What Next - Can Gaza Survive on Airdropped Aid?
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 March 2024
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
Airdropping aid, food, and supplies is expensive, inexact, and inefficient and usually only a last resort when your enemies have left you no other options. So why is the United States airdropping aid into Gaza, when the borders are controlled by America’s ally, Israel?
Guest: Jane Arraf, reporter for NPR based in the Middle East.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | journalist Jainorna Raff boarded a Jordanian cargo plane last week to get an up close look at one of the ways Palestinians in Gaza are getting food and other |
| 0:16.8 | essentials right now. With many of Gaza's roads destroyed, helping people has become a matter of shoving supplies out |
| 0:27.0 | a door while cruising at 17,000 feet. |
| 0:31.8 | On the day that we went, they were dropping basic food supplies, oil, sugar, dates, and then |
| 0:39.2 | sanitary napkins because everything is an extremely short supply in Gaza. |
| 0:45.8 | The Jordanian military was organizing this aid drop. |
| 0:49.6 | The planes were carrying seven tons of food and other basics. Some pallets had messages of |
| 0:54.9 | support from Jordanian kids scrolled on them. Is there an estimate of how many people |
| 1:00.5 | need this aid in Gaza? |
| 1:04.6 | Almost all of them. |
| 1:07.0 | That's the shocking and short answer. |
| 1:10.4 | Even if you have money there, it's really hard to find food. |
| 1:17.0 | The strange thing for Jane about this trip was how little she could see with her own two eyes. |
| 1:22.0 | She watched palette after palette tumbled. little she could see with her own two eyes. |
| 1:22.8 | She watched palette after palette tumble from the plane, and she had no idea where these things |
| 1:27.9 | landed, or who found them. |
| 1:31.3 | Later she'd learn that at least one of these packages got carried across the border into Israel by the wind. |
| 1:37.0 | Some of these also have been dropped into the sea near Gaza, but a recent air drop saw some of those packages |
| 1:47.2 | landing more than a mile out to sea, and that's a huge problem. But really the theory is, or it seems to be, |
| 1:54.6 | that if they can save just a few lives, |
| 1:57.5 | then they're going to keep doing this. |
| 2:00.2 | You've said Air Drops are a last resort |
... |
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