Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi is a 19-year-old writer and poet from Gaza. She is currently a second-year English literature student at the Islamic University of Gaza.
Help for Gaza is now supposed to fall from the sky. Planes from Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates drop parachuted bundles of food and supplies meant to save lives when all other options are lost. They then crash into streets, rooftops, and tents, turning hope into panic.
Every airdrop shows the cost of survival here, where daily life is threatened not by just hunger or lack of medicine, but also the very help meant to reach starving people.
This is the new reality of aid delivery in Gaza. As Israel’s siege approaches the two-year mark, on-the-ground access to food and other crucial supplies is mostly controlled by the Israel-backed and U.S.-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose aid sites have become shooting grounds where the Israeli army kills hungry civilians. On July 27, Israel announced the start of airdrops for humanitarian aid, promising “safe corridors” and relief from the crushing blockade.
The aid has itself become a weapon in the literal sense: At least 124 people have been struck by falling aid packages since October 2023, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office, and 23 of them killed. The Intercept spoke to more than 10 people who were injured by or witnessed injuries from falling aid packages for this story.
“When those packages fall, they sound like bombs,” said Mariam, a 21-year-old witness to one of the first drops, recalling her father’s trembling voice. “We don’t know if they will save us or crush us.”
Sometimes the crates land on fragile rooftops, shattering tin and wood, sending splinters flying into narrow alleyways. Other times, they slam into flimsy tents: those last fragile sanctuaries for families uprooted by relentless bombardment. The cries that follow are not always relief; often they are pain — sharp and sudden.
In the Zawayda area, a prominent Gaza nurse Adi Nahid Qaran condemned the aerial drops, calling them “humiliation disguised as aid.”
“This is not humanitarian help,” he said in a video posted shortly before his death. “If they can fly planes to drop aid, they could open the land crossings and let trucks bring real help.”
Just days later, on August 4, Qaran was killed after being hit by a falling aid crate during an airdrop operation in Zawayda.
On a suffocating Sunday afternoon in Zawayda, I watched as one of these supposed lifelines from the sky turned into a nightmare on the ground. International airdrops landed in my crowded neighborhood, not an organized distribution zone. The sky opened, parachutes drifted down, and within seconds our community became a battlefield.
From my window overlooking the street, I heard the cries, the chaos, the neighbors shouting.
My friend Maimouna, a third-year multimedia student at the Islamic University of Gaza, was taking her online university exam when the silence of her room shattered.
“I was solving my exam questions, and suddenly I heard screaming, shouting, and gunfire everywhere,” she told me. “I couldn’t focus, the page froze, the questions stopped loading. I was shouting at my family, asking what was happening.”
From her backyard, she saw two massive bundles of aid — known locally as mishtah — fall into her neighborhood. One landed right behind her room, another by her uncle’s house.
“Strangers suddenly appeared in our yard,” she said. “They came with knives, screaming. My uncle’s brother-in-law was stabbed in the shoulder. Thank God it wasn’t worse.”
Her family managed to keep one box and gave another to displaced neighbors, while others were taken by force.
“This is not aid. This is madness from the sky.”
“It was pure terror,” she said. “My grandmother and father were sitting by the fire when a package dropped behind my room. I screamed: ‘Yamma! Yaba! Come quickly!’ My mother didn’t believe me at first. And all the while the exam kept running on the computer screen as if nothing was happening. The timer was moving, but I wasn’t Maimouna anymore. I wasn’t a student. I was just terrified.”
From my window, I could hear neighbors shouting to each other in panic.
“Cover the kids! Don’t let them near!” cried one woman.
“The mishtah is ours, we saw it first!” shouted a young man before others pushed him aside.
Another neighbor whispered in disbelief: “This is not aid. This is madness from the sky.”
These aerial drops are only a symptom of the deeper crisis: the siege itself. They are but a patchwork fix for a blockade starving Gaza’s people of essentials: food, medicine, fuel.
While governments and militaries parade their “humanitarian gestures,” thousands remain trapped, waiting for permission to receive more than mere scraps from the sky. Six thousand aid trucks stand idle outside Gaza, blocked by checkpoints.
“If they can fly planes to drop aid, they could open the land crossings and let trucks bring real help.”
The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East has criticized the airdrops, with its commissioner-general noting that airborne aid delivery costs are “one hundred times higher” than land convoys. UNRWA has called to open land crossings immediately to prevent further loss of life and provide aid safely and effectively.
For Marah, a young woman in her 20s, the airdrop became a source of trauma when it struck her elderly father.
A man in his late 60s, fragile with age, sat quietly outside their home when the sky opened. A massive mishtah came tearing downward, its parachute tangled, its weight unstoppable.
“It fell right on my father,” Marah said, her voice shaking. “He’s an old man, he couldn’t run. He screamed and collapsed to the ground. For a moment, I thought I had lost him.”
Neighbors came rushing. Some tried to lift the heavy box off his back, while others lunged at it like wolves, clawing and pulling at the ropes to tear it open.
“I was screaming at them: ‘Please, help my father first!’” she recalled, tears in her eyes. “But many didn’t even look at him. They were ripping at the box while he was still pinned under it.”
The scene, she said, was not one of aid but of savagery. “Men were shoving each other, their eyes wild with hunger. Some had knives, some had sticks. They were like predators circling prey. And my father was under that box, gasping for breath, while they fought over rice and flour.”
Eventually, a few men managed to drag the box aside, pulling her father free. His body was bruised, his back and legs swollen, his spirit broken. Since then, he refuses to sit outside.
“He tells me every day, ‘The sky is not safe. The sky will fall on me again.’ He doesn’t believe this is aid. He says it is punishment. And honestly, I cannot disagree.”
Marah’s voice grew heavy as she finished her story. “We needed food, yes. But not like this. Not at the cost of my father’s life. Not at the cost of our dignity.”
My brother Mazen almost became a victim of the very aid that was supposed to save lives. Walking home on Sunday, he saw a massive aid bundle plummet at terrifying speed, smashing into a tree just meters away.
“It felt like death could fall on you at any moment,” he said. “I was walking, minding my own business, and suddenly this giant package exploded beside me. If it had landed differently, I wouldn’t be here.”
But what came after was just as frightening. Dozens rushed to the site, fighting with knives, fists, and even bullets.
These airdrops, far from easing hardship, have caused civilian casualties, injuries, and destruction of precious shelters, the Gaza Ministry of Interior said in a warning issued on August 6. Families already stripped of everything now face new dangers from the very aid meant to sustain them.
International humanitarian organizations voiced sharp concern. A Doctors Without Borders representative called the airdrops “a futile initiative that smacks of cynicism.” They insisted these aerial deliveries fail to meet Gaza’s urgent and growing needs.
As reported by Al Jazeera, a box of humanitarian supplies fell on a child, Muhannad Zakaria Eid, in the Nuseirat refugee camp located in central Gaza and killed him. If the airdrops continue unchanged, more deaths are sure to follow.
From my window, I heard a neighbor mutter bitterly: “You see your neighbors turning into enemies in front of you. The siege made people desperate, but now they’re stabbing each other over rice and flour. This is not aid — this is another weapon against us.”
Another man, his voice trembling, said, “I swear, this thing could crush a child any moment. Who will be responsible then?”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
