‘Major policy failure’: US mulls plan to airdrop aid to Gaza after Israel blocks it on the ground

The White House is said to be considering airdropping aid from US military planes into Gaza amid dire warnings of famine in the territory and following the failure of US officials to convince Israel to allow sufficient aid deliveries on the ground.

Jeremy Konyndyk, who led USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration and oversaw humanitarian air drops to Nepal, the Philippines and Iraq, described the potential US plan to drop aid by air as a “major policy failure” on the part of the Biden administration.

“When the US government has to use tactics that it otherwise used to circumvent the Soviets and Berlin and circumvent Isis in Syria and Iraq, that should prompt some really hard questions about the state of US policy,” he told The Independent.

US officials told Axios that the US was considering the plan due to the inability of humanitarian groups to reach northern Gaza due to “the security situation and the Israeli restrictions,” the outlet reported.

The move follows months of warnings from aid groups that Israel’s war in Gaza is causing a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale that would be impossible to contain.

The United Nations warned this week that some 576,000 people, or one quarter of Gaza’s population, are “one step away from famine.” It has also accused Israel of “systematically” blocking aid deliveries into Gaza and of opening fire on convoys that do make it through.

The US has repeatedly said it has been working behind the scenes to convince Israel to allow more aid into Gaza, but the Biden administration hasrefused to condition billions of dollars of aid it gives to Israel each year as leverage to pressure its ally to do so. The amount of aid that reached Gaza dropped by half