US officials consider airdropping aid to Gaza amid claims that famine threatens 2 million residents

U.S. officials claim the humanitarian situation in Gaza has deteriorated to the point that the Biden administration is considering airdropping aid into the Gaza Strip using U.S. military planes, the Axios news outlet reported on Wednesday.

“The situation is really bad. We are unable to get enough aid [in] by truck so we need desperate measures like airdrops,” claimed the U.S. official.

Canadian International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen announced last week that Canada was considering airdropping humanitarian aid into Gaza within the next week.

“We have to do everything we can to avert mass starvation in northern Gaza and beyond,” Hussen said.

The United Kingdom, the Netherlands and France have already been conducting airdrop operations to a hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. The Kingdom of Jordan airdropped aid several times into a field hospital that it has been operating in Gaza.

The news about a potential airdrop of American aid comes as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Chief Administrator Samantha Power - a former U.S. Ambassador to the UN under the Obama administration - announced that the Washington would be providing $53 million in additional humanitarian aid to Gaza and the West Bank after claiming more than two million people in Gaza are at “imminent risk” of famine.

“Right now, the bureaucratic bottlenecks and inspection delays have to get resolved. The number of access points into Gaza has to grow significantly,” Powers said during a recent visit to Jordan.

She later traveled to Israel, where she visited Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the southern border communities that were devastated by Hamsa terrorists on Oct. 7. Powers called her visit “heartbreaking” and shared her “deepest condolences for all those killed, injured, & taken hostage.”

Powers said that the Biden administration was talking to Israel about opening up more border crossings for humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.

“We are talking to Israeli officials about the need to open up far more crossings, far more passages into Gaza so that vitally needed humanitarian assistance can be dramatically surged. This is a matter of life and death,” she said.

On Wednesday, COGAT, the Israeli authority in charge of coordinating governmental activities in the West Bank and Gaza, affirmed that Israel has not been setting limitations on the amount of aid that enters Gaza.  

Israel has facilitated the delivery of almost 14,000 trucks with crucial humanitarian aid to Gaza, corresponding to more than 254,000 tons of various supplies, including food supplies since the Hamas terrorist organization launched its brutal attack on Israel, triggering the current war in Gaza.

In December, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said that the United Nations was to blame for the bottleneck of humanitarian aid for Gazan civilians.

“Unfortunately, due to the utter failure of the UN in its work with other partners in the region, they have been unable to bring in more than 125 trucks [of aid] a day,” Herzog said. “Today it is possible to provide three times the amount of humanitarian aid to Gaza if the UN — instead of complaining all day – would do its job.” 

To complicate things further, the IDF has stated that Hamas operatives steal the humanitarian aid intended for citizens. enter Gaza. Israel has published footage of Hamas terrorists stealing humanitarian aid from Gazan civilians and beating them up.

“Hamas members beat civilians and steal the humanitarian aid they received from international organizations - facilitated by Israel. Hamas puts its terrorist goals over Gazans' needs,” the IDF said in a statement accompanying the footage in December.