The proposal is due to be presented to an emergency summit of the Arab League on Tuesday in Cairo.

“The Cogat plan is meant to be a spoiler, an alternative to the Arab plan,” an aid worker in Jerusalem said.

In January 2024 the IDF carried out trials of “humanitarian bubbles” in three areas of northern Gaza.
Selected Palestinians such as community elders were to administer the distribution of food and other basic supplies, but the plan never got off the ground.

1. It was hard to find local volunteers prepared to work with the Israelis
2. and Hamas killed some of the local people who were co-opted into the experiment.

Amjad Shawa, the director of the Palestinian NGOs Network, said: “The bubble approach, which was rejected from the beginning of the war, has all kinds of serious implications since the Israelis will control each single supply coming in,”

Shawa said it would be an extension of the restrictive aid regime currently overseen by the IDF

Under the ceasefire, the flow of humanitarian assistance entering Gaza has reverted to its prewar level of 400 to 600 trucks a day, but Shawa says Israel has not delivered the number of tents promised, when children have been freezing to death.

UNRWA reported that six infants died from exposure to cold on Monday and Tuesday this week in the Gaza Strip.

Shawa said the IDF was also preventing water tankers from entering, as well as notebooks and crayons intended for the improvised school classes being taught under canvas, on the grounds that such materials were “dual use”.

“They want to control the ABC of the lives of Palestinians,” he said.