The United States will resort to dropping humanitarian aid from planes to try to supply Gaza, where conditions are edging ever closer to famine and Israel is reluctant to allow a larger flow of aid. US President Joe Biden announced the new measure at the start of a meeting in the Oval Office with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a day after the deaths of more than a hundred Palestinians in a line where they waited to receive flour, in an attack in which Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd.
The aid that has arrived in the Strip so far “is not sufficient”, underlined the American president at the beginning of the meeting. “We will do everything we can” to increase the flow of aid to the 2.3 million people trapped in the Strip, he said. As indicated, aid launches will begin in the coming days and will be developed in collaboration with other allied countries in the area, including Jordan. Washington is also studying the possibility of opening a maritime corridor, which would allow the entry of much greater quantities of aid than planes can distribute.
“Innocent people were trapped in a terrible war, unable to feed their families, and they saw the answer when they tried to get help,” the president said, referring to Thursday’s deaths. “But we must do more and the United States will do more, in the coming days we will join our friends in Jordan and other countries to organize aid drops in Ukraine [sic: la Casa Blanca clarificó que se refería a Gaza] and seek to open up other avenues, including the possibility of a marine corridor that facilitates large amounts of humanitarian assistance.”
According to Biden, “the aid coming to Gaza is nowhere near enough right now. “Innocent lives are at stake, children’s lives are at stake.”
The American president’s announcement comes while the administrator of the US humanitarian aid agency, Samantha Power, is in the area, having met on Wednesday with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and that country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant . .
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In statements released after the meeting, White House spokesman for international affairs John Kirby clarified that air aid “will not replace” but will be “a complement” to that which arrives by land or sea.
Kirby recalled that dropping aid packages from the sky is a mission full of difficulties. “Few military operations are more complicated. There are many premises that must go exactly as planned. We will proceed carefully with the operation with Jordan, we will plan it carefully and we will learn from the first launches to improve,” he underlined.
In the case of Gaza the scenario is even more complicated given the enormous population density. “We need to get as close as possible but without endangering people,” added the spokesperson. The first deliveries, he clarified, will consist mainly of food, “probably military combat rations,” and will be delivered “to a safe location where no one will be injured, accessible to humanitarian organizations to help distribute the shipment” and avoid avalanches, Kirby said. said. The senior official insisted that the idea of airdrops had already been considered before Thursday’s deaths in the humanitarian aid queue, as “the need has become increasingly acute in recent weeks.”
Thursday’s deaths “underscore the need to continue to seek alternative routes and means for aid to enter Gaza” and the essence of the temporary ceasefire the United States is seeking to achieve in ongoing talks between Israel and the radical Palestinian militia. Hamas, with the mediation of Qatar, for an exchange of prisoners, an increase in humanitarian aid and a pause in hostilities.
Sending aid by air represents a shift in the American position, until now focused on pressuring the Netanyahu government to authorize a greater flow of aid by land. The trucks entering from Rafah, the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, have been reduced to a handful, without Washington having managed to convince the prime minister to open other crossings or allow more vehicles to pass.
The US president is under pressure to take measures to ease the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, where more than 30,000 people – most of them women and children – have already been killed in the Israeli offensive since October, and dozens more thousands were injured. Discontent with the White House’s pro-Israel stance, which maintains military assistance to Israel, and its rejection of a permanent ceasefire, have already caused election wake-up calls for the president this week in Michigan. There, the large Arab-American community mobilized a campaign for the “undeclared” vote (equivalent to a blank ballot) in the Democratic primaries. Their goal was to call for a permanent armistice and show Biden that his pro-Israel stance in Gaza could cost him re-election in November. The mobilization obtained 100,000 votes, or 13.3% of the total, and the activists intend to repeat the initiative in the elections in Minnesota, next Tuesday, and in the State of Washington, on the 12th. Both states, like Michigan, allow the possibility of “undeclared” voting.
The White House, for its part, claims that it is doing everything possible to reach a temporary truce, lasting about six weeks, which could serve as the first step towards a permanent ceasefire. Biden spoke Thursday, after the deaths in the humanitarian aid queue, with the Emir of Qatar and Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al Sisi.
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