All cargo offloaded from the first aid ship to reach Gaza

A first aid ship plying a new maritime corridor from Cyprus began unloading its cargo of desperately needed food in Gaza on Friday as Hamas proposed a new six-week truce in the war.

AFP footage showed the Open Arms, which set sail from Cyprus on Tuesday, towing a barge that the Spanish charity of the same name says is loaded with 200 tonnes of food for Gazans threatened with famine after more than five months of war.

World Central Kitchen, the US charity working with Open Arms, said it was readying another boat with supplies of beans, canned meat, flour, rice and dates in the Cypriot port of Larnaca but stressed the need for more road access to bring aid into Gaza.

"Our ambition is having a highway of aid going into Gaza," the group's Juan Camilo Jimenez said in a video posted on social media platform X.

The Israeli military said it had deployed troops to "secure the area" around the jetty while the cargo of aid was unloaded. The "vessel underwent a comprehensive security inspection," it said.

A spokesman for the Hamas-ruled territory's health ministry said early on Saturday that 123 people had been killed across Gaza in the past 24 hours, including 36 people in a strike on a house sheltering displaced people in central Nuseirat.

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, thousands attended prayers in the revered Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, amid a heavy security presence and restrictions on entry.

"It's the first year I see so many forces (police), and their eyes....