Struggling for a can of food: starving Gazans scramble for aid drops

People commute along the coastal road as humanitarian aid is dropped on the Gaza Strip, west of Gaza City, on March 25, 2024 amid the ongoing conflict in the Palestinian territory between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (AFP)

• With Gazans increasingly desperate, foreign governments have turned to airdrops, in particular in the hard-to-reach northern parts of the territory including Gaza City

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories: A military plane banked over the war-ravaged ruins of Gaza City dropping dozens of black parachutes carrying food aid.
On the ground, where almost no building within sight was still standing, hungry men and boys raced toward the beach where most of the aid seemed to have landed.
Dozens of them jostled intensely to get to the food, with scrums forming up and down the rubble-strewn dunes.
“People are dying just to get a can of tuna,” said Mohamad Al-Sabaawi, carrying an almost empty bag on his shoulder, a young boy beside him.
“The situation is tragic, as if we are in a famine. What can we do? They mock us by giving us a small can of tuna.”
Aid groups say only a fraction of the supplies required to meet basic humanitarian needs have arrived in Gaza since October, while the UN has warned of famine in the north of the territory by May without urgent intervention.
The aid entering the Gaza Strip by land is far below pre-war levels, at around 150 vehicles a day compared to at least 500 before the war, according to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
With Gazans increasingly desperate, foreign governments have turned to airdrops, in particular in the hard-to-reach northern parts of the territory including Gaza City.
The United States, France and Jordan are among several countries conducting airdrops to people living within the ruins of what was the besieged territory’s biggest city.
But the aircrews themselves told AFP that the drops were insufficient.
US Air Force Lt. Col. Jeremy Anderson noted earlier this month that what they were able to deliver was only a “drop in the bucket” of what was needed.
The air operation has also been marred by deaths. Five people on the ground were killed by one drop and 10 others injured after parachutes malfunctioned, according to a medic in Gaza.
Calls have mounted for Israel to allow in more aid overland, while Israel has blamed the UN and UNRWA for not distributing aid in Gaza.
“Palestinians in Gaza desperately need what has been promised — a flood of aid. Not trickles. Not drops,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said on Sunday after visiting Gaza’s southern border crossing with Egypt at Rafah.
“Looking at Gaza, it almost appears that the four horsemen of war, famine, conquest and death are galloping across it,” he added.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
Israel launched a retaliatory bombardment and invasion of Gaza aimed at destroying Hamas that has killed at least 32,333 people, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.
Returning home in Gaza City with little to keep his family going, Sabaawi said their situation was miserable.
“We are the people of Gaza, waiting for aid drops, willing to die to get a can of beans — which we then share among 18 people.”