Meal packages were dropped over the beleaguered enclave of Gaza Strip on Saturday by the U.S. military, where supply vehicles had been overrun and plundered.
In the first of many future rounds of emergency humanitarian relief approved by President Joe Biden, three C-130 cargo planes dropped 66 pallets totaling over 38,000 meals ready to eat over Gaza, a senior administration official stated in a news teleconference on Saturday morning.
The official stated that the pallets were dumped near the Mediterranean Sea beachfront in the southwest of the Strip. To ensure that the relief packages are accessible to the greatest number of people, the places were carefully selected.
Jordan, which has previously dropped food into Gaza via airdrops, coordinated the airdrop.
“This will be part of a continuous effort with our international partners to increase the amount of life-saving assistance we can get to Gaza,” the official said, adding that the airdrops “alleviate the suffering of innocent Palestinians who have nothing to do with Hamas.”
“We’re looking at land routes, we’re looking at sea routes, and we’re looking at air routes to make sure we’re exploring every opportunity to get help,” the official told reporters.
When questioned if this effort had anything to do with Israel's military assault in Gaza, the official stated that it is a reaction to the dire needs of Palestinian people and has nothing to do with what the Israeli military is doing.
The source told reporters that the airdrop is only one step in a process to get humanitarian goods into the war-torn territory in "every possible way," denouncing Hamas terrorists for impeding the flow of life-saving supplies into Gaza by infiltrating civilian houses.
During a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the White House on Friday, President Biden declared that the airdrops will start shortly.
“The loss of life is heartbreaking. People are so desperate that innocent people got caught in a terrible war unable to feed their families and you saw the response when they tried to get aid in,” President Biden said.
“We need to do more, and the United States will do more,” he continued. “In the coming days, we’re going to join with our friends in Jordan and others in providing airdrops of additional food and supplies into Ukraine [Gaza] and seek to continue to open up other avenues into Ukraine [Gaza].”
The president made reference to a horrific episode that occurred in northern Gaza, where a group of Palestinians attacked vehicles carrying humanitarian goods, resulting in at least 100 Palestinian deaths and hundreds of injuries.
The precise events leading up to the fatalities are still unknown. The Israeli military claimed that the majority of the deaths and injuries occurred from the stampede, despite several accounts claiming that Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd as they raced to remove supplies from the relief truck.
“Early this morning, during the entry of humanitarian aid trucks into the northern Gaza Strip, Gazan residents surrounded the trucks, and looted the supplies being delivered,” Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement on Feb. 29. “During the incident, dozens of Gazans were injured as a result of pushing and trampling. The incident is under review.”
Aerial film apparently shows hundreds of Palestinians rushing and getting aboard vehicles during the event. The IDF also published this clip.
However, Hamas asserted that Israel and the Biden administration were "fully responsible" for the "ethnic cleansing" and "massacre" that it claimed had occurred against the Palestinian people. The terrorist organization demanded protests against Israel's ongoing operations in Gaza be held all around the world.
“We have mercy on the souls of our people’s martyrs, and we affirm that their sacrifices and blood will not be in vain and that we will remain loyal to our cause, our land, and our sanctities,” it said in a message posted to Telegram.
The United Nations has issued a warning that food and clean water are running out in the Gaza Strip, twenty weeks into Israel's war against Hamas, to the extent that hundreds of thousands of people may face starvation.
Despite significant need, the UN food organization announced on February 20 that it had stopped sending supplies to northern Gaza after a convoy of trucks encountered violence and looting. After a three-week break, the World Food Program, an international UN agency, started up supplies again, although it stated that the collapse of civil order meant that their convoy traveling north "faced complete chaos and violence."
“Several trucks were looted between Khan Younes and Deir al Balah and a truck driver was beaten,” the organization said. “The remaining flour was spontaneously distributed off the trucks in Gaza City, amidst high tension and explosive anger.”
