Sustaining Genocide: Why Israel Permits Airdrops but Not Aid Trucks

By Tazeen Hasan
Senior Researcher and Policy Analyst, Justice For All Canada

At the Rafah border, over 2,200 trucks full of life-saving aid including food, medicine, and water stand idle, blocked from entering Gaza. Behind each truck is a promise: sustenance for hungry children, relief for sick patients, and the hope of survival for a besieged population. But these trucks aren’t moving.

Instead, the world watches as Western governments, including Canada, airdrop aid packages into Gaza. While photos and videos of fluttering parachutes aim to project compassion, the truth is far more cynical and no one seems to be asking the obvious question: Why are we airdropping food into Gaza when aid trucks are already waiting at the border?

And the answer is simple: Western governments are not intervening to stop the genocide, they are buying time for it to be completed.

Canada’s recent announcement that it is joining the air-dropping effort may seem like a humanitarian gesture, but this tactic is not new, not effective, and most importantly, not an alternative to ending the siege. In April 2024, a joint U.S.-Jordanian airdrop campaign sought to deliver food to starving Palestinians. It was a PR-driven project. Despite the participation of Jordan’s King Abdullah II himself in the operation, only a few thousand packages were delivered daily, nowhere near what’s needed for a population of over two million.

What’s worse is that airdrops are deadly. Palestinians were killed while scrambling to catch packages. Stampedes broke out. One Palestinian professor in Gaza reported that when some packages were finally opened, they contained only water and vinegar. Nothing about this was humane. The operation was expensive, inefficient, and lethal.

So why are Western nations, Canada included, still pursuing this strategy?

Because symbolic airdrops are easier than confronting Israel’s blockade. Because dropping a few parachutes buys political cover. It allows governments to say to their outraged citizens, “At least we’re doing something.” But they’re not doing what’s actually needed: imposing an arms embargo, enforcing sanctions, and launching the kind of military operation international law permits to stop genocide and unblock humanitarian access.

Let’s also ask a question no one in mainstream politics seems to want to touch: If Israel is allowing Canada to airdrop aid into Gaza, why is it still blocking the trucks at Rafah?

Israel permits airdrops because they do not interfere with the goals of its operation. They do not halt the starvation. They do not break the siege. They do not interrupt the airstrikes, the displacement, or the systematic destruction of Gaza’s civil infrastructure.

In other words, airdrops serve genocide, not justice.

Meanwhile, Canada and other Western countries continue to champion a hollow, demilitarized Palestinian state and recycle the long-dead “two-state solution” while watching an entire generation in Gaza be erased. With no arms embargo, no sanctions, and no military intervention to end the siege, these gestures ring hollow.

This is not diplomacy. It’s complicity.

The international community has the legal and moral responsibility to intervene under the Genocide Convention and the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) when a population faces mass extermination. Airdrops do not fulfill that obligation, they mock it.

If Canada truly wanted to save Palestinian lives, it would stop arming Israel, sanction Israeli officials responsible for war crimes, and demand the opening of land crossings for uninterrupted humanitarian access.

Instead, we are left with parachutes floating over rubble, while aid trucks rot at the gates of Gaza.

It’s not just inaction. It’s an active strategy to buy time for genocide under the cover of humanitarian theatre.

Looking at Israel’s 76-year history of Zionist settler-colonialism, occupation, and apartheid, it is clear that only a UN-led takeover of Gaza and the enforcement of international protection for Palestinians can bring an end to the blockade, displacement, and starvation.

And if Canada is genuinely committed to ending starvation and protecting Palestinian lives, it must move beyond symbolic gestures and condemnations. 

Canada should follow the path Ireland has begun advocating: invoke Chapter VII of the UN Charter to authorize international military intervention to end the siege and allow humanitarian aid to reach Gaza by land. Under international law, when all diplomatic means have failed and a civilian population is being deliberately starved, such action is not only justified but necessary.

Anything less is complicity.