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On the 674th day of the genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, 61 Palestinians were killed and 363 others wounded by Israeli forces in the past 24 hours, including 35 killed and 304 injured while waiting for aid, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
The Gaza government announced in a statement on Saturday that the death toll from misdirected air-dropped aid in the territory has risen to 23, with 124 others injured, since Israel’s genocide began on Oct. 7, 2023.
Hamas warned that most of the air drops land in areas controlled by the occupation or in forcibly emptied neighborhoods, putting anyone approaching them at risk of being directly targeted and killed.
They also noted that air-dropped aid shipments had previously fallen into the sea, resulting in the drowning of 13 Palestinian civilians last year.
The movement added in the same statement, “We have repeatedly warned of the dangers of these inhumane methods and have consistently called for aid to be delivered safely and sufficiently through the land crossings.”
On Wednesday, Gaza’s Interior Ministry stated that “the negative consequences of parachuting aid, and the chaos and losses it causes, far outweigh any benefit it might bring to our starving people,” accusing Israel of “using this method as part of a deliberate policy of engineered starvation and the spread of chaos.”
Since March 2, Israel has kept all crossings into Gaza closed, blocking the entry of humanitarian aid and driving the territory into famine.
This comes despite long lines of aid trucks waiting at the borders, with only limited quantities allowed in—far below the minimum needed to meet the population’s basic needs.
The World Food Programme recently warned that “one-third of Gaza’s population has not eaten for several days,” describing the humanitarian situation as “unprecedented in its levels of hunger and desperation.”
The United Nations has stressed that Gaza requires hundreds of truckloads of aid each day to end the famine brought on by the blockade and ongoing genocide.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel—with U.S. support—has carried out a campaign of killing, starvation, destruction, and forced displacement in Gaza, ignoring international appeals and defying orders from the International Court of Justice to stop.
French historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, a prominent university professor and Middle East expert, in the Le Monde newspaper, tracked the food aid allowed by Israel by air and sea after it fully sealed the land crossings, which were opened only a few times.
He emphasized that Israel’s goal was merely to appease public opinion, not to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinians.
Filiu initially discussed the air-drop operation carried out in the besieged Gaza Strip in March 2024, highlighting that Israel uses aid as a means of exerting pressure on Gaza’s residents.
He noted that airdropping aid in conflict zones is “one of the least effective ways to distribute” humanitarian assistance, a conclusion also reached by the U.S. military following the massive air-drop campaign carried out by heavy aircraft in northern Iraq in the spring of 1991 to aid the Kurds.
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