A team from “Le Monde” was able to board a C-130 of the French army, one of the 16 planes, from eight countries, which dropped, on April 9, 110 tons of food on the Palestinian enclave , prisoner of the war between Israel and Hamas.
A land of desolation. This is the view offered by the Gaza Strip at an altitude of 500 meters. Rows of destroyed buildings and houses, as if crushed, in entire blocks and neighborhoods, for kilometers; the gray of the ruins combining with the sandy yellow color of what were once roads and streets. Here and there sometimes emerges the almost unreal silhouette of a building still intact, as if spared from the storm of iron and fire which fell on the Palestinian territory. The countryside is just as bruised. The farms were swept away by the wave of destruction, offering a terrible contrast with the vegetation on the Israeli side, which seems to surround Palestinian territory.
“When the ramp opens, and we see what is at the bottom, it’s a shock”
In April this year sixteen aircraft participated in a humanitarian aid drop operation over the Gaza Strip, including two planes from the Franco-German Rhine-Rhein transport squadron: a KC-130 from the Luftwaffe and a C-130J of the French Air Force, on which Le Monde was able to board. The operation mobilized at least eight countries, a scale desired by Jordan, on the eve of the Eid-el-Fitr holiday.
“France was the first country to respond to Jordanian requests. We did it on January 4 for a GPS-guided drop for the benefit of the two Jordanian field hospitals in Gaza , ” says Alexis Le Cour Grandmaison, French ambassador in Amman. “Jordan wanted at the end of February to develop these operations by involving a greater number of countries and moving from GPS guidance to more massive operations, directly for the benefit of the population, in a context of congestion at crossing points or of their non-opening by Israel ,” he explains.
