Inside the aid drops onto Gaza’s torched ruins – with the starving too weak to fight for food
From the sky, the torched ruins of once-bustling cities simmer into view as the back of a Jordanian military plane yawns open. The ground beneath – Gaza – is ash and ruin: the bottom of a firepit stretching out to the horizon.
It is as if giants have torn through anything that once lived here: monstrous teeth have ripped chunks out of the few buildings that still teeter above ground. Everything else appears stamped underfoot.
In some corners, Israeli tank tracks have clawed up what is left of the soil in sickening scrawls. The only flicker of life is the families corralled into tents on scraps of beach in the punishing sunlight.
From the ground looking up, these impossibly huge planes roar into view. It is absurd. Gaza is just 25 miles long and a few miles wide, and entirely accessible by land and sea.
But because of Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the Strip and war with militant group Hamas, coupled with its crippling blockade, countries across the world are now dropping aid at enormous expense from the sky.
Airdrops are always a last resort, a desperate measure. That is because it rarely gets to those who are most in need, UN officials have told The Independent – those dying of starvation are too weak to endure the hunger games to grab it.
Sometimes it also lands in the sea. Sometimes it lands on the very people it is supposed to save.
“Like all the young men, Oday waited in the scorching sun for four hours. But when the planes arrived, he couldn’t get out of the way in time,” said Moatasem Al-Quraan, 31, from central Gaza, about his cousin, nurse Oday Al-Quraan, who was crushed to death earlier on Monday.
A pallet of aid being airdropped into central Gaza landed on him as he waited for food, his family and eyewitnesses told The Independent.
“He is married and has two children,” said Moatasem. “He was like every citizen in Gaza. He has been hungry for four months.
“The plane which dropped the aid which killed Oday was carrying 12 boxes, inside each were 36 cartons of food. Where will we distribute them? The aid on the plane isn’t enough for the 20,000 people who were waiting there.”
Further north in Gaza, Muhammad Mansour, a 39-year-old father of six, said that when the aid drops, it is usually taken by armed gangs, as crippling hunger has exploded into lawlessness.
A few times it falls in the sea.
“I don’t know how to swim,” Muhammad said in desperation. “Some went out in small fishing boats, but when they got it, the flour, sugar and rice were useless due to the seawater.”
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