AFP footage showed the Open Arms, which set sail from Cyprus on Tuesday, towing a barge that the Spanish charity operating it says is loaded with 200 tonnes of food for Gazans threatened with famine after more than five months of war.
Gaza death toll at 31,490
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Friday that at least 31,490 people have been killed in the territory during more than five months of war between Israel and Palestinian militants.
The latest toll includes at least 149 deaths in the previous 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding that 73,439 people have been wounded in Gaza since the war began on October 7.
World Central Kitchen is unloading the barge connected now to the jetty," said Linda Roth, a spokesperson for the US charity that is working with Open Arms.
The Hamas-ruled territory's health ministry said Israeli fire had earlier killed 20 people waiting to receive aid. The ministry said at least 149 people had been killed in the past 24 hours.
Witnesses reported air strikes and fighting in the southern Gaza Strip's main city Khan Yunis as well as areas of the north where humanitarian conditions have been particularly dire.
As Muslim worshippers marked the first Friday of the fasting month of Ramadan, AFP photographers saw Palestinians from the occupied West Bank queueing to pass through Israeli checkpoints to reach the revered Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in annexed east Jerusalem.
With tensions soaring over the Gaza war, Israel deployed thousands of police across Jerusalem's Old City.
In southern Gaza's Rafah, the last major population centre yet to be subjected to a ground assault but still pounded by Israeli strikes, AFPTV footage showed worshippers praying by the rubble of a destroyed mosque.
In negotiations aimed at securing a new truce and hostage deal, Hamas has put forward a new proposal for a six-week ceasefire and the exchange of several dozen Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners, an official from the group told AFP.
Hamas would want this to lead to "a complete (Israeli) withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and a permanent ceasefire", the official added.
The proposal would involve the release of some 42 hostages, who would be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners at a ratio of between 20 and 50 prisoners per hostage, the official said, down from a previous proposal of a roughly 100-to-one ratio.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US was working "intensively" with its fellow mediators Egypt and Qatar "to bridge the remaining gaps".
The UN has repeatedly warned of looming famine, with only a fraction of the supplies needed to sustain Gaza's 2.4mn people being let in.
With fewer aid trucks entering by road, efforts have multiplied to get relief in by air and sea.
Cyprus, the nearest European Union member country to Gaza, has said a second, bigger vessel is being readied for the fledgling maritime air corridor after the Open Arms completes its mission.
"God willing, they will bring food for the children, that's all we ask for", Abu Issa Ibrahim Filfil, a displaced Palestinian told AFPTV after spotting the ship from the beach.
Sea missions and airdrops are "no alternative" to the more effective land deliveries, 25 organisations including Amnesty International and Oxfam said in a statement this week.
Israeli aggression against Palestinians has killed at least 31,490 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry.
