Biden announces that the US will send humanitarian air aid to Gaza |

The United States will resort to dropping humanitarian aid from planes to try to supply Gaza, where conditions are increasingly approaching famine and Israel is reluctant to allow in a larger flow of aid. The president of the United States, Joe Biden, announced the new measure at the beginning of a meeting in the Oval Office with the Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, a day following the death of more than a hundred Palestinians in a line where They were waiting to receive flour, in an attack in which Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd.

The aid that has entered the Strip so far “is not enough,” the US president indicated at the beginning of the meeting. “We are going to do everything possible” to increase the flow of assistance to the 2.3 million people trapped in the Strip, he has maintained. According to him, the 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 marine corridor, which would allow the entry of a much larger amount of aid than airplanes can distribute.

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“Innocent people have been trapped in a terrible war, unable to feed their families, and they have seen the response when they tried to get help,” the president said, referring to Thursday’s deaths. “But we have to do more and the United States will do more, in the coming days we will join with our friends in Jordan and other countries to organize airdrops of aid to Ukraine [sic: la Casa Blanca clarificó que se refería a Gaza] and seek to open other avenues, including the possibility of a marine corridor that facilitates large amounts of humanitarian assistance.”

According to Biden, “the aid coming into Gaza is not nearly enough right now. “Innocent lives are at stake, children’s lives are at stake.”

The US president’s announcement comes while the administrator of the US humanitarian aid agency, Samantha Power, is in the area, who met on Wednesday with the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Minister of Defense of that country. Yoav Gallant.

In statements following the meeting, the White House spokesman for international affairs, John Kirby, clarified that aid by air “will not replace” but will be “a complement” to that which arrives by land or sea.

Kirby recalled that dropping aid packages from the air is a mission full of difficulties. “Few military operations are more complicated. There are many premises that have to go exactly as planned. We will proceed carefully in the operation with Jordan, we will plan it carefully and we will learn from the first launches to improve,” he stressed.

In the case of Gaza, the scenario is even more complicated given the enormous population density. “You have to get as close as you can but without putting people in danger,” added the spokesperson. The first deliveries, he clarified, will consist primarily of food, “probably military combat rations,” and will be delivered “in a safe place where no one will be hurt, accessible to humanitarian organizations to help distribute the shipment” and avoid avalanches, Kirby said. The senior official has insisted that the idea of ​​airdrops was already being considered before Thursday’s deaths in the humanitarian aid queue, given that “the need has become increasingly acute in recent weeks.”

Thursday’s deaths “underscore the need to continue searching for alternative routes and means for the entry of aid into Gaza” and the essentiality of the temporary ceasefire that the United States is trying to achieve in the talks that continue between Israel and the radical Palestinian militia. Hamas, mediated by Qatar, for a prisoner exchange, an increase in humanitarian aid and a pause in hostilities.

Israel claims that the deaths were due to a human avalanche and runs over by humanitarian trucks, while the Palestinian Authority describes what happened as “a massacre.”

The sending of assistance by plane represents a shift in the American position, until now focused on pressure on the Netanyahu government to authorize a greater flow of aid by land. The trucks entering through Rafah, the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, have been reduced to a handful, without Washington recently getting the prime minister to agree to open new entry points or allow more vehicles to pass through. What comes in “is not enough,” Kirby acknowledged.

The US president is under pressure to take steps to alleviate Palestinian suffering 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 tens of thousands more have been wounded. Discontent over the pro-Israel position of the White House, which maintains military assistance to Israel and its rejection of a permanent ceasefire, has already caused an electoral wake-up call for the president this week in Michigan. There, the large Arab-American community mobilized a campaign for the “undeclared” vote (equivalent to a blank vote) on the Democratic primary ballots. Their goal was to demand a permanent armistice and demonstrate to Biden that his pro-Israel position in Gaza might cost him re-election in November. The mobilization obtained 100,000 of those votes, or 13.3% of the total, and the activists plan to repeat the initiative in the consultations in Minnesota, next Tuesday, and in the State of Washington, on the 12th. Both States, like Michigan allows the option of “undeclared” voting.

The White House, for its part, maintains that it is doing everything possible to achieve a temporary truce, around six weeks, that can serve as a first step towards a permanent ceasefire. Biden spoke on Thursday, following the deaths in the humanitarian aid queue, with the Qatari emir and the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al Sisi.

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