The Gaza Strip as a Refuge: What the U.S. and Jordan are Doing to Provide Aid since the Hamas-Obama War
Access to the Gaza Strip has been severely limited since the start of the war on Oct. 7. According to the Israeli officials, there was a massacre of 1,200 people by Hamas when it was in charge of Israel. The Gaza Health Ministry says that the Israeli response has killed 30,320 Palestinians.
But the fact that little — or not nearly enough — aid has actually made it into Gaza has prompted several countries to use airdrops to deliver aid. According to the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), a quarter of Gaza’s roughly 2.2 million people are “one step away from famine.”
The routes to take aid in by land rely on a number of factors, such as border crossings, availability of drivers in Gaza to receive the trucks and drive the supplies where they need to go as well as having clearance from the Israeli military for safe passage.
This follows an initial U.S. military aircraft drop in coordination with the Royal Jordanian Air Force over the weekend. Tuesday’s operation was also done by the US and Jordan.
Jeremy Konyndyk was the director of the office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance under president obama.
He spoke about why airdropping aid is a last resort and how it’s a “grim irony” that the US is doing so now.
Organizing Airdropping Aid is Inefficient — Why is the U.S. Doing It in Gaza Anyway? Source: The Case of Gaza
If a population was completely physically unavailable, if they had been cut off by an earthquake or a hurricane, or if there was fighting or they were besieged, we would use them.
The Kurdish minorities fled up the mountain after the Islamic State militia pushed them out of their town. We organized air drops by the US military onto the Sinjar mountain in order to sustain them. It’s extremely rare outside of those types of situations. I can’t think of a place where they’ve been used while we were still in the area.
Konyndyk: First is cost. If you want to deliver by air, it is going to cost you eight to 10 times as much as overland transport.
And the volumes are much smaller. So to put this in perspective, Samantha Power, the administrator of USAID, was in the Middle East last week, and she gave remarks in the West Bank where she was bemoaning the fact that only about 96 trucks per day, on average, had been getting into Gaza.
Well, the three planeloads that the U.S. dropped last week are equivalent to ballpark four to six truckloads. It isn’t a significant additional amount of aid relative to the woefully inadequate amount of aid getting in.
Shapiro: That’s staggering, that not only is it eight to 10 times more expensive, but it’s the equivalent of four to six truckloads. And the number that President Biden himself has described as wholly insufficient is something like 96 trucks per day.
Source: Airdropping aid is inefficient — so why is the U.S. doing it in Gaza anyway?
Do we really need to stop denying humanitarian assistance in the U.S.? Comment on The case of Israel’s response to the Gaza crisis”
Konyndyk: Well, I think it is reflective of just a level of frustration within the administration with the ongoing obstruction of more normal aid mechanisms by the Israeli government.
And I think what is quite striking about that is under the International Court of Justice order, Israel faces a requirement to do all they can to facilitate humanitarian aid. Under the U.S. law there are prohibitions against giving security assistance to countries that are obstructing U.S humanitarian assistance. The plain language of what the president, vice president and administrator of USAID have said in recent days suggests that Israel is doing that.
Shapiro: Some people have criticized the U.S. as taking performative steps when the Biden administration is at the same time supporting the Israeli military’s war in Gaza. What do you make of that assessment?
Konyndyk: I think there is a really grim irony in the fact that the U.S. is supplying both the bombs that are dropping on Gaza and now the food parcels that are dropping on Gaza.
And I think it’s far past time — and most, I think, in the humanitarian community are now saying it is time — to put some real pressure and leverage on Israel over these blockages. And again, that is in our view required under U.S. law, that we should not be providing bombs to a government that is blocking aid from going into a population.