Airdropping aid in Gaza ‘ineffective’
Gaza City, Palestine - The famine in Gaza is deepening and airdrops of humanitarian aid are ‘ineffective’, the Palestinian enclave’s media office said on Sunday.
The office said in a statement on Telegram that ‘2.4mn people suffer from severe food shortages and famine is deepening further in Gaza and the north’.
It said the famine ‘is worsening in the northern and Gaza governorates, where so far 15 children have succumbed to hunger, malnutrition and dehydration’ and this ‘threatens the lives of more than 700,000 Palestinian citizens suffering from extreme hunger’.
The media office pointed out that ‘dropping aid by air and turning a blind eye to bringing it in through the crossings is an attempt to circumvent the radical solutions to the problem’.
“Aerial aid drops now carry serious consequences for the people, posing a major challenge, as some of them are dropped near the buffer zone (with Israel) or areas controlled by the occupation army or located within the occupied Palestinian territories,” it noted. It said this ‘poses a danger of death to citizens attempting to obtain aid’.
‘The aid that is dropped by air does not achieve justice at all’ and requires people to ‘run after this aid that does not reach safe places in disgraceful, humiliating and inhuman behaviour’, it added.
The office reiterated that it is ‘holding the US administration, the international community and the Israeli occupation fully responsible for the genocidal war being waged by the occupation against civilians, children and
women’ and also holds them responsible ‘for the famine and promoting the starvation policy’.
The US said on Saturday that it had carried out its first airdrop of humanitarian aid into Gaza, with more than 30,000 meals parachuted from military planes.
Days ago, the Egyptian army announced in a statement the participation of Qatar and France in an aerial operation in which Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates took part to provide aid to the Gaza Strip, which has been witnessing an Israeli war since October 7.
Gaza death toll rises to 30,534
At least 124 Palestinians were killed and 210 others injured over the last 24 hours as Israel continued its onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip, the territory’s Health Ministry said on Monday.
“The Israeli occupation committed 13 massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, leaving 124 martyrs and 210 injured during the past 24 hours,” the ministry said in a statement.
“Many people are still trapped under rubble and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them,” the statement said.
Flouting the International Court of Justice’s provisional ruling, Israel continued its onslaught on the Gaza Strip where at least 30,534 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and 71,920 injured since October 7, according to Palestinian health authorities.
Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip since a cross-border attack by Hamas, which Tel Aviv says killed nearly 1,200 people.
The Israeli war on Gaza has pushed 85 per cent of the territory’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60 per cent of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza. Hostilities have continued unabated, however, and aid deliveries remain woefully insufficient to address the humanitarian catastrophe.