The difficulties in delivering aid are pushing Washington to try other strategies.
Faced with a situation described as "desperate", the United States announced Friday that it will participate for the first time in air drops of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip besieged by the Israeli army.
“In the coming days, we will join our friends in Jordan and other countries in airdrops of food and other goods” on Gaza, said President Joe Biden while receiving the head of the Italian government at the White House Giorgia Meloni.
“Innocent people are trapped in a terrible war, unable to feed their families, and you saw the response when they tried to get help,” he said, referring to the killing Thursday during a distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza, where more than 110 people died in still unclear circumstances between Israeli fire and stampede.
The American president also stressed that the United States would "seek to open other access routes to Gaza, including the possibility of a maritime corridor to deliver large quantities of humanitarian aid."
“The aid provided to Gaza is far from sufficient today – it is far from sufficient,” insisted Joe Biden, something that Washington has been complaining about to its Israeli ally for weeks.
Until now, the United States has not carried out such aid drops, judging their effectiveness to be limited.
But while the Gaza Strip is threatened with famine according to the UN, and while waiting for a ceasefire agreement which would allow more aid to arrive, the United States has visibly evolved on the subject.
Qatar, the United States and Egypt have been trying for weeks to extract from the two camps a compromise that would make possible a truce associated with new releases of hostages, but no concrete progress has been announced so far .
The war was sparked on October 7 by a bloody attack carried out by Hamas commandos infiltrated from Gaza in southern Israel, which caused the deaths of at least 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to a count of AFP produced from official Israeli data.
Not a single operation
This change of heart on the drops comes in the middle of the electoral campaign in the United States, where the 81-year-old Democratic president, who is running for a second term in November, is under pressure from the left wing of his party and the Arab-Arab community. Muslim for her support of Israel.
This is evidenced by a sanction vote on Tuesday during a Democratic primary in the state of Michigan (north) where more than 100,000 people cast the equivalent of a blank vote in the ballot boxes, as a form of protest.
This result is worrying for the Democratic leader because he won this state against Donald Trump four years ago with some 150,000 votes in advance.
Each defection undermines his chances of being re-elected in the November presidential election.
In fact, the American president continues to raise his voice against Israel.
And this even if Washington does not intend to suspend its military aid to its ally and has vetoed several UN Security Council resolutions calling for immediate and lasting ceasefires.
“We will insist to Israel that it facilitates the entry of more trucks and that it increases access routes into Gaza,” Joe Biden said.
Jordan has carried out several operations to drop humanitarian and medical aid since the start of the war on October 7 between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, intended in particular for a Jordanian field hospital in the north of the Palestinian territory.
Questioned by journalists, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, John Kirby, clarified shortly after that this will not be a unique operation.
“Other drops will be planned and executed” by the Pentagon, he said, emphasizing their “extremely difficult (…) nature in an environment as congested as that of Gaza, which is very, very densely populated” .