Gaza Needs Urgent Relief

Instead we get stunts and delayed half-measures while Palestinian children are perishing from dehydration and malnutrition right now.

Biden announced in his address last night that the U.S. would be building a temporary pier for delivering aid to Gaza. Humanitarian relief agencies were quick to point out that this will be woefully inadequate:

“A temporary pier that could take weeks to construct or airdrops are not a solution,” the International Rescue Committee said in a statement. “The US must use its influence to ensure that Israel lifts its siege of Gaza, reopens its crossings, including the Karni and Erez crossings in the north, and allows the safe and unimpeded movement of humanitarian workers and aid — including fuel, food, and medical supplies.”

Building a temporary pier might allow for some additional aid to get in weeks or months from now, but it will take too long to construct when the people of Gaza’s need is immediate and dire. There are estimates that it will take the pier 45-60 days to get up and running to a level where it is bringing in significant amounts of aid, and people in Gaza don’t have the luxury of waiting another six or eight weeks to get access to basic necessities. Maybe if Biden had proposed doing this four or five months ago it would have been somewhat helpful, but now it will be too little and too late.

Every humanitarian relief agency has been pleading for the U.S. to take the obvious steps to avert a famine like the ones the IRC is calling for, and Biden simply won’t do what they recommend. Instead we get stunts and delayed half-measures while Palestinian children are perishing from dehydration and malnutrition right now. Biden also said that “Israel must allow more aid into Gaza,” but if there are no consequences when the Israeli government continues to impede and block aid this will prove to be just another empty warning.

The airdrops are proving to be more dangerous than helpful. In one incident this week, five people were killed and many more injured when they were struck by airdrop packages. Dropping aid from the air is extremely inefficient and the aid doesn’t reliably reach the places where it is most needed, so it is never going to be able to provide enough food to make much of a difference. There are also reports that some of the food included in the shipments is expired or needs to be reheated, and people in Gaza obviously don’t have the means to microwave frozen dinners. Now we have reports that the aid itself is killing people as it falls. It is a damning indictment of the Biden administration’s failure in responding to this catastrophe.

Biden wants to be seen trying to provide aid to the people that the Israeli government is deliberately starving, but he is unwilling to press that government to fulfill its basic obligations as the occupying power in Gaza. The president wants to continue backing the war without conditions while making a big show of offering relief to the war’s victims, but the relief he is offering is insufficient and too slow to stave off mass starvation. What Gaza really needs is urgent relief, and pushing for a halt to the war is a crucial part of that.