“Three U.S. C-130 cargo planes dropped 66 total bundles, equating to about 38,000 pork-free meals, into the territory on Saturday morning. The bundles were split between three planes, the official said.”
“The airdrop is expected to be the first of many announced by President Joe Biden on Friday. The aid will be coordinated with Jordan, which has also conducted airdrops to deliver food to Gaza.”
Any help is better than none, that’s obvious. However, 38,000 meals is not NEARLY sufficient when the UN’s humanitarian office lists 2.2 million Palestinians at Crisis or worse levels of food insecurity (stage 3 of 5), of which over 500,000 are at the Catastrophe level (stage 5, the most serious before death). So you can see it would take 14 drops of that size (and each meal would have to get to the right people) to feed only the over 500,000 most desperately starving people a single meal, much less a day’s worth of food.
The same report says there is no access to clean water in northern Gaza. There is also a lack of medicine with hundreds of thousands of people dangerously ill.
The only remotely sustainable solution is to follow the advice humanitarian agencies have been giving this whole time - allow MANY more trucks into the region. There were about 500 aid trucks entering Gaza daily prior to Oct. 7th - since then it’s very roughly 10-30% of that most days. If Biden and the rest of the Western powers actually want to turn this crisis around, they are going to have to pressure Israel to immediately open up crossings and stop interfering with aid delivery. I sincerely hope this is just the start of a much more concerted humanitarian effort than has been allowed. Otherwise I’m afraid these air drops will be little more than a political trick done so that people can say, “but look, we helped!”