Aid is rushing into Gaza while the cease-fire holds

Humanitarian supplies are pouring into the Gaza Strip at an unprecedented rate, as foreign governments and aid groups race during a pause in the fighting to bring much needed relief to the beleaguered population.

The flows enabled by the cease-fire deal that went into effect Sunday morning are exceeding the 600 trucks a day called for in the agreement. In the first two days, 1,545 trucks have entered the enclave, according to data from the United Nations. That is also up from the 1,460 trucks that entered in the first 10 days of the month combined, according to Cogat, the Israeli military agency responsible for policy in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Thousands more trucks are lined up at the Egyptian border to deliver flour, fuel and other basic supplies in the coming days. Aid is also flowing into northern Gaza, which has been largely cut off since October by an Israeli military offensive.

With the risk that fighting could resume at any time, aid groups see the pause as an opportunity to get as much assistance to Gaza’s population as possible.

“There is definitely a desire to capitalize on the momentum that we have and the window that we have without a guarantee beyond phase one," said Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president for global policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps.

Security officials stood guard as trucks entered Gaza after the truce.

Prices for food have been falling with the improving outlook for supply, aid organizations and Gaza residents say. Leena Ahmed, 29, a mother of two in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah, said the prices of key goods dropped after the cease-fire was announced—with chicken and sugar down by nearly half, and flour down about 85%.

The hundreds, sometimes thousands, of trucks lined up on the Egyptian side of the Gaza border for much of the war became a symbol of the difficulty of getting aid to Gaza’s population of more than two million Palestinians, most of whom have been displaced and who have struggled with hunger and disease.

Those trucks are now being processed faster than any other time since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that sparked the war.

Aid workers say they have long been ready to surge in supplies but that Israel often obstructed their efforts by throttling access with delays and security checks and failing to establish order in Gaza after badly weakening Hamas.

Israel has said it doesn’t limit the amount of aid that can enter Gaza and that the U.N. and other aid groups hadn’t sufficiently increased their capacity.

“For months, Cogat was blaming the U.N. and the humanitarians for failing to deliver aid, but yesterday showed that when we have a proper operating environment, we can scale up and do it," Shaina Low, spokeswoman for the Norwegian Refugee Council, which provides water, food, shelter and sanitation supplies in Gaza.

A spokeswoman for Cogat said the cease-fire had made it easier to distribute aid inside Gaza and cited new contributions announced by the U.N. and Arab countries.

“Everything is the same regarding Israel, but the amount got bigger," she said.

Aid coming into the Gaza Strip has long run into bottlenecks once it enters the border terminal, where it is unloaded and then picked up by other trucks for distribution inside the territory. Distribution had been crippled by Israeli permitting, a shortage of trucks on the Gaza side, rubble-strewn roads, the dangers of military activity along the way and extensive looting by criminal gangs.

The pause in fighting has reduced those dangers, and the looting has fallen off now that some Hamas-run police have returned to the streets.

The cease-fire that began Sunday calls for six weeks of calm and an exchange of 33 hostages held in Gaza for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody. It also opens the way to talks to end a 15-month war that has shaken the Middle East and left around 47,000 people dead in Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants.

Besides food, aid groups say what’s needed most immediately in Gaza is water, shelter and medicine. Many people live in tents or other makeshift homes. The cold weather adds another stress.

Aid groups want Israel to ease restrictions on items needed for shelter such as tentpoles and cement, which it has banned to keep militants from using them to make weapons or shore up their tunnels.

Palestinians gathered Tuesday in Khan Younis to receive aid boxes provided by a U.N. agency.

The 600 truckloads of daily aid called for in the deal include 50 fuel trucks and are split between Gaza’s north and south. Most trucks will carry aid from Egypt and Jordan, with the rest from Ashdod and other points inside Israel as well as the occupied West Bank.

The new deal stipulates that aid workers be allowed to move between north and south. After the first week, civilians will be permitted to move around the strip as well, giving them the chance to check on their homes and see family members who they have been separated from for months.

That is likely to complicate aid distribution. Most people are currently concentrated in central areas, but hundreds of thousands could move to the north and south, widening the area that would need to be supplied.

The humanitarian response faces a potential stumbling block next week when two Israeli laws passed last year are to come into force, effectively halting the operations of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the largest aid organization in Gaza and the West Bank.

Aid groups say Unrwa’s wide-ranging responsibilities and infrastructure, including schools, health centers and warehouses, make it irreplaceable. Israel has accused the group of bias and alleges 12 Unrwa workers participated in the Oct. 7 attacks and that hundreds more have links to Hamas.

Under a previous cease-fire agreement in late 2023, humanitarian groups were allowed to dispatch 200 trucks a day to the Gaza Strip. But the deal broke down after a week. The volume of imports ebbed and flowed all last year but never approached the prewar average of 500 to 600 trucks a day carrying aid and commercial goods.

Beyond immediate needs, Gaza faces the monumental task of rebuilding infrastructure—including power, roads and sewage systems—that has been destroyed along with most schools and hospitals. Hundreds of Palestinian teachers, doctors, nurses, first responders and aid workers have been killed, creating a personnel shortage. Rubble, trash and unexploded ordnance present additional hazards.

“Gaza doesn’t just need trucks of flour," said Bushra Khalidi, a policy lead at Oxfam, an antipoverty charity. “The destruction of this key infrastructure has made it nearly impossible for delivery of aid at the scale needed."

—Summer Said and Abeer Ayyoub contributed to this article.

Write to Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com