Maintaining the schedule for Gaza's crossings, Israeli officials informed their Palestinian counterparts Friday that all terminals would be closed for 48 hours.
Terminals will stay closed on Saturday, for the regularly scheduled Israeli weekend.
Gaza crossings official Raed Fattouh said he expected terminals to reopen Sunday, and limited shipments of aid and supplies to enter, principally via the Kerem Shalom crossing in the southern Gaza Strip.
The Karni crossing, made for the mass transport of bulk goods, the major crossing point until 2007, remains open an average of two days per week. The schedule is roughly the same as the crossings schedule since summer after Israel's assault on Gaza.
Fattouh noted that Thursday's imports, hitting around the 140-trucks-per-day average set for Israel for the first stage of the eased blockade, included 136 truckloads of goods, 32 of which were aid for relief agencies.
The official noted that 199,770 kilos of domestic-use gas and 553,623 liters of industrial fuel were also delivered, indicating a slight improvement in relations between the Gaza Electricity Distribution Company and the Palestinian Authority after a disagreement that plunged Gaza into darkness for 12-16 hours per day.
Fattouh confirmed a few Israeli military media reports saying 52 wheelchairs brought to Gaza by the 31 May Freedom Flotilla were unloaded into Gaza on Thursday.
On Wednesday, Israeli military officials said 82 wheelchairs from the flotilla were delivered.
Rights group: One month into ease, siege still illegal
After a month's worth of monitoring the level of goods entering Gaza in the wake of Israel's attack in the flotilla in international waters, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights released a paper reaffirming the "illegality of the closure imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip and its alleged ‘easing’."
The rights group said that despite the increase in goods, which UN reports from the Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs put at seven percent, "the closure is illegal and constitutes a form of collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza."
Monitoring the situation in Gaza, the locally based organization said "nothing has really changed" in the days and weeks after the Israeli government decision to change its method of siege.
In order to ensure real change on the ground, the group said, a "dramatic change in Israeli policy is needed." Describing the recent changes to the blockade as "vague, purely cosmetic and fail[ing] to deal with the root causes of the crisis," PCHR called for an "complete lifting of the closure, including lifting the travel ban into and out of the Gaza Strip and the ban on exports."
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