Hamas urges end to Gaza airdrops after deaths, more aid trucks
GAZA, Palestine (AFP) - Hamas on Tuesday urged foreign nations to stop parachuting aid into war-torn Gaza after officials and humanitarians said 18 people died trying to reach food packages in the starving north.
Instead, the Palestinian militant group that rules the Gaza Strip demanded that its enemy Israel allow more aid trucks to enter the besieged territory, which the United Nations has warned is on the brink of a "man-made famine". Fighting raged on unabated a day after the UN Security Council passed its first resolution calling for an "immediate ceasefire" in the bloodiest ever Gaza war, sparked by Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel.
The resolution also demands that militants free the roughly 130 hostages Israel says remain in Gaza, including 33 captives who are presumed dead. Jordanian, US and other planes have airdropped food into Gaza, even as UN officials and aid agencies have warned this falls far short of the dire needs of its 2.4 million people and is far less effective than ensuring overland access.
On Tuesday, as Jordanian, Egyptian, Emirati and German planes again airdropped relief goods, with the sight of food packages floating down on parachutes sending Palestinian crowds rushing toward them. Six people were killed in stampedes and 12 others drowned off the territory's Mediterranean coast, the Hamas government and the Swiss-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said.
Hamas in a statement called for "an immediate end to airdrop operations" and "the immediate and rapid opening of land crossings to allow humanitarian aid to reach our Palestinian people". The UN children's fund, UNICEF, said vastly more aid must be rushed into Gaza by road, rather than air or sea, to avert "this imminent famine".
Food aid is usually only airdropped in crises where "people are cut off for hundreds of kilometres", said UNICEF spokesman James Elder, speaking via video link from Gaza. But "the lifesaving aid they need is a matter of kilometres away", he said, as trucks loaded with aid have been waiting across Gaza's southern border with Egypt. "We need to use the road networks."
Battles near hospitals
On the ground in Gaza, dozens of Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles surrounded the Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis, where thousands of displaced people have sought refuge, witnesses said. The health ministry said shots were being fired around the sprawling complex, but no raid had yet taken place.
At Gaza City's Al-Shifa Hospital, the territory's largest, Israeli troops have been engaged in heavy fighting for nine days. Israel claims to have killed 170 Palestinian militants and arrested hundreds. On Monday, the Israeli military reported killing about 20 fighters around Al-Amal Hospital, also in Khan Yunis, over the previous day in close-quarters combat and air strikes.
Israel has labelled its operations "precise operational activities" and said it has taken care to avoid harm to civilians, but aid agencies have voiced concern for non-combatants caught up in the fighting. Palestinians living near Al-Shifa have reported corpses in the streets, constant bombardment and the rounding up of men who are stripped to their underwear and questioned.
