The Electronic Intifada 13 October 2025
Members of the Jordanian army look out the open rear of a C-130 airplane, just after a humanitarian airdrop in the Gaza Strip, 14 August.
ZUMA PressAt a thousand meters above Gaza, the hatch of a Jordanian “aid” plane swings open and I get a glimpse of the blue Mediterranean.
The shoreline summons images of 1948, when Palestinian families from Haifa and Jaffa were forced to flee to Gaza to escape Zionist militias who were ethnically cleansing Palestine’s coastal villages. The images fade quickly from my mind, and they are replaced by today’s shoreline. Seventy-seven years on, it is again crowded with displaced families and tents.
The view of Gaza itself from above is a shock: a disfigured cityscape where entire neighborhoods have been wiped off the map and others have been reduced to a monotonous gray by Israel’s relentless bombardment. Markets barely function, their pale colors set against the rubble, as people walk through ruins or pull carts through broken streets.
With every district the plane passes over, the devastation deepens; a relentless panorama of destruction stretching for more than 10 minutes of flight.
A member of the Jordanian military crew, dressed in an olive-green uniform, secures himself to the aircraft’s ropes and raises his hand, as if signaling to someone. With that, eight tons of brown boxes packed with food, medicine and baby formula begin to slide rapidly out of the plane and toward Gaza.
The crew then step toward the open hatch and strike poses as the parachutes bloom. They embrace and clasp hands in triumph, like actors in a Hollywood movie.
Foreign and local photographers scramble for the perfect shot, capturing images staged as though these soldiers had just saved Gaza from annihilation or defused a nuclear device at the last possible second.
I find myself wondering: Who are these pictures for?
From an army base
Weeks earlier, I had been assigned by a news outlet to document these “humanitarian operations,” I wrestled with the dilemma: Should I record a scene I knew to be contrived, or try to show something different?
I consulted colleagues, and some urged me to go, suggesting this might be a rare chance to capture what is usually hidden behind the heroic and staged pictures that often emerge from such operations.
The trip began at the King Abdullah II Airbase in Zarqa, Jordan, where military aircraft from European countries, and, of course, Jordan are stationed along a lengthy runway. Yet it’s the media presence, not the aircraft, that dominates the scene: dozens of journalists and correspondents compete for interviews and images of the troops as they load aid packages.
Every photograph will serve a pivotal purpose: to polish the images of the states involved in the airdrops and to legitimate the aid operation itself.
In Jordan, the filming of the airdrops is stage-managed by the Jordanian Royal Court, the administrative facilitator between the monarch and the state’s constitutional authorities. Press permits are first distributed to major international outlets, then to journalists from the states participating in the aid drops and finally to local reporters.
Over the past month, images of the airdrops, many of which were taken by seasoned foreign photographers, have flooded digital platforms.
These shots juxtapose Gaza’s devastation with the “aid soldiers” against a backdrop of parachutes opening in the skies.
The pictures of the staged airdrops reinforce a contradiction: they diminish the work of Palestinian journalists who report from the very heart of genocide and who have been relentlessly targeted and slaughtered by Israel for two years.
And, of course, one cannot forget that the entire “humanitarian aid” operation takes place under full coordination and approval from Israel.
Why is aid dropped from the sky?
Since the resumption of airdrops at the end of July, around 800 tons of aid have been dropped in more than 400 missions, according to Jordan’s state media.
Yet in the midst of famine, which the UN only formally classified in August 2025, despite clear indications of famine for many, many months, Gaza requires at least 1,000 trucks a day, according to the head of Gaza’s Civil Defense.
These costly airdrops are not meant to benefit Palestinians in Gaza.
They serve another purpose: to serve as public relations cover for states complicit in aiding Israel’s genocide.
They are at best ineffective at delivering aid, and at worst have been deadly.
By my own calculation, the total amount dropped in over 400 airdrop missions could have been delivered in a single day by land, if the crossings were not closed by Israel and Egypt.
This way of distributing aid seems intended to deliberately create disorder and to prevent any organized, humane distribution of necessities.
Airdrops humiliate and psychologically torment the people of Gaza. Food is thrown at a starving population from the sky – leading to horrific scenes of death and chaos – while it is mostly blocked on land.
Israel’s aim since 7 October 2023 and throughout its genocide in Gaza has been to reshape the image of Palestinians: from rightful returnees to their lands to a weakened, disenfranchised population chasing a can of tuna.
Film the aid, but do not film Gaza
Before we stepped onboard the plane, an Emirati soldier approached the assembled journalists, issuing instructions.
“Do not show the pilots’ faces,” he said, and then he praised the “tremendous efforts” of the UAE’s ruler.
A Jordanian military representative then spoke, echoing that “Jordan is doing everything it can to support its Palestinian brothers.”
Yet such words run up against a different reality in Amman: ongoing arrests of activists; crackdowns on pro-Palestine protests; and the refusal to cancel the 1994 Wadi Araba normalization agreement with Israel or halt gas imports from Israel.
As the plane prepared for takeoff, a question troubled me: How will we prove, 30 years from now, in the pages of history, that these images were never about aid?
The very states that now posture in sympathy to Palestinians, appearing to send “relief,” are the same ones that have armed Israel politically and militarily. They have granted Israel cover to wage a war of annihilation on Gaza.
Today’s airdrops are attempts to cleanse bloodstained hands, yet they ignore calls from Palestinians in Gaza themselves to end this theater.
As the photographers and journalists boarded the plane, we were instructed by military personnel not to film Gaza or its devastation.
On the flight I joined, filming was restricted to the boxes of supplies and the soldiers. Onboard, the handful of journalists were monitored by military media officers, who combed through images to ensure lenses did not point toward Gaza’s annihilation but remained fixed on the spectacle of aid.
Once again, the Palestinian voice was erased mid-flight. And, of course, most journalists and outlets don’t care. So long as the footage is “exclusive” and can be sold, nothing else matters.
The aid drop journey took nearly two hours, round trip.
Once the aircraft door was shut, with all the packages dropped onto Gaza, the atmosphere inside grew quiet, and cameras stopped recording.
Through the window, the coastline came back into view.
The soldiers began to look like actors on a break between takes, stretched out on the floor, waiting for the plane to return to the military airport.
If the ceasefire holds, airdrops may become outmoded as a form of whitewashing for governments complicit in the genocide. But those same countries will still pose as Gaza’s saviors, promising “aid” that will come with many colonial strings attached.
Back in Amman, as I headed back into the city, I saw the banners for the Jordan International Food Festival, hosted by the Jordanian government while Gaza starves.
Anonymous is a photojournalist.
