Washington/Tel Aviv, 2 March 2024 (dpa/MIA) - The United States will join efforts to drop humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip from the air to deliver badly needed food and supplies to the civilian population, US President Joe Biden announced on Friday.

Jordan has been dropping aid into Gaza by air since November, and other countries including France, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have recently joined those operations as the humanitarian situation in the besieged Palestinian territory has deteriorated.

Israel has been continuously bombarding Gaza for months, since the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched unprecedented bloody attacks on Israel on October 7 that included massacres of civilians.

Biden said that Israel must allow more trucks to reach Gaza by land and that the US will "pull every stop" to ensure that aid reaches civilians there. Current supplies to Gaza, Biden said, are nowhere near enough, echoing the urgent concerns expressed by aid agencies and the United Nations.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pressing ahead with a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip and severely restricting humanitarian aid, despite international criticism.

More than 100 Palestinians were killed on Thursday while trying to get supplies from an aid convoy arriving in Gaza, with the Hamas-controlled health ministry reporting more than 700 injured.

More than 30,000 people have now been killed in the Gaza Strip in total during Israel's military campaign, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry.

Exactly what happened in the incident on Thursday remains hotly disputed, and dpa is incapable of independently verifying the events.

Palestinian officials and witnesses claim Israeli gunfire caused the bloodshed. The Israeli military, however, has denied responsibility, contending that Israeli soldiers fired warning shots at the desperate crowd and that the chaos and crush was responsible for most of the deaths.

"There was no attack by the Israeli military on the aid convoy," an Israeli army spokesman said.

Numerous countries, including the US and Germany, have demanded clarification of the events from Israel. A number of other countries, meanwhile, condemned Israel over the incident.

A spokesman for the World Health Organization said that the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza amid Israel's military offensive caused the disaster.

"What is important is that people are so desperate for food, for fresh water, for any supplies that they risk their lives in getting any food, any supplies to support their children, to support themselves," WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said in Geneva on Friday. "This is the real drama, this is the real catastrophe here. Food is so scarce that we see these situations coming up."

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock expressed "shock" about the reports from Gaza and reiterated her calls for a ceasefire and more aid, saying that civilians in Gaza are "closer to dying than to living."

Qatar, a mediator in negotiations for a new Israel-Hamas deal, vehemently denounced Israel for what it called the "heinous massacre."

Meanwhile, the Israeli military said it continued to press attacks in the Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis and said that further Hamas fighters were killed in the operations.

Raids were carried out on the homes of high-ranking Hamas members and troops reportedly seized rockets and explosives, among other items, according to the Israeli military.

Suspected Israeli airstrikes also killed three people in Syria on Friday when a house was bombed near the Mediterranean coast, hospital sources told dpa.

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the targeted house was occupied by members of pro-Iranian militias.

There was no comment from Israel on the strike.

Photo: EPA