Aid Airdrops Over Gaza, Documented by Moises Saman
A series of images from Saman's documentation of an air airdrop over northern Gaza, a "last resort for relief" conducted by the Jordanian Air Force, on assignment for NPR.
On Thursday, February 29, Moises Saman documented an airdrop aid mission over northern Gaza, on assignment for NPR.
The airdrop mission, a “last resort for relief,” was conducted by the Jordanian Air Force. “The aid drop on Thursday is part of a dramatic and desperate effort to get food to Gaza’s starving population as Israel allows only a trickle of aid to enter through the country’s sole working land border,” the NPR article explains.
“The pallets were loaded with cardboard boxes containing rice, flour, sugar, tea and milk, along with sanitary napkins. It was impossible to see where the parachute-equipped pallets of food landed over northern Gaza. The meticulously planned airdrops, conducted with Israeli approval, are still subject to unpredictability.”
A U.N. report published on March 7, days before the beginning of Ramadan, states that in the north of Gaza, “one in six children under the age of two is acutely malnourished and media reports have indicated that at least 20 youngsters have died from starvation in recent days, including a 14-day-old baby.”
“It was a short flight aboard a Jordanian Royal Air Force C-130 cargo plane from a base outside of Amman to the skies above Gaza and back,” Saman writes of his experience on February 29. “Soon after flying over Amman, we crossed into Israeli airspace across the Jordan Valley. From the small round windows of the plane I could spot the hills of Jerusalem below, and minutes later the Mediterranean coast. Then the plane banked to the left, and we started our approach toward Gaza. From 17,000 feet high, the density of buildings in Gaza is astonishing, but we were too high to see much of the destruction down below. Once the few pallets of aid were dropped the plane banked once again toward where we came from. In the short amount of time I was aboard this plane, I was reminded of the incongruity of how short the distances are in this region, compared to how wide the gap remains.”
In November 2023, on assignment for The New York Times, Saman traveled to Jordan with reporter Nicholas Casey and Hussam Hasan to capture the faces and voices of several of the 2.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan.
For Saman, and other Magnum photographers and foreign journalists, access to Gaza itself has been denied by Israel. According to a different report by the U.N., 122 local journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. The report states: “Israel’s military operation in Gaza, in the aftermath of the heinous 7 October attack by Hamas, has become the deadliest, most dangerous conflict for journalists in recent history.”
According to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 30,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israel since the Hamas attack on October 7.
Read the full story from NPR here.
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