The US would begin air-dropping emergency humanitarian assistance into Gaza, US President Joe Biden said on Friday, a day after more than 100 Palestinians were killed during a chaotic encounter with Israeli troops.
The president announced the move after witnesses said Israeli troops opened fire as huge crowds raced to pull goods off an aid convoy on Thursday.
At least 115 Palestinians were killed and more than 750 others were injured, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said.
Photo: AFP
Biden said the airdrops would begin soon, and that the US was looking into additional ways to facilitate getting badly needed aid into the war-battered territory to ease the suffering of Palestinians.
“In the coming days we’re going to join with our friends in Jordan and others who are providing airdrops of additional food and supplies” and would “seek to open up other avenues in, including possibly a marine corridor,” Biden said.
The president twice referred to airdrops to help Ukraine, but White House officials clarified that he was referring to Gaza.
Israel said many of the dead were trampled in a stampede linked to the chaos and that its troops fired at some in the crowd who they believed moved toward them in a threatening way.
The Israeli government has said it is investigating the matter.
The head of a Gaza City hospital that treated some of those wounded on Friday said that more than 80 percent had been hit by gunfire.
“Aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough,” Biden said. “Now, it’s nowhere nearly enough. Innocent lives are on the line... We won’t stand by until we get more aid in there. We should be getting hundreds of trucks in, not just several.”
The White House, US Department of State and Pentagon had been weighing the merits of military airdrops of assistance for several months, but had held off due to concerns that the method is inefficient, has no way of ensuring the aid gets to civilians in need and cannot make up for overland aid deliveries.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said that airdrops are difficult operations, but the acute need for aid in Gaza informed the president’s decision.
He said ground routes would be continued to be used to get aid into Gaza, and that the airdrops would be a supplemental effort.
“It’s not the kind of thing you want to do in a heartbeat. you want to think it through carefully,” Kirby said. “There’s few military operations that are more complicated than humanitarian assistance airdrops.”
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