ABC Australia laments the death of a 14-year-old boy in Gaza, reportedly crushed by an airdrop of humanitarian aid. And it is clear to them who is to blame.
Israel was repeatedly warned that allowing aid to be airdropped would have deadly consequences in Gaza.
For 14-year-old Muhannad Eid, that warning became a reality when he was crushed by a pallet of aid in the enclave on the weekend.
“He was my sweetheart, the love of my life,” his mother, Nai’ila Eid, said.
“He is gone, and there is no point in my life. Now I am waiting to die.”
Faced with growing and significant international condemnation over starvation in Gaza, Israel chose to allow countries to parachute aid into Gaza several weeks ago.
Although international aid agencies repeatedly have stressed that airdrops are ineffective and dangerous, they’ve been carried out by countries like Jordan, the UAE, and European nations in a bid to deliver a paltry lifeline into the strip.
On Saturday, one such aid drop was carried out near Nuseirat in Central Gaza.
Footage from the scene showed several pallets parachuting down from the sky and hitting the ground with significant force.
Some of these pallets can weigh up to 1 tonne.
Hundreds of people, many of them children and teenagers, raced toward the packages of aid.
Next to one of the pallets, being pulled apart by the hungry and desperate Palestinians, Muhannad’s motionless body could be seen lying in the dirt.
He was carried to hospital, where his distraught family mourned him.
“The food is scarce. He said that he would get something, a can of sardines or sauce,” Muhannad’s father Zakaria Eid said.
“The aid package fell on him, directly on his head. His skull and neck were fractured. He had a brain laceration.
If true, this is obviously a horrible tragedy. But placing the blame on Israel is yet another instance of ABC Australia’s terribly biased coverage of the Gaza conflict.
For a start, what about the countries who dropped the aid? Why is the condemnation reserved for Israel who allowed the air drops out of compassion and a desire to help regular Gazans in need?
And what about the Gazans themselves? If they saw pallets being dropped from the sky, shouldn’t they have made sure to be out of harm’s way – especially their own children? True, you cannot always prevent kids from rushing forward, but this is not the fault of Israel either.
Israel is trying to have aid delivered, but it is faced with huge challenges – like Hamas looting and commandeering trucks with aid for themselves or to sell at inflated prices. So allowing the drops is clearly meant to alleviate the hardships on regular, hungry Gazans. Surely, the priority is to get as much aid in as possible. How about acknowledging that instead of condemning us?
For the record, air drops have been used throughout modern times, including by the US on Gaza during the Biden administration. So this is hardly unprecedented.
Meanwhile, the ABC Australia report also seems to be implying Israel is making life hard for the World Food Programme to deliver aid:
Organisations like the World Food Programme also deliver some aid, but say their missions along two aid corridors still face considerable obstructions, even after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced it would create “secure corridors” to help convoys travel to depots.
What the report does not mention is Hamas’ looting and diverting of aid as mentioned above. Nor does it mention the incident last week in which Hamas terrorists were posing as World Central Kitchen (WCK) staff.
At the end of the day, this isn’t about pallets, parachutes, or “secure corridors.” It’s about a media outlet twisting a tragedy into yet another weapon to bludgeon Israel, while airbrushing Hamas’s role in creating the very desperation that makes these airdrops necessary – and dangerous.
Blaming Israel for a fatal accident caused by aid dropped by other countries is as absurd as blaming a firefighter for smoke inhalation victims while ignoring the arsonist. The hard truth is that until Hamas stops stealing aid, hoarding supplies, and using civilians as human shields, no delivery method will be entirely safe – not by land, sea, or air.
But that truth doesn’t fit ABC’s narrative. And so, rather than hold the real culprits accountable, they’ll just keep dropping their own payloads – of bias, omission, and spin.
