Europe and the US plan to supply Gaza by sea, but aid groups say this is not enough

A day after President Biden announced plans to deliver maritime aid to the Gaza Strip, European leaders said on Friday they would deliver aid by ship as early as the weekend. But aid groups and Gaza officials criticized air and sea transport as too cumbersome, and urged much more food and medicine to be brought in by trucks.

The complications of delivering aid to Gaza’s hungry residents were underscored Friday when authorities in Gaza said at least five Palestinians were killed and several others injured after they were hit by parcels of humanitarian aid dropped from a plane.

The United Nations has warned that five months of war and an Israeli blockade have pushed hundreds of thousands of Gazans to the brink of starvation, prompting a variety of proposals to speed the delivery of food and other essential needs. Israel insists on inspecting all goods entering Gaza, and aid trucks are allowed through only two border crossings – one from Egypt and one from Israel – in southern Gaza.

President Biden outlined a U.S. military plan Thursday evening to build a floating pier on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast to provide civilians with food, water, medicine and other necessities. He said the operation would allow “a huge increase” in aid coming into the area.

But US officials said the project would take at least 30 to 60 days to complete, raising questions about how famine in Gaza will be averted in the critical days ahead.

The aid group Doctors Without Borders said in a statement on Friday that the US maritime plans were a “glaring distraction” and that the delivery of aid was not a logistical problem but a “political” one.

“The food, water and medical supplies that Gazans desperately need are just across the border,” the group said in a statement. “Israel must facilitate rather than block the flow of supplies.”

Britain, the European Union and the United Arab Emirates said Friday they would join U.S. maritime efforts, but added in a joint statement that aid must be delivered “through all possible routes.”

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, said the first ship carrying aid could soon leave EU country Cyprus for Gaza, with more to follow on Sunday.

It was not immediately clear where the ships would unload their cargo or how it would be distributed amid Israeli bombardments and attacks on aid trucks by hungry Palestinians. Gaza has no functioning port and the coastal waters are too shallow for most ships.

At a press conference in Cyprus, Ms von der Leyen gave some details. Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Friday that it supports a maritime corridor as long as the goods are checked “in accordance with Israeli standards” before leaving Cyprus.

David Cameron, Britain’s foreign secretary, told reporters on Friday that it is “crucial” that Israel fully opens the port of Ashdod, north of Gaza, to receive maritime aid.

“That is a working port – help may be needed now,” he said. “That would increase the amount of aid that can then be pushed into Gaza.”

Mr Cameron said that about 120 trucks of aid have been entering Israel every day lately, but the enclave needs more than four times as many aid trucks.

Israeli officials have not said whether they will open more land routes to Gaza.

Shortages of food and other supplies have been especially acute in northern Gaza, and humanitarian groups have called on Israel to reopen a major border crossing there. The few attempts to drive supply convoys from the south to the north had limited success, with aid groups reporting that in some cases they were turned back by gunfire or had their trucks overrun and picked off by desperate people before they could reach their destinations.

Plans for the sea route started taking shape months ago. In November, President Nikos Christodoulides of Cyprus announced an initiative to collect shipments in his country, inspect them at the port of Larnaca and send them via a secure maritime corridor to Gaza, about 400 kilometers away.

If the first shipments are successful this weekend, more deliveries will follow, said Konstantinos Letymbiotis, a spokesman for the Cypriot government. He said it would take about 15 hours to make the journey, although he declined to say where in Gaza the shipment would be delivered, citing security concerns.

The support is partly distributed by the renowned Spanish chef José Andrésthe founder of the World Central Kitchen, which has served more than 32 million meals in Gaza.

Mr. Andrés posted images on social media On Friday he showed how pallets are loaded onto a ship stamped with the names of his group and Open Arms, a Spanish aid group. He said plans for the shipment were “in the final stages” and that it would “land on the beaches of Gaza with 200 pallets.”

Aid is made difficult by the chaos and despair caused by the war. Last week, an aid convoy under Israeli military escort ended in disaster when dozens of Palestinians were killed as they gathered around the aid trucks. The Israeli military released a statement on Friday summarizing the results of an initial internal assessment, which said Israeli soldiers “fired precisely” at Gazans who approached them during a chaotic scene near the convoy.

The account differed sharply from that of witnesses and Palestinian officials, who described extensive shootings after thousands of desperate Gazans approached relief efforts.

The Israeli military said the investigation found that the soldiers had fired in an attempt to keep “suspects” away.

“As they approached, the troops fired to eliminate the threat,” the statement said.

The release of the report came as authorities in Gaza gave details of what they said was yet another disaster in the aid delivery: the deaths of Palestinians killed in an airstrike on Friday. The media office of the Hamas-led government in the area said in a statement that aid packages fell “on the heads” of some people “as a result of a wrong landing.”

The report could not immediately be verified by independent sources.

A video circulating on social media that appears to depict the incident shows a plane releasing parachutes carrying aid packages over northern Gaza. In the clip, whose date and location have been verified by The New York Times, it appears that one parachute failed to open, while several packages not attached to parachutes crashed to the ground. In the clip, filmed near Al-Shati campYou see people running in different directions.

Jamie McGoldrick, a senior U.N. aid official, said the incident is further evidence that Israel needs to open more land crossings for aid.

“Just let things flow, it’s a very simple solution,” he said in an interview. “You don’t need airdrops like the one that killed five people in the north this morning.”

It remained unclear which country had dropped the aid packages, but a US military spokesman said it was not the United States. Airdrops have been carried out in recent weeks by the United States, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and France.

“Press reports that U.S. airborne landings resulted in civilian casualties on the ground are incorrect, as we have confirmed that all of our aid bundles landed safely,” said Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman.

Saleh Eid, a 60-year-old translator, said in a telephone interview on Friday that he had previously seen packages dropped in northern Gaza fall “very quickly” when their parachutes failed to open, posing a risk to people’s lives.

Mr Eid, who lives in Jabaliya, just north of Gaza City, said many of these packages had fallen into the sea. Others have landed in open areas near the border with Israel, and people have risked being shot by Israeli forces to retrieve them, he said.

Mr Eid said much of the air-dropped food ends up being sold on the black market rather than being distributed to the hungriest.

On Sunday, he said, he bought three bags of food dropped by the United States at a market. He gave the food to his wife, who is breastfeeding their two-week-old baby, hoping she would be able to eat well enough to produce milk.

Each of the bags, he said, cost him 30 shekels, or about $8, and contained a small meal and some cookies, jelly, peanut butter, a chocolate bar, a juice box, instant coffee and gum.

Victoria Kim And Christina Morales reporting contributed.