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A ship with humanitarian aid for Gaza remains docked in Cyprus, a day after it was due to begin its journey.
A charity leading the mission told the BBC it was “a quickly evolving and fluid situation”, but it hoped the ship, Open Arms, would set sail soon.
On Sunday evening, the sighting of the new moon marked the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan in Gaza.
A ceasefire remains off the table as negotiations between Israel and Hamas have largely stalled.
The Open Arms’s mission is separate to US plans to start building a floating dock off the coast of Gaza to help get aid deliveries in by sea.
US President Joe Biden issued a Ramadan message on Sunday, and said the suffering of Palestinians would be in his “front of mind” as Ramadan arrived at “a moment of immense pain.”
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also marked the beginning of the holy month with a video message of “solidarity and support to all those suffering from the horrors in Gaza.”
The UN has previously warned a quarter of Gaza’s population is on the brink of famine, and children are starving to death there.
The ship, still docked in the Cypriot city of Larnaca, belongs to the Spanish charity of the same name, Open Arms.
It will tow a barge loaded with 200 tonnes of food, including rice, flour and cans of meat and fish, sourced by US charity World Central Kitchen (WCK).
It is expected to take about two days to reach an undisclosed location off the coast of Gaza, using a new sea route the EU said would be opened over the weekend.
A spokesperson for WCK told the BBC the charity has started building a jetty to safely get the food to shore. They added WCK has another 500 tonnes of aid in Cyprus ready to go on future boats.
Aid deliveries into Gaza have been increasingly difficult and dangerous – the World Food Programme paused its deliveries to northern Gaza last month, after its convoys endured “complete chaos and violence”, the organisation said.
With land deliveries near impossible, several nations have turned to air drops.
But the situation in Gaza is so dire, that the drops are an inefficient way of getting supplies to people who need them most.
And on Friday, there were reports that five people had been killed by a falling aid package north of Gaza City, when its parachute failed to open properly.
Israel’s military launched an air and ground campaign in the Gaza Strip after Hamas’s attacks on Israel on 7 October, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 253 others were taken hostage.
More than 30,900 people have been killed in Gaza since then, the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry says.
The conflict has created a growing humanitarian crisis, and the UN has warned that famine in Gaza is “almost inevitable”, with an estimated 300,000 Palestinians are living there with little food or clean water.
