On Friday, President Joe Biden announced that the United States will be delivering food and aid to the Gaza Strip by airdrop.
“We are going to join with our friends from Jordan and others to provide airdrops of supplies into Ukraine,” Biden said in the Oval Office before clarifying that he meant to say Gaza, according to pool reports.
“The loss of life is heartbreaking. People are so desperate that innocent people got caught in a terrible war unable to feed their families, and you saw the response when they tried to get aid in,” he said. “And we need to do more in the United States, will do more. In the coming days, we’re going to join with our friends in Jordan and others in providing airdrops,” he said.
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“In addition to expanding deliveries by land, as I said, we’re gonna — we’re gonna insist that Israel facilitate more trucks and more routes to get more and more people the help they need. No excuses because the truth is, aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough,” he said. “Now, it’s nowhere nearly enough. Innocent lives are on the line, and children’s lives on the line and we won’t stand by and let — until they — until we get more aid in there. We should be getting hundreds of trucks in, not just several.
Up to 250 trucks are already arriving in Gaza each day, and each airdrop would only equate to one to four truckloads of supplies.
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“There’s few military operations that are more complicated than humanitarian assistance air drops. This is—-this is a tough military mission to do because so many parameters have to be exactly right. We’re going to pursue this the way we would pursue any such operation — carefully,” White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby said at a briefing afterward.
“There will be additional airdrops planned and executed. And with each one, I think we’ll learn more and we’ll get — we’ll get better at them. It’s very difficult. It is extremely difficult to do an airdrop in such a crowded environment as is Gaza. Very, very densely populated. A lot of people confined to small spaces. So, you want to do it in a way that you can get it to close — as close as you can to the people in need, but not in a way that puts them in any danger. And so, the Pentagon will be doing a raft of planning on this,” said Kirby.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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