Rallies in 19 cities will press for aid access to Gaza on Wednesday

Osman Nuri Kabaktepe, who heads the Palestine Support Platform, said protests will begin at the same hour on Wednesday in 19 cities in 19 countries, calling for food, medicine, shelter and medical care to be let into the Gaza Strip.

He was speaking on Monday at a press conference convened by Turkish civil society groups in Istanbul, alongside Kemal Ozdal of the Sadakatasi Association, Ahmed Goksen, secretary-general of the relief foundation IHH, and Mehmet Cengiz of Deniz Feneri. The date was chosen to fall on World Humanitarian Day.

In Istanbul the crowd is to gather at Uskudar Square, across the water on the Anatolian shore, at 6:30 in the evening local time, or 3:30 in the afternoon GMT.

Kabaktepe said the supplies being demanded are entitlements rather than gifts, and that children, patients and women in Gaza are finding it steadily harder to obtain food and medicine at all.

The organisers rest their case on a gap between two numbers. The ceasefire agreement signed on 10 October 2025 provides for 600 aid trucks a day; they cite international monitoring reports showing that between 100 and 200 are getting through.

Closing that gap is not only a question of permits. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has warned that Gaza's haulage system itself has broken down: of a prewar fleet of roughly 1,200 trucks, it estimates about a quarter are still running, more than 20 drivers have been killed and 15 detained, and replacement vehicles and spare parts are kept out. Even an order to triple the flow tomorrow would meet a shortage of trucks to carry it and drivers to drive them.

The campaign is also being run online, with coordinated posting timed to the demonstrations, and organisers say further actions will follow in the coming weeks.