Palestinian Territories:

Hamas on Thursday called for an end to airdrops of aid after two Palestinians were killed in northern Gaza when a aid pallet crashed into a warehouse after its parachute failed to open.

Several countries, including the United States, Britain and France, have resorted to regular aid airdrops in northern Gaza, where humanitarian agencies have warned of a looming famine.

On Tuesday, two people died when an aid parachute fell on the roof of a warehouse where residents had gathered to collect relief supplies.

The latest fatalities take to at least 21 the number of people killed when airdrops of aid have gone disastrously wrong, according to the Hamas authorities.

“We reiterate that airdrops pose a real danger to the lives of citizens and do not provide a real solution to alleviate the food crisis plaguing northern Gaza,” Salama Marouf, head of the government’s media office in Gaza, said in a statement.

“We call for an immediate halt to the delivery of aid in this ineffective and erroneous manner, and we call for the full activation of the land crossings to deliver humanitarian aid to northern Gaza.”

With only a trickle of aid reaching the starving north and the United Nations warning of “imminent famine”, foreign governments have turned to airdrops to get aid into the territory.

Aid agencies say the situation has deteriorated this week after Israeli forces closed the Rafah border crossing with Egypt after taking control of it.

Relief also has not been transferred into Gaza through the other main crossing between Israel and the Palestinian territory, Kerem Shalom, after it came under rocket fire three times since Sunday.

Meanwhile, a US container ship loaded with aid for Gaza left Cyprus Thursday in a new test of a maritime corridor to get relief into the besieged territory.

The US-flagged MV Sagamore left the port of Larnaca after being loaded with aid from Britain, Cyprus and the United States, Cyprus government spokesperson Yiannis Antoniou told the official CNA news agency.

US military engineers have been assembling a temporary pier for installation on the Gaza coast to unload maritime aid deliveries.

UN agencies and humanitarian aid groups have warned that maritime deliveries and airdrops cannot deliver aid in the quantities needed to avert acute food shortages for the 2.4 million people across Gaza.

Gaza has been devastated by the war which started with Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that resulted in the deaths of about 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 34,904 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

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Washington:

The chief of the United Nations’ food program has warned of a “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza and reiterated calls for a ceasefire in Israel’s war against Hamas.

“There is famine, full-blown famine in the north and it’s moving its way south,” Cindy McCain, executive director of the World Food Program, said in an interview excerpt published Friday.

“What we are asking for and what we’ve continually asked for is a ceasefire and the ability to have unfettered access to get in safe… into Gaza — various ports, various gate crossings,” McCain continued.

The World Food Program is one of the many humanitarian groups trying to get aid into Gaza.

The World Health Organization said Friday that the availability of food in the Gaza Strip has very slightly improved, though the risk of famine continues in the besieged Palestinian territory, which is home to 2.4 million people.

Israel has repeatedly accused the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations of not distributing aid quickly enough.

The aid agencies blame the trickle of essential food into the Palestinian enclave on restrictions and inspections imposed by Israel.

The war in Gaza broke out after Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

The militants also took around 250 hostages, of whom Israel estimates 128 remain in Gaza, including 35 believed to be dead.

Israel’s devastating retaliatory campaign has killed at least 34,622 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Hamas on Tuesday urged foreign nations to stop parachuting aid into war-torn Gaza after officials and humanitarians said 18 people died trying to reach food packages in the starving north.

Instead, the Palestinian Hamas group that rules the Gaza Strip demanded that its enemy Israel allow more aid trucks to enter the besieged territory, which the United Nations has warned is on the brink of a “man-made famine”.

Fighting raged on unabated a day after the UN Security Council passed its first resolution calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in the bloodiest ever Gaza war, sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

The resolution also demands that Hamas operatives free the roughly 130 hostages Israel says remain in Gaza, including 33 captives who are presumed dead.

Jordanian, US and other planes have airdropped food into Gaza, even as UN officials and aid agencies have warned this falls far short of the dire needs of its 2.4 million people and is far less effective than ensuring overland access.

On Tuesday, as Jordanian, Egyptian, Emirati and German planes again airdropped relief goods, with the sight of food packages floating down on parachutes sending Palestinian crowds rushing toward them.

Six people were killed in stampedes and 12 others drowned off the territory’s Mediterranean coast, the Hamas government and the Swiss-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said.

Hamas in a statement called for “an immediate end to airdrop operations” and “the immediate and rapid opening of land crossings to allow humanitarian aid to reach our Palestinian people”.

The UN children’s fund, UNICEF, said vastly more aid must be rushed into Gaza by road, rather than air or sea, to avert “this imminent famine”.

