Delivering by parachute is risky and inefficient – and other options could open up if the west were to expend more diplomatic capital
Half an hour before Rishi Sunak launched his assault on British extremism, the foreign secretary, David Cameron issued his own strong statement.
Cameron said the killings of more than 100 Palestinians in Gaza as crowds gathered around aid trucks on Thursday were horrific and required an investigation and accountability. He said the halving of the number of aid trucks entering Gaza in the past month was “completely unacceptable” and that Israel had an “obligation” to ensure significantly more humanitarian aid reached the territory.
He then listed a “series of bottlenecks” and bureaucratic obstacles to the delivery of aid, many that he first identified when he gave evidence to the foreign affairs select committee on 9 January.
Since then, he and his officials have complained ad nauseam to Israeli officials about those bottlenecks, but judging by the killings, and the desperation in northern Gaza revealed on Thursday, it has had little effect.
But it was significant that Cameron made no mention of airdrops, the solution the White House has latched upon. Instead, he spoke about opening more land crossings, the demand of UN aid agencies.
That does not mean the British government is altogether opposed to airdrops. The UK, in conjunction with the king of Jordan, dropped four tonnes of supplies to the Tal al-Hawa hospital in Gaza City on 21 February, but UK officials privately consider this to be a last resort, and some regard it as performative. It was hardly encouraging that some of the Jordanian airdrops were carried by parachute into the sea.
One reason is that the maths and finances of using planes to drop aid at random make little sense when other options would be available if the west were only willing to expend more diplomatic capital.
One C-130 Hercules can carry the approximate equivalent of a lorry-load of aid. Gaza needs an estimated 500 lorries of aid a day at minimum.
