Relief agencies rushed trucks full of tents and other humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip on Thursday, trying to take advantage of a fragile cease-fire that was holding despite a standoff between Israel and Hamas over hostage releases and alleged truce violations.

Earlier this week, Hamas indefinitely postponed a planned release of hostages that had been set for Saturday and accused Israel of violating the cease-fire, mainly by failing to allow enough tents and other aid into Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responded on Tuesday by warning that “intense fighting” would resume in Gaza if the hostages were not freed.

That sent the United Nations and other relief agencies scrambling to deliver more aid — including by pressuring Israel to let more shipments into Gaza — to try to salvage the cease-fire, now in its fourth week.

The director of the Hamas-run government media office in Gaza said Thursday morning that only 40 percent of the hundreds of thousands of tents that Israel was required to provide had entered the territory. In an interview with AlAraby TV, the media director, Salama Maarouf, said other essential supplies also had not arrived despite what he described as a slight uptick in aid trucks entering Gaza in the past two days.

On Thursday, Israeli media said that a convoy of trucks carrying thousands of tents for displaced Palestinians had entered northern Gaza.

A day earlier, the United Nations’ relief agency reported that 801 trucks of humanitarian aid entered Gaza on Wednesday alone to “seize every opportunity afforded by the cease-fire to scale up” assistance, it said in a statement.

The United Nations said its information was based on data its workers in the area had obtained from the Israeli authorities and from guarantors for the cease-fire deal.

But the emergency coordinator in Gaza for the aid agency Doctors Without Borders said that humanitarian deliveries were not happening quickly enough and that “people are still lacking basic items.”

“We are still not seeing the massive scale-up of humanitarian aid needed in northern Gaza,” the emergency coordinator, Caroline Seguin, wrote in a dispatch from the territory that the agency posted online on Wednesday.

She said that assistance had improved since the start of the cease-fire but that “the humanitarian community is failing to provide vital services to a population in dire need of humanitarian and medical support.”

“Both Israel and international actors need to urgently ensure the delivery of vital supplies such as shelter and food and to increase the capacities for its distribution,” Ms. Seguin added.

Three Israeli officials and two mediators, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said earlier that Hamas’s claims about not receiving enough tents were accurate. But COGAT, the Israeli military unit that oversees aid deliveries, said in a written response that Hamas’s accusations were “completely false.”

Negotiations were ongoing Thursday, and Hamas said in a statement that “it is not interested in the collapse of the Gaza cease-fire agreement and is committed to its full implementation” — a signal that the impasse was nearing resolution and that hostages could be released on Saturday.

Hamas also called for mass street demonstrations across the Middle East and Muslim communities to protest any plans to force Palestinians from Gaza. Over the past week, President Trump has repeatedly said that the United States should take over Gaza, turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East” and not allow displaced Palestinians to return to the territory once it has been rebuilt.

Mr. Trump has also said that “all hell is going to break out” if Hamas does not release all hostages by Saturday.

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.



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