‘Everyone is hungry’: 12 Gazans said drowned wading into sea to get aid packages
Countries say they’ll continue to airdrop humanitarian supplies into war-torn enclave despite recent drownings
Gazans waited again Tuesday in their hundreds for food to fall from the sky at beaches in the famine-stalked north, a day after nearly 20 died trying to get to parachutes carrying aid.
Twelve of them drowned trying to wade into the sea to get aid packages that went astray, according to Hamas authorities and the Swiss-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
They were “young men and children,” witnesses told AFP. “They didn’t know how to swim. They went and did not return.”
“Everyone is hungry, so there’s chaos to get food,” said Ahmed Al-Rifi, a mechanic from nearby Gaza City, much of which has been reduced to ruins by months of war, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacre.
“Every day people get hurt or even killed fighting to get basic items like flour, canned food, water, lentils, and beans,” he added.
Six of those who died amid the dunes and rubble on Monday were killed in stampedes, Hamas and Euro-Med said.
“The situation is deeply humiliating,” said taxi driver Uday Nasser.
“We are risking our lives just to receive aid. What should be a humanitarian effort has turned into fights and beatings.
“The strong take from the weaker ones. Sometimes they use knives or even shoot.”
Even those who manage to get food risk being robbed on the way home, said Nasser.
But such is the hunger in northern Gaza, which the United Nations warned is on the brink of a “man-made famine,” that every day people are prepared to take the risk.
US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller on Tuesday lamented the reports of the drowning deaths of Palestinians who were trying to retrieve the air-dropped aid that landed off the coast of northern Gaza.
“It is a tragedy,” Miller said when asked about the reports in a briefing. “It is not just a tragedy that [these] individuals died trying to get aid. It is a tragedy that they felt so desperate that they had to swim out into the ocean to try and retrieve it in the first place.”
Miller says the US has not yet confirmed who was responsible for the airdrops that landed in the sea. Last month, several Palestinians were killed after packages from an Emirati airdrop landed on top of them.
The US official says that there has been a modest increase in aid going into Gaza in recent weeks, but that such boosts have been seen before and weren’t sustained, so Washington is pushing Israel to ensure that aid continues to increase.
Insufficient aid
Israel and Hamas are almost six months into a war triggered by the terror group’s devastating October 7 attack, when thousands of terrorists killed close to 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 253 people of all ages to Gaza, where more than half remain.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 32,000 have been killed since October, an unverified figure that does not differentiate between combatants and civilians. The figure cannot be independently checked and includes some 13,000 Hamas terrorists Israel says it has killed in battle. Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7.
Israel, which has vowed to destroy Hamas following the attack, is worried that Hamas and other terror groups in Gaza will divert aid and has kept all but one of its land crossings into the enclave closed. It opened its Kerem Shalom crossing close to Rafah in late December and denies accusations by Egypt and UN aid agencies that it has delayed deliveries of humanitarian relief, saying that there is no limit to the amount of aid that can enter the Strip.
Israel blames the ailing humanitarian situation on aid agencies’ failure to distribute supplies, and on Hamas and armed groups who have looted trucks entering the Gaza.
‘Real danger’
“We hear the plane’s noise and wait for aid to be dropped with parachutes. We see people gazing at the sky, so we know the plane is coming,” said Nasser, 27, who used to live in the Jabalia refugee camp before being forced to flee his home.
“When we reach the drop zone, a large crowd gathers, leading to fights, chaos, and injuries. Some people fall to the ground in the stampede.”
The aid crates, which weigh around a ton, can be dangerous.
Five people were killed and 10 injured by an airdrop earlier this month when parachutes malfunctioned, a Gaza medic said.
Several nations have been airdropping aid into northern Gaza, where land deliveries have effectively been inadequate, including France, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Germany. The UN chief recently accused Israel of blocking the delivery of aid through obstacles and chokepoints.
Despite the latest deaths linked to airdrops, the United States insisted Tuesday that it would continue the airdrops even as Hamas pleaded for them to stop, saying they were a “real danger to the lives of hungry citizens.”
Instead, the terror group demanded that Israel allow more aid trucks to enter the war-torn territory.
Only around 150 trucks a day carrying aid are now getting into Gaza compared with at least 500 before the war, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
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.”
Back on the beach, Al-Rifi, 32, whose workshop was destroyed by Israeli army bulldozers, is in despair.
“By God, getting food is hard for us. We risk our lives [waiting for deliveries] on Salah al-Din Road or at the Kuwait roundabout, or when trying to collect supplies dropped from planes,” he said.
“Neither planes nor trucks provide us with our basic needs. We want UNRWA to come and distribute aid respectfully to every family in Gaza,” he said.
