Canada airdrops aid into Gaza as Netanyahu defies mounting ceasefire pressure

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A Canadian military aircraft joined the airlift of humanitarian assistance into Gaza for the first time on Monday, an international effort that resulted in a desperate scramble on the ground that saw hundreