Biden announces air delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza

The United States will resort to dropping humanitarian aid from planes to try to supply Gaza, where conditions are increasingly approaching famine and Israel is reluctant to allow in a larger flow of aid.

The President of the United States, Joe Biden, announced this at the beginning of a meeting in the Oval Office with the Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, a day after the death of more than a hundred Palestinians in a line where they were waiting to receive flour, in an attack in which Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd.

The aid that has entered the Strip so far “is not enough,” the US president indicated at the beginning of the meeting.

“We are going to do everything possible” to increase the flow of assistance to the 2.3 million people trapped in the Strip, he has maintained.

According to him, the aid launches will begin in the coming days and will be developed in collaboration with other allied countries in the area.

Washington is also studying the possibility of opening a marine corridor, which would allow the entry of a much larger amount of aid than airplanes can distribute.

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“Innocent people have been trapped in a terrible war, unable to feed their families, and they have seen the response when they tried to get help,” the president said, referring to Thursday's deaths.

“But we have to do more and the United States will do more, in the coming days we will join with our friends in Jordan and other countries to organize air drops of aid to Ukraine [sic: the White House clarified that it was referring to Gaza] and seek the open other avenues, including the possibility of a marine corridor that facilitates large amounts of humanitarian assistance.”

According to Biden, “the aid coming into Gaza is not nearly enough right now.

“Innocent lives are at stake, children’s lives are at stake.”

The US president's announcement comes while the administrator of the US humanitarian aid agency, Samantha Power, is in the area, who met on Wednesday with the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Minister of Defense of that country. Yoav Gallant.

The sending of assistance by plane represents a shift in the American position, until now focused on pressure on the Netanyahu government to authorize a greater flow of aid by land.

The trucks entering through Rafah, the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, have been reduced to a handful, without Washington having managed to get the prime minister to agree to open other entry points or the passage of more vehicles.

The US president is under pressure to take steps to alleviate Palestinian suffering in Gaza, where more than 30,000 people - most of them women and children - have already been killed in the Israeli offensive since October, and tens of thousands more have been wounded.

Discontent over the pro-Israel position of the White House, which maintains military assistance to Israel and its rejection of a permanent ceasefire, has already caused an electoral wake-up call for the president this week in Michigan.

There, the large Arab-American community mobilized a campaign for the “undeclared” vote (equivalent to a blank vote) on the Democratic primary ballots.

Their goal was to demand a permanent armistice and demonstrate to Biden that his pro-Israel position in Gaza could cost him re-election in November.

The mobilization obtained 100,000 of those votes, or 13.3% of the total, and the activists plan to repeat the initiative in the consultations in Minnesota, next Tuesday, and in the State of Washington, on the 12th. Both States, like Michigan allows the option of “undeclared” voting.

The White House, for its part, maintains that it is doing everything possible to achieve a temporary truce, around six weeks, that can serve as the first step towards a permanent ceasefire, in the talks taking place between the radical militia. Palestinian Hamas and Israel, under the mediation of Qatar.

Biden spoke on Thursday, after the deaths in the humanitarian aid queue, with the Qatari emir and the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al Sisi.

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