By Phyllis Bennis / Common Dreams
There’s lots of talk underway about airdropping food to the 2.3 million people struggling to survive under Israeli bombardment in the ruins of the Gaza Strip. Many humanitarian aid experts say that the plan is expensive, inefficient and insufficient to deal with the level of famine and death by starvation and dehydration now raging across Gaza.
It is also dangerous. On Friday, five Gazans were killed and 10 injured after provisions that were airdropped onto the Strip fell on top of them, underscoring the very real risks that come with the practice.
Experts in public relations and good television, on the other hand, have long recognized the value of video footage of Air Force personnel crouched at the open hatch of low-flying planes pushing out pallets of food, and the graceful lines of parachutes floating to earth, with grateful refugees running across the beach to claim them.
All that talk makes it easy to avoid discussing Gaza’s true urgent need — an immediate and lasting ceasefire, and unhindered access on the ground for unlimited truckloads of humanitarian assistance.
Some of the dangers of airdrops are obvious. Parachutes blow off course. Sometimes, like on Friday, heavy pallets can come loose from their parachutes and crash down on individuals merely hoping for a bit of food for starving babies or a sip of water for dehydrated elders.
And with such small amounts arriving relative to need, airdrops are ready-made for chaos and injury. Hostile military forces add to the instability. In Gaza, chaos during the flour massacre of Feb. 29 ensued as Palestinians seeking food aid were targeted and killed by Israeli forces.
Since the first weeks after Israel’s assault began on Oct. 7, it has been clear that there is no safe place in Gaza, and that means no safe place for airdrops, including the beachfront of the coastal Strip.
Beyond the dangers that any airdrop faces in conflict or famine areas, sometimes particular risks make such a plan life-threatening. The U.S. military should know those risks all too well.
On Oct. 7, 2001, just three weeks after the horrific crimes of 9/11, Washington began its invasion of Afghanistan with a massive bombing assault on Kabul and other cities. Desperate Afghans fled to the mountains to escape. They faced the early winter cold with nothing, and the U.S. insisted, against the advice of experienced humanitarian organizations, that an airdrop was the best solution. Of course, the made-for-TV visuals of U.S. planes dropping food to impoverished refugees had nothing to do with it.
But it got worse. The food packets were wrapped in yellow plastic to protect the pallets when they hit the ground. It turned out the wrapping was identical to the yellow-wrapped cluster bombs the Pentagon was dropping nearby. As a result, children were reportedly killed running to pick up what they thought was food.
Word got out, and journalists started asking questions. In response, the U.S. beganradio broadcasts in Persian and Pashto, announcing that “the Partnership of Nations is dropping yellow Humanitarian Daily Rations, and “In areas far from where we are dropping food, we are dropping cluster bombs.”
“Although it is unlikely, it is possible that not every bomb will explode on impact. These bombs are a yellow color,” it warned. “Please, please exercise caution when approaching unidentified yellow objects in areas that have been recently bombed.”
The warning came too late for some Afghan civilians. On Oct. 22, 2021, nine civilians were killed and 14 more injured when the U.S. dropped cluster bombs on the village of Shaker Qala near Herat in western Afghanistan.
On Nov. 1, 2021,the Pentagon announced it would change the food packet wrapping to blue — eventually.
While the situation is different for Palestinians, there’s one danger particular to Gaza today. The 2.3 million Palestinians there have lived under a crippling siege for 16 years in which there was never enough access to food and clean water. In the last several months, virtually the entire population lacked enough food, and children are especially vulnerable.
The United Nations World Food Program says about 1 in 6 children under the age of two in northern Gaza are already suffering from acute malnutrition and wasting — “the worst level of child malnutrition anywhere in the world.” Many of those children need specially designed therapeutic food supplements if they are to survive.
The Pentagon is dropping meals-ready-to-eat (MREs), processed food designed for healthy adult soldiers,most of which require clean water and fuel to prepare. A child who hasn’t had a piece of bread in weeks, desperate for food, wolfing down unfamiliar rations from the sky, is likely to get sick immediately — or worse.
Between the distraction, the potential of confusing food with weapons and the potential for malnourished children and elders to eat items dangerous to their bodies, food airdrops are not the answer. At worst, they can be fatal.
We still need a ceasefire and full access to unlimited truckloads of humanitarian aid. The airdrops are not designed to save lives, but, as an Oxfam America official described, they “mostly serve to relieve the guilty consciences of senior U.S. officials whose policies are contributing to the ongoing atrocities and risk of famine in Gaza.”
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Phyllis Bennis
Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and serves on the national board of Jewish Voice for Peace. Her most recent book is the 7th updated edition of “Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer” (2018). Her other books include: “Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer” (2008) and “Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the UN Defy US Power” (2005).