Amid Growing Fury Over Gaza, Israel Says It Is Easing Aid Restrictions

Following days of global outrage at Israel’s restrictions on aid to Gaza, the Israeli military announced on Saturday night that it would revive the practice of dropping aid from airplanes, and make it easier for aid convoys to move through Gaza by land.

The announcement came amid a crisis of severe hunger in Gaza, where the number of wartime deaths caused by starvation has nearly doubled in the past month, to 127.

Hunger has spiraled since Israel blocked all food deliveries between March and May. It then put in place a new and contentious aid system that required many civilians to walk for miles, through Israeli military lines, to reach a handful of food distribution points run by private contractors.

According to Gazan health officials, hundreds of people have been killed by gunfire on their way to get food under the new system, in many cases by Israeli soldiers who opened fire on hungry crowds. Israeli officials have said they fired shots in the air in some instances because the crowds came too close or endangered their forces.

Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a military spokesman, said in a phone interview that the changes announced on Saturday night were meant to make it easier to bring aid closer to where civilians live. He said that the Israeli Air Force had already begun to drop aid packages over northern Gaza, and that foreign air forces would continue the practice on Sunday.

The military’s announcement came a day after Israeli officials agreed to allow other countries, including Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, to parachute aid into Gaza.

Colonel Shoshani said that Israeli soldiers would also observe brief “tactical pauses” in neighborhoods where aid convoys were delivering food, making it less likely that aid trucks would be hit by Israeli strikes.

Israel already allows aid convoys to travel along designated routes through Gaza but aid agencies say they are badly coordinated, reducing their effectiveness. Foreign countries, in coordination with the Israeli Air Force, dropped aid in Gaza last year but the practice ended after some airdrops hit people and property, and others landed in the sea and in Israel.

The new airdrops follow some of the most exacting scrutiny of Israel since the start of the war. The U.N. World Food Program said this week that nearly a third of Gaza’s population was not eating for multiple days in a row. The head of the United Nations said on Friday that the situation in Gaza was “a moral crisis that challenges the global conscience.” Then the International Committee of the Red Cross said that the situation had “long exceeded every acceptable standard — both legal and moral.”

Israeli officials have argued that the level of hunger has been exaggerated and that Israel is doing what it can to lessen it. “What we are currently witnessing is an unprecedented vilification of Israel,” Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said in a statement on Saturday night. “The accusations that Israel is guilty of implementing a policy of starvation in Gaza are lies.”

But other government officials have given momentum to Israel’s critics. Amichay Eliyahu, a far-right lawmaker who leads Israel’s Heritage Ministry, said in a radio interview this week that “there is no nation that feeds its enemies.” He concluded that the government was “rushing toward Gaza being wiped out,” while also “driving out the population.”

After his office initially declined to respond, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel later disavowed the comments by Mr. Eliyahu, who remains a government minister.