Food aid is usually only airdropped in crises where “people are cut off for hundreds of kilometres”, said UNICEF spokesman James Elder, speaking via video link from Gaza.

But “the lifesaving aid they need is a matter of kilometres away”, he said, as trucks loaded with aid have been waiting across Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.

“We need to use the road networks.”

UN ceasefire vote

Israeli troops meanwhile battled Hamas with no sign of a let-up in the war raging for almost six months.

The Israeli military said its jets had struck more than 60 targets, including tunnels and buildings “in which armed terrorists were identified”.

The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said 70 people were killed early Tuesday, 13 of them in air strikes around the southern city of Rafah.

The Security Council resolution passed Monday demanded a ceasefire for the ongoing Muslim holy month of Ramadan that should lead to a “lasting” truce.

Israel’s top ally the United States, which had blocked previous resolutions, abstained amid growing concern for the worsening humanitarian situation, sparking an angry reaction from Israel.

Washington has baulked at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to launch an assault on Rafah.

The far southern city is Gaza’s last major population centre still untouched by Israeli ground troops, and where most of Gaza’s population has sought refuge.

Israel charged that the UN resolution “hurts” both its war effort and attempts to free hostages, though the White House insisted there had been no shift in its policy.

Palestinians in Rafah welcomed the UN vote and called on Washington to ensure the resolution is implemented.

Bilal Awad, 63, said the United States must “stand against an attack on Rafah, and support the return of the displaced to their cities” further north in Gaza.

‘Political isolation’

The October 7 attack resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory campaign against Hamas has killed at least 32,414 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry.

Hamas welcomed the UN resolution and reaffirmed its readiness to negotiate the release of hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, during a visit to Iran on Tuesday, said Israel is experiencing “unprecedented political isolation” and losing US “protection” at the Security Council.

In an earlier statement, Hamas had blamed Israel for the failure to make progress in the latest round of talks hosted by mediator Qatar.

Hamas argued Netanyahu and his cabinet were “entirely responsible for the failure of negotiation efforts and for preventing an agreement from being reached up until now”.

Netanyahu’s office hit back on social media platform X, charging that Hamas was “not interested in continuing negotiations”.

Qatari foreign ministry spokesperson Majed al-Ansari said on Tuesday the talks were “ongoing”, adding there had been no “development that would lead to thinking that one of the teams has pulled out of the negotiations”.

Battles near hospitals

On the ground in Gaza, dozens of Israeli tanks and armoured vehicles surrounded the Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis, where thousands of displaced people have sought refuge, witnesses said.

The health ministry said shots were being fired around the sprawling complex, but no raid had yet taken place.

At Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the territory’s largest, Israeli troops have been engaged in heavy fighting for nine days. Israel claims to have killed 170 Palestinian operatives and arrested hundreds.

On Monday, the Israeli military reported killing about 20 fighters around Al-Amal Hospital, also in Khan Yunis, over the previous day in close-quarters combat and air strikes.

Israel has labelled its operations “precise operational activities” and said it has taken care to avoid harm to civilians, but aid agencies have voiced concern for non-combatants caught up in the fighting.

Palestinians living near Al-Shifa have reported corpses in the streets, constant bombardment and the rounding up of men who are stripped to their underwear and questioned.

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A medic at Gaza’s largest hospital said Friday a humanitarian airdrop in the north of the Palestinian territory killed five people and wounded 10.

The casualties were taken to Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital, the emergency room’s head nurse, Mohammed al-Sheikh, told AFP.

Sheikh said the deadly airdrop occurred north of the coastal Al-Shati refugee camp.

A witness from the camp told the news agency AFP he and his brother followed the parachuted aid in the hope of getting “a bag of flour”.

“Then, all of a sudden, the parachute didn’t open and fell down like a rocket on the roof of one of the houses,” said Mohammed al-Ghoul.

“Ten minutes later I saw people transferring three martyrs and others injured, who were staying on the roof of the house where the aid packages fell,” the 50-year-old told AFP.

The United States and Jordan are among the countries to have carried out airdrops in northern Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of people are facing dire conditions after more than five months of war.

A Jordanian military source told AFP that the kingdom was not involved in Friday’s fatal drop.

“The technical defect that caused some parachutes carrying aid not to open and to fall freely to the ground during the airdrop on Gaza on Friday was not from a Jordanian aircraft,” the source said. 

“The four Jordanian aircraft that carried out the airdrop in partnership with five other countries carried out its mission without any glitches.”

Referring to the five killed on Friday, the government media office in Hamas-run Gaza said airdrops were “futile” and “not the best way for aid to enter.”

The United Nations has said airdrops or a proposed maritime aid corridor cannot be a substitute for land deliveries, urging more trucks to be permitted to reach Gaza through more border crossings.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)