A day after the tragedy in which more than a hundred Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops in Gaza while queuing for food, US President Joe Biden announced on Friday that he would create an airlift to launch aid packages from the skies of Gaza. On Saturday, three US Army C-130 cargo planes dropped the first batch from the sky, 66 packages with 38,000 food rations inside.
“Innocent people have been caught up in a terrible war, unable to feed their families, and they’ve seen the answer when they tried to get help,” Biden said Friday from the Oval Office, minutes before meeting behind closed doors with the Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni. “We will do everything possible” to ensure humanitarian aid to the 2.3 million people trapped in the strip, the president promised: “we must do more”.
The airdrop, which will be expanded “in the coming days” with other supplies, is being carried out in coordination “with our friends in Jordan and other” allies in the region, Biden confirmed. In recent months, France, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have also provided aerial aid, but Saturday’s is the first US launch. The planes that have been used, C-130s, are prepared to reach remote locations and precisely drop pallets full of food and other supplies tied to a net with parachutes. They have been used in the past to send humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti, among other places.
Since the start of the war on October 7, the war cabinet led by Benjamin Netanyahu has blocked the entry of food, water, medicine and other supplies into Gaza on the grounds that weapons for Hamas are being smuggled into the trucks . The only passage for humanitarian aid that has remained open, on a trickle basis, is Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, recently bombed by Israel.
At the same time, the US is also studying the possibility of opening a sea corridor, which will allow supplies to be distributed from the Mediterranean in much higher quantities. Meanwhile, Biden is negotiating with Israel to allow the passage of more trucks by land: “We will insist on Israel to facilitate more trucks and more routes, so that more and more people receive the help they need, without excuses.”
At the beginning of the week, three senior United Nations officials warned the Security Council that residents of Gaza could suffer “imminent starvation”. The director of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Ramesh Rajasingham, drew an alarming situation: “Unfortunately, as gloomy as the picture is, there is a good chance that it will continue to deteriorate.” For now, 576,000 people, a quarter of Gaza’s population, are “on the brink of starvation”, he said, warning of an imminent “total” agricultural collapse in the north of the strip in May if they continue the conditions
