Photo: President Joe Biden announced on Friday that the U.S. military will soon begin airdrops of humanitarian aid in Gaza. | Evan Vucci/AP
The US normally does airdrops in hostile environments, not in areas occupied by allies.
President Joe Biden announced on Friday that the U.S. military will soon begin airdrops of humanitarian aid in Gaza. | Evan Vucci/AP
03/01/2024 05:53 PM EST
- President Joe Biden’s decision to airdrop humanitarian aid into Gaza will provide temporary relief for Palestinians on the ground — but it also exposes the limits of America’s approach toward Israel.
When the U.S. sends military aircraft to drop food, water, medicine and other assistance for people in need, it typically does so in areas occupied by terrorist groups or hostile regimes, not allies. And yet, months of pushing Israel to allow more aid into Gaza — where around 80 percent of the population is displaced and famine looms — have yielded limited results.
Even Biden, who refuses to blame Israel for the scarcity of supplies, outwardly admitted Friday that more assistance should be getting into the enclave.
“The truth is, aid flowing into Gaza is nowhere nearly enough now. It’s nowhere nearly enough. Innocent lives are on the line and children’s lives are on the line,” Biden said alongside Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in the Oval Office. “We should be getting hundreds of trucks in, not just several.”
For close watchers of the Israel-Hamas conflict, which has raged following the militants’ Oct. 7 attack, the move to drop aid from the skies signals Biden can’t persuade Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do more for suffering Palestinians.
“We look 100 percent weak,” said Dave Harden, a former humanitarian assistance coordinator at the U.S. Agency for International Development. “Administration officials are doing this just to make themselves feel better.”
The National Security Council didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on that charge. But during a Friday news briefing, NSC spokesperson John Kirby agreed with Biden’s overall assessment.
“We just haven’t been able to meet the need,” he said. “Not enough aid is getting into people that need it. It’s not getting in fast enough, it’s not happening in the quantity that we need. And we’re trying to act to the need; we’re trying to behave and change and be more creative to meet the desperate need of the people of Gaza.”
The good news is airdrop operations aren’t overly dangerous for U.S. personnel, especially when there aren’t immediate threats to the aircraft or crew, noted retired Gen. Frank McKenzie, who led U.S. Central Command during the Trump and Biden administrations. There aren’t enemies to shoot down the planes, he said, and working with aid agencies on the ground to manage crowds clamoring for fresh supplies and food won’t be too difficult.
Plus, McKenzie said in an interview Friday, the U.S. can use GPS to track where the packages land. It’s not like the old days when troops did their best to aim the drops and avoid harming civilian infrastructure or civilians themselves in the process. “We’re pretty good at this, we’re pretty precise,” he said.
But airdrops can also create perilous problems for people on the ground, noted Harden. Without clear crowd control, Palestinians will fight for morsels of the one or two truckfulls of assistance planes can carry. That puts Jordanian troops working with the U.S. or aid organizations in a tough spot to ensure the strongest don’t bully their way to the front of the line.
“Innocent lives are on the line and children’s lives are on the line,” President Joe Biden said. | Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images
On Thursday, dozens of Palestinians were killed while scrambling for aid in Gaza, prompting Friday’s announcement. “It was the final impetus,” said a senior administration official, granted anonymity to reveal sensitive internal thinking. Gazan health officials say Israeli troops fired into the crowd, killing more than 100 people and injuring some 700 more. The Israeli military denies attacking the humanitarian convoy.
Harden insisted that, short of convincing Israel to open all the gates into Gaza, the U.S. would be better off pushing Israel to allow 10 more trucks to go through currently open crossings. “Airdrops are a stupid thing to do. They’re expensive, they’re inefficient. It’s more symbolic to make people in the administration feel good that we’ve done something,” he said.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who supports Biden’s decision, agreed that what can be provided with aircraft alone is “a drop in the bucket to what’s needed in order to relieve the impending famine.”
Still, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee member added in an interview, “it sends the right message, including the fact that the United States is absolutely fed up that the Netanyahu government is restricting humanitarian assistance into Gaza to the point that the United States has to airdrop food. I mean, that’s a statement in itself.”
Some critics, though. say the operation is also unnecessary.
The U.S. has many ways to influence Israeli actions, not least of which is to consider conditioning military aid for the country. Democrats in Congress have long suggested that Biden withhold new arms sales to Israel until Netanyahu addresses the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But Kirby, aware the U.S. is in talks with Israel on a new weapons delivery, on Friday reiterated the U.S. would continue to support Israel’s right to self-defense.
“To make matters even more baffling, we’re doing this while continuing to send weapons to the very military responsible for forcing us to conduct aid airdrops,” said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
“To make matters even more baffling, we’re doing this while continuing to send weapons to the very military responsible for forcing us to conduct aid airdrops.”
Charles Lister, senior fellow, Middle East Institute
The Biden administration insists its approach toward Israel is the right one. An open break with Netanyahu and his far-right, anti-Palestinian government would lead to more indiscriminate military operations and less humanitarian aid would get into Gaza. It’s better for the U.S. to maintain some influence with Israel than not at all.
The U.S. is also working with Israel, Hamas, Qatar and Egypt to broker a hostage deal that would pause the fighting for six weeks. That cease-fire would allow more assistance to get into the enclave, alleviating some of the crisis that Israel’s retaliation against Hamas started.
That the Biden administration has to think this way, and is about to launch airdrop missions, tells Lister that the U.S. approach is limited in its effectiveness.
“The fact that the U.S. is having to mobilize military resources to airdrop aid into Gaza is a staggering symbol of just how emphatic Israel’s constraints are on access,” he said.
POLITICO
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