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The U.S. will begin airdropping humanitarian aid over Gaza in the coming days.
“Aid flowing into Gaza is nowhere nearly enough… lives are on the line,” U.S. President Joe Biden said Friday during an Oval Office meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The announcement signifies mounting pressure on the Biden administration to address the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza due to Israel’s perceived failure to safely deliver supplies. Biden did not clarify when the airdropping campaign would begin.
U.S. officials had been debating an airdrop campaign for days, Axios reported. Biden’s announcement comes just one day after chaos at an aid distribution convoy turned deadly. Israel and Gazan authorities have offered different accounts on what took place; the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza said Israeli troops fired on a crowd trying to get food, killing more than 100 Palestinians, while the IDF claimed its troops fired at a group several hundred yards away and that most Palestinians were killed in a stampede.
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Some have warned the U.S. that airdrops are insufficient for Palestinians to survive because one airdrop mission is equivalent to one to four truckloads of supplies, while Gaza could receive more than 250 truckloads per day, the Wall Street Journal reported. But others in the White House have said airdrops are better than nothing.
Top U.N. officials on Tuesday warned that a quarter of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are on the brink of famine, and that one in six children face acute malnutrition.
The U.S. Agency for International Development announced this week that Washington would send an additional $53 million in additional humanitarian assistance into Gaza.
Meanwhile, the White House is continuing to push for a temporary ceasefire and the release of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza. But Biden on Thursday admitted that the deadly aid convoy tragedy would likely complicate those efforts.
