The Israeli Army said on Sunday that in recent weeks it coordinated with Egypt, Jordan, the United States and the United Arab Emirates a total of 20 airdrops, with more than 450 food packages, to deliver humanitarian aid inside the Gaza Strip. “We will continue to expand our humanitarian efforts to the civilian population of Gaza as we meet our goals of freeing our Hamas hostages and liberating Gaza from Hamas,” said Israeli Army spokesman Daniel Hagari.
The United States, which in recent days has insisted on the need to significantly increase aid levels, carried out its first airdrop of food this Saturday on three C-130 military cargo planes, which dropped 66 packages with 38,000 meals. The President of the United States, Joe Biden, described the humanitarian aid currently entering the Palestinian enclave by land as “insufficient”. “We need to do more and the US will do more,” he added. The air launch is expected to be the first of many announced on Friday by Biden, in coordination with Jordan, which already carried out several of these launches days ago, as well as Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and France.
Around 70,000 people face famine in the north of the Gaza Strip and 17 babies have died in hospitals in the region from malnutrition and dehydration, according to the Ministry of Health in the Hamas-controlled enclave. An average of 100 humanitarian aid trucks enter the lane per day, an insufficient number given the pressing and unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, and below the average of 300 trucks per day that entered before the war.
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