


The United States started airdropping humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip Saturday.
Three US Air Force C-130s dropped supplies over the embattled region around 9 a.m. ET, one official US officials told CNN.
The US Air Force Central Command said a total of 66 bundles were dropped, or 22 from each aircraft.
The packages contained about 38,000 meals but did not include water or medical supplies, NBC reported.
President Joe Biden announced plans for the drops on Friday, saying that “aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough.”
Palestinian authorities, however, slammed the aid drop as a “weak” move by the US.
“America behaves as a weak marginal country unable to secure the entry of aid to the hungry in the Gaza Strip,” the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates said in a statement shared on X.
The US actions, the group insisted, “are not befitting of a great power that is capable if it wants, to force Israel to protect the Palestinian civilians and provide for their humanitarian needs.”

The drop also comes after more than 100 Palestinian civilians were killed and more than 700 injured during a melee online for food outside Gaza City earlier this week.
While the Israel Defense Forces blamed the majority of the casualties on a stampede, the Hamas-linked Gazan health authority and UN insiders accused the IDF of opening fire on the desperate crowd and driving the aid trucks away.
“From what they saw, in terms of the patients alive and getting treatment is that there is a large number of gunshot wounds,” UN Secretary General’s spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric explained at a news conference Friday, according to CNN.