Dropping aid into a conflict zone by parachute is the least effective method of distributing humanitarian assistance. That was the categorical conclusion the US military reached after carrying out a massive air drop campaign using large cargo planes, in northern Iraq in the spring of 1991. At the time, hundreds of thousands of Kurds had fled into the mountains along the Iraq-Turkey border to escape repression by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The United States, the United Kingdom and France imposed a no-fly zone for Iraqi aircraft in the country’s far north. Yet the air drops caused many casualties among the refugees, with people being killed by falling crates, violent fights breaking out over aid and some supplies mistakenly landing in minefields.
Soldiers on the ground protested against the operation, considering it to be more about media coverage than effectiveness, and they ultimately secured authorisation to use helicopters to deliver the aid. This allowed for actual aid distributions to be conducted, rather than just dropping supplies – but even that was only an interim solution before convoys of trucks finally provided humanitarian relief worthy of the name.
‘Flour massacre’
The failure that air dropping aid in northern Iraq represented was so devastating that such methods were ruled out for large-scale use for more than three decades. Only Israel’s determination to use humanitarian aid as leverage over the population of Gaza, a violation of fundamental humanitarian law, has brought the last-resort option of air drops back as a possibility.
In February 2024, four months of unprecedented Israeli bombardment followed by an exceptionally violent ground offensive triggered a horrifying food shortage in Gaza City and the Palestinian enclave’s north, which had been cut off from the rest of the Gaza Strip. There, a 25-kilogram sack of flour would sell for $1,000, and this led to the tragedy known as the “flour massacre” on February 29, 2024: 118 people died, killed by the Israeli army, crushed by tanks or trampled in the panic of an aid distribution operation that had turned into a nightmare.
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