By the time the first engine of the Emirati C-130 aircraft I was aboard started up at a Jordanian military air base north of Amman, two other C-130s were already taxiing on the tarmac and getting ready to take off. An aerial convoy was taking shape, heading to Gaza and loaded with food, as part of a multilateral effort to conduct airdrops over the war-ravaged strip.
For three days, I followed the complex work that went into making these Emirati Air Force flights possible, starting with a C-17 flight from Al Reef Military Airfield in Abu Dhabi, where supplies were first collected from various charities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). That’s when I started to realize the extent to which these airdrop missions depend on immense efforts involving logistics, security, coordination, and deconfliction with the Israeli military. The airdrops required the use of airspace above an active war zone that has historically been solely controlled by the Israeli Air Force and closed to foreign aviation.
Ironically, the war in Gaza following the attacks by Hamas on October 7, 2023, set in motion a cascade of events that led to multiple nations’ air forces reopening the coastal enclave’s airspace to carry out airdrops. This broke a twenty-four-year-long closure of Gaza’s airspace following the cessation of operations at the Gaza international airport, which I had flown into in the years 1999 and 2000 with Palestinian Airlines, which is also now defunct.
For two days, on August 25 and 26, I was part of an aerial convoy that included five cargo planes from four countries (Jordan, the UAE, Indonesia, and Germany) executing food airdrops over central Gaza. I was able to speak at length with the Emirati flight and ground crews who helped manage and organize logistics for the airdrops. Meanwhile, the Jordanians provided the infrastructure, ground operational equipment, and support, as well as a neutral, professional, and sovereign base for launching and managing these joint operations.
Credit: Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
The Jordanian Air Force first introduced airdrops in Gaza early in the war, with over a dozen countries later executing them on a larger scale in the first months of 2024. Improvements of systems for delivering and distributing food and humanitarian supplies brought a halt to the expensive and risky method of airdrops. Only recently did Israel decide to allow nations to once again commence such operations over the Gaza Strip, as famine-like conditions spread in the strip following the Israeli government’s restrictions on aid delivery. The situation was further compounded by the challenges that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation faced when its food-distribution mechanisms faltered in the first few months of its operations, proving woefully insufficient to fulfill the demands of Gaza’s hungry population.
The purpose of airdrops, such as the missions I participated in, is to alleviate part of the hunger, malnutrition, food insecurity, and aid-distribution problems that have plagued the people of Gaza for nearly two years since the war began. While airdrops are insufficient and costly, they rapidly deliver aid to desperate civilians without the need for compromised and/or ineffective middlemen and distribution mechanisms. Thieves, merchants of death, Hamas members, and looters have intercepted a large number of the United Nations’ aid trucks and convoys, according to the data provided by the international body itself. Airdrops are dispersed in a way that enables geographically disadvantaged segments of Gaza’s population to receive and collect food quickly, before malicious actors divert it.
Damaged roads and infrastructure, wartime conditions, criminal activities, and dangerous circumstances make it difficult for civilians in Gaza to travel to aid-distribution sites and retrieve the food they need for themselves and their families. Airdrops distribute food boxes closer to people in isolated localities, such as northern Gaza, which have received far less aid than the rest of the coastal enclave. This method, however, poses risks to the people below. I helped pack the individual pallets that were loaded onto the C-130, and I learned that each pallet weighs about one ton, which poses a potential danger. If a parachute attached to the pallet fails to deploy or if a change in the direction of the wind occurs, then this weight could fall on a camp or other area where civilians are taking shelter.
What I learned from the Emirati military commanders on site is that the Israelis provide suggested coordinates to nations engaged in airdrops, allowing them to select the drop zone they wish to target based on each country’s assessments of available information. The Emiratis had on-the-ground observers who helped with the location-selection process to minimize risk to civilians and capture footage of the airdrop’s outcome.
While flying over Gaza, I captured footage that was widely disseminated across Palestinian, Arab, and Israeli media. Many Palestinians reached out to me, expressing appreciation for someone thinking about them and trying to help them out. Some, however, recommended that I tell the Emiratis to regularly shuffle and change the locations of airdrops because organized gangs were still hijacking airdropped food and supplies.
Other Palestinians asked for airdrops to occur in northern Gaza, specifically Gaza City, which at the time was already subject to the Israeli military’s combat operations and evacuation orders. My sense when participating in the airdrops was that locations in northern Gaza were no longer part of the list of coordinates that Israelis were giving to airdropping nations. That appeared to be the case despite the fact that airdrops had taken place in the north in the days and weeks prior to my arrival—perhaps signaling that Israeli authorities did not want to supply people with food when they were ordering those same people to evacuate southward toward the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone. (Israel’s new ground offensive in Gaza City could cut off Palestinian civilians remaining there from humanitarian supplies, necessitating the reintroduction of airdrops to prevent the onset of famine.)
Witnessing the airdrops firsthand from a C-130 2,200 feet above Gaza, I saw the potential for a single pallet of aid to feed hundreds of families and prevent them from starving. But I was frustrated by the heavy-duty and concentrated nature of the airdrops. Airdrops should be decentralized and abundant, even if they are small in scale. I concluded that what is needed are hundreds of airdrops carried out via smaller aircraft, delivery mechanisms, and other autonomous systems. Such operations should deploy smaller boxes and parachutes that pose less risk to the safety of people on the ground than a one-ton food pallet.
In addition to their high expense and the danger they pose to civilians on the ground, airdrops currently don’t deliver as much aid as traditional methods such as convoys of trucks, which still need to be part of the mix of ways to provide humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza. But airdrops can also bypass delivery and distribution hazards associated with those traditional methods, such as bad actors intercepting aid trucks or crowds of hungry people gathering in a single area.
Innovation and new technologies can and should make food airdrops over Gaza one of the primary methods for delivering aid to needy people—especially at a moment when desperate civilians are saturating southern Gaza while the Israeli military conducts operations up north in Gaza City.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib leads Realign For Palestine, an Atlantic Council project that challenges entrenched narratives in the Israel and Palestine discourse.
Further reading
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An operation to take Gaza City would mark a dramatic escalation in the conflict—and one with potentially irreversible costs to Israel’s alliances and reputation.
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Image: Displaced Palestinians, fleeing northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, move southward after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate to the south. September 16, 2025. REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
