US airdropping supplies in Gaza. (Credit: AFP)
BEIRUT — At least five people have been crushed to death after being hit by aid packages airdropped into Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reported from Rafah on Friday. AFP later reported the deaths, adding that ten other had also been injured, citing the head nurse in the emergency department at al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza.
The parachute that was used to airdrop the aid did not open, the correspondent said, causing the boxes to fall directly onto people who were gathered there in large numbers, hoping to receive some desperately needed and severely limited supplies.
Two people were killed on the spot, while three were severely injured and later died at Kamal Adwan Hospital, in northern Gaza, according to initial reports from Al Jazeera. AFP reported that the failed airdrop had occurred at al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City.
“This is the tragedy people are experiencing in the north of Gaza. Not only are they confronted with the lack of food and medical supplies, but as they wait for packages of food they are either targeted by the Israeli military or killed by a non-functional parachute,” Mahmoud said.
The Palestinian group al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed that its fighters attacked and destroyed a gathering of Israeli soldiers stationed in tents around the Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing in northern Gaza on Friday. And even before the afternoon was through, dozens of Palestinians had reportedly been killed by the Israeli army in northern Gaza.
The US, Jordan, Egypt, France, the Netherlands and Belgium dropped aid over Gaza Friday in an attempt to provide supplies, including desperately needed food, to Palestinians in the Israel-blockaded enclave where already people, mostly children, are dying from malnutrition.
The airdrops have been criticized by international aid agencies and others as wholly insufficient to meet the needs of the people living in the Palestinian territory.
The United Nations has warned of widespread famine among Gaza's roughly 2.3 million residents, and the global body's top humanitarian aid coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said Friday in a social media post marking six months of war in Gaza that the airdrops were a "last resort."
"All those concerned about the situation in Gaza should put pressure on Israeli government to grant unimpeded humanitarian land access and not blocking convoys," the European Union's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Thursday, calling the airdrops "good but insufficient."
At least 20 Palestinians have starved to death in Gaza, Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, said on Wednesday. The youngest baby who died of starvation in the enclave was one day old, according to Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan hospital.
Negotiators from Hamas, Qatar, and Egypt — but not Israel — have tried this week to secure a 40-day cease-fire in time for the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which begins early next week.