Hamas urges end to Gaza airdrops after deaths

AFP | Jerusalem     

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Hamas yesterday urged foreign nations to stop parachuting aid into war-torn Gaza after officials and humanitarians said 18 people died trying to reach food packages in the starving north.

Instead, the Palestinian group that rules the Gaza Strip demanded that Israel allow more aid trucks to enter the besieged territory, which the United Nations has warned is on the brink of a “man-made famine.”

Fighting raged on unabated a day after the UN Security Council passed its first resolution calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in the Gaza war, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

The resolution also demands that Hamas fighters free the roughly 130 hostages Israel says remain in Gaza, including 33 captives who are presumed dead. Jordanian, US and other planes have airdropped food into Gaza, even as UN officials and aid agencies have warned this falls far short of the dire needs of its 2.4 million people and is far less effective than ensuring overland access.

Rushing crowd

Yesterday, as Jordanian, Egyptian, Emirati and German planes again airdropped relief goods, with the sight of food packages floating down on parachutes sending Palestinian crowds rushing toward them.

Six people were killed in stampedes and 12 others drowned off the territory’s Mediterranean coast, the Hamas government and the Swiss-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said. Hamas in a statement called for “an immediate end to airdrop operations” and “the immediate and rapid opening of land crossings to allow humanitarian aid to reach our Palestinian people”.

‘Imminent famine’

The UN children’s fund, UNICEF, said vastly more aid must be rushed into Gaza by road, rather than air or sea, to avert “this imminent famine”. Food aid is usually only airdropped in crises where “people are cut off for hundreds of kilometres”, said UNICEF spokesman James Elder, speaking via video link from Gaza.

But “the lifesaving aid they need is a matter of kilometres away”, he said, as trucks loaded with aid have been waiting across Gaza’s southern border with Egypt. “We need to use the road networks.”