The United States Air Force successfully dropped approximately 66 ready-to-eat meal pallets into Gaza, which contained roughly 38,000 meals on Saturday, completing its first airdrop of humanitarian aid into the area.
The airdrop was carried out by three C130 planes, and the airdrops are expected to be a “sustained effort” as more than half a million people in Gaza are a step away from famine.
“The DoD humanitarian airdrops contributes to ongoing U.S. government efforts to provide life-saving humanitarian assistance to the people in Gaza,” CENTCOM said in a news release. “We are conducting planning for potential follow-on airborne aid delivery missions.”
Senior administration officials said the administration was looking at all possible ways of getting aid into Gaza, including by land and sea. However, they maintained that getting supplies in by land is the most efficient.
The officials also claimed that getting food into the area was one issue, but an even bigger deal was the distribution of the aid that gangs in Gaza were monopolizing.
“The problem has been distribution, and distribution is what matters,” a senior official said on a call with reporters on Saturday. “If you cannot move assistance from storage facilities from warehouses, i you cannot get aid into the north … You’re not meeting the critical needs to provide that minimal feeding that prevents famine.”
Another senior official said the administration chose to drop the food pellets along the Gaza coastline because it was where they felt it was easiest for people to access the aid.
President Joe Biden announced the airdrop on Friday, claiming that there was not enough humanitarian assistance flowing into the region.
“Aid flowing into Gaza is nowhere nearly enough … lives are on the line,” Biden said. “We should be getting hundreds of trucks in, not just several. We’re going to pull out every stop we can.”
Israel said it was aware of the airdrops endeavor and was supportive of getting aid to the civilians in the Gaza Strip. Israel itself tried to drop in aid to Gaza as well, according to White House National Security Communications adviser John Kirby.
More aid is expected to be rolled out in the near future, but an exact timeline for the next drop has not been set. Kirby said the U.S. has been considering airdrops for a while.
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“The biggest risk [with airdrops] is making sure that nobody gets hurt on the ground. And so you got to locate out areas to drop that you know will be safe for people so that they don’t become victims of the drop itself,” Kirby said on Friday. “Then you want to make sure that it’s in a location that is also accessible to aid organizations to help distribute that food so that you want, you want to see as best you can, and it may not be possible in Gaza, but as best you can a presence on the ground to help with the distribution.”
More than 30,000 Palestinians have died, according to the Gaza health ministry, as a result of Israel’s war with Hamas so far, which began following the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
This story is breaking, and will be updated.
