flow of aid into Gaza.

“We are still not seeing improvements on the ground. This must change,” Cameron said in a statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Earlier the United Nations’ food agency said it had been “largely unsuccessful” in its attempt this week to resume deliveries to northern Gaza which is nearing famine.

The World Food Program had paused its deliveries on February 20 due to precarious security conditions, with its convoys exposed to attacks by hungry mobs. In a statement, the Rome-based charity said it dispatched a 14-truck food convoy to northern Gaza, but it was turned back by the Israeli army after a three-hour wait at the Wadi Gaza checkpoint. The trucks were rerouted and later stopped by a large crowd of desperate people who looted the food, taking about 180 tonnes, the WFP said.

South Africa, which filed a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, asked the court to order Israel to allow in aid “to address famine and starvation” in Gaza.

“I’m worried so much about my children,” Tahrir Baraka, a mother of five in Rafah, told Al Jazeera. “I don’t care if I eat, I worry about them, they’ve done nothing wrong to be starved like this.”

Meanwhile, EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen will visit Cyprus on Friday to inspect installations at the port of Larnaca, from where aid would leave for Gaza if the sea route is established, Cypriot government spokesman Constantinos Letymbiotis said.

EU spokesman Eric Mamer said the bloc was hopeful the corridor would open “very soon”.

Concerned by the lack of access to food, the US, Jordan and other nations have begun making air drops of aid in recent days, but aid groups say only a fraction of the needed assistance can be delivered by air.

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The war in Gaza began with a Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 in which Palestinian militants killed about 1200 people and took about 250 hostages. More than 100 of them were released during a weeklong cease-fire in November.

The attack sparked an Israeli invasion of the enclave of 2.3 million people. Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Wednesday the Palestinian death toll from the war climbed to 30,717. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and maintains detailed casualty records. It does not differentiate between civilians and combatants in its tallies but says women and children make up around two-thirds of those killed.

Israel says it has killed over 13,000 Hamas fighters, without providing evidence.

Aid groups say the fighting has displaced most of the territory’s population and pushed a quarter of the population to the brink of famine.

Meanwhile, efforts to negotiate a ceasefire to start before the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in a few days have so far borne no fruit. The US, Qatar and Egypt have worked on an agreement in which Hamas would release up to 40 hostages in return for a six-week ceasefire, the release of some Palestinian prisoners and a major influx of aid to Gaza. Hamas has said it wants a full end to the war and Israeli forces’ withdrawal.

Pressure on Biden

US President Joe Biden’s administration faced growing calls from his fellow Democrats on Wednesday to push Israel to ease the devastating humanitarian crisis in Gaza, with some saying they may try to stop military assistance if conditions for civilians do not improve.

“We need to use all the leverage we’ve got. The administration has not used the leverage it has to date. I don’t know how many more kids have to starve before we use all the levers of our influence here, but they really need to do more,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic member of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters.

Van Hollen and other lawmakers have called upon the administration to hold back military assistance to Israel if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government does not take steps such as opening crossings into Gaza for aid shipments.

Talks on hold

Talks on a ceasefire and hostage exchange between Israel and Hamas were deadlocked on Wednesday, as the humanitarian crisis in Hamas-run Gaza prompted growing Western concern and a Houthi attack on a ship in the Gulf of Aden killed at least two people.

Negotiators from the Palestinian militants, Qatar and Egypt - but not Israel - are trying to secure a 40-day ceasefire in time for the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which begins on Sunday evening.

The United States is worried that the Gaza conflict could spread in the Middle East, especially after a series of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden by Iran-aligned Houthi forces acting in solidarity with the Palestinians.

In the latest attack, at least two sailors were killed in a Houthi attack on a freighter, US and British officials said, the first deaths reported since the Yemeni group began the strikes against shipping in one of the world’s busiest sea lanes.

AP, Reuters