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 accident happened on Friday morning near the coastal refugee camp known as al-Shati, one of the most devastated parts of Gaza, after a parachute attached to the pallet failed to deploy properly and the parcel fell on a group of men, teenagers and younger children hoping to obtain food and other supplies.
Several hundred thousand people are facing famine in northern Gaza, where they live among the ruins of their homes, without sewage, electricity or any other basic services.
The casualties were taken to Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital, the emergency room’s head nurse, Mohammed al-Sheikh, said.
A witness from the camp said he and his brother had 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.”
Video posted on social media showed a large cluster of aid parcels suspended from parachutes drifting through the sky but appearing to get tangled before one, with its chute deployed but not fully opened, drops much more quickly than the rest.
The airdrops have been criticized by international aid agencies and others as wholly insufficient to meet the needs of the people of Gaza.
The United Nations has warned of widespread famine among Gaza's roughly 2.3 million residents, and the global body's top humanitarian aid coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said Friday in a social media post marking six months of war in Gaza that the airdrops were a "last resort."
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."
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