Airdrops of food are not the answer as tons of food, medicine, and humanitarian aid sit on the other side of Gazan borders, blocked by Israeli authorities from entering the Strip.
Airdrops are ineffective and dangerous and will force people to risk their lives for food, said Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) today.
As Israeli authorities’ deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza has reached unprecedented levels and people continue to be killed in violence at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid distribution sites, Israel must fully lift its inhumane siege on Gaza and abandon the ineffective GHF scheme to distribute aid, and allow humanitarian actors to freely provide lifesaving assistance to Palestinians across the Strip.
Gaza: 1 in 4 young children and pregnant women in MSF clinics are malnourished
Read moreJean Guy Vataux, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza, said today:
“The roads are there, the trucks are there, the food and medicine are there, everything is ready to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza just a few miles away.
All that is needed is for Israeli authorities to decide to facilitate its arrival—expedite the clearance procedures, allow the entry of goods at scale, and coordinate to permit safe collection and delivery. Only then can we begin to resolve the starvation we are seeing.
Airdrops are notoriously ineffective and dangerous. They carry far less supply than the more than 20 tons you can get on a truck.
At the moment, 2 million people are trapped in a tiny piece of land, which makes up just 12 percent of the whole Strip—if anything lands in this area, people will inevitably be injured. On the other hand, if the airdrops land in areas where Israel has issued displacement orders, people will be forced to enter militarized zones—once again risking their lives for food.”
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