t least five people were killed, and 10 others injured on Friday, when aid packages air dropped from the sky fell on them in the Al Shati camp west of Gaza City, according to a journalist on the scene who witnessed the incident.
I'm struggling to think of something flippant and cutting enough to capture the irony while also doing justice to and being respectful of the dead and wounded.
I suppose dropping humanitarian aid is kind of like dropping bombs without the boomy bits, so I can definitely believe it. The bigger issue is that the only effective way to get aid in is air dropping. If a certain country would be a little more sensible, the logistics could be easier.
The chutes didn't open. There's video. Having a heavy pallet crash through your roof can cause death. We're talking maybe half the weight of a car, traveling at faster than freeway speed.
Even the ones where the chutes deployed have to be still carrying a decent amount of energy given the speed they appeared to be dropping in the video I saw. Given the number of folks running to try to get to them I'm surprised MORE weren't injured.
In a video obtained by CNN on Friday, an airdrop goes wrong when the parachute on a pallet malfunctions. The pallet and its contents can be seen falling at a high speed towards a residential building near the Fairoz Towers in western Gaza.
If it's what I imagine to be massive pallets of equipment, people could wrongly be under the impression that these drops will float down like feathers when in reality they're like a low-speed automobile collision. So as they approach the ground their speed and drift may catch some off-guard.
Additionally as the article points out, some drops have broken apart or their parachutes do not deploy.
A journalist based in northern Gaza told CNN that Palestinians in northern Gaza are struggling to make use of aid recently air dropped by the US and Jordan, because it does not include essential food supplies.
Abdel Qader Al Sabbah told CNN that the air drops of aid are “useless” calling for items that can be stored and used over several days rather than single portions to be eaten on the day.
Well done as usual, America.
Golf clap.
Maybe the U.S. should stop "helping" Palestinians. And also stop helping Israel.
Humanitarian Daily Rations are best for scenarios like when displaced people are en route, or transient camps without cooking infrastructure built yet.
Flour, rice, lentils, beans, etc is cheaper both up front and a per-meal basis, but doesn’t offer a bonus payout to US military industrial suppliers. The same companies that make the MREs the military eats in the field, also made the HDRs being airdropped right now.
When a population is starving, I fail to see how single portion containers isn't helping.
It is food. If it's more food than you can eat before it parishes, share it with others around you.
Yeah, it's not great that the chutes failed and we basically catapulted "aid" at a residential building, but there are unavoidable risks when you're forced to air drop anything.
This is more condemning good in the name of perfect.
If you want to point fingers, point them at Isreal for not allowing aid to be driven in.
And no, I don't need more finger pointing about US aid to Isreal.
Further proof that The Pentagon is taking us for a ride, when they claim to need over a billion in tax dollars each year, for drones and fighter jets. There are far more economical ways of exterminating foreign civilians available