Dr Mohammed Mustafa said it is a very delicate process re-feeding people after they have been as starved as Palestinians in Gaza have been because of Israel’s deliberate starvation policy, and it is not just a case of sending in food:

Look, this starvation – when I was there last year in June, we had children coming in like the same images you’re seeing now, dying from starvation.

This hasn’t been something that’s happened over the last few months. This has been almost a – this has been what the war has been the whole time for the last two years, there has been this policy of starvation, of collective punishment, of the civilian population. Of the we’re seeing the full force of that live now, out in the open. We’ve reached Stage 5 famine in parts of Gaza.

25% of the population by IPC classification is in Stage 5, which means that 2 out of every 10,000 people a day die from starvation. That’s huge numbers. And that’s not been seen before like this.

And airdrops are not the solution.

Mustafa:

When you airdrop supplies in, the planes that they use have to be able to fly at a low altitude to drop supplies in. But there’s no coordination. What you’ll have is sometimes aid falling on top of people in tents and crushing children. Also as well, it’s ineffective. You know, you could have 12 of these cargo planes in and drop aid in, but it’s only the equivalent of one aid truck.

You could open up the borders and roads and bring in 1,000 aid trucks in a few hours. You would need hundreds of planes to do the same thing. It’s highly expensive and highly ineffective. It just masks the problem. It just tells us that we’re dropping aid in. But it’s not aid – it’s a drop in the ocean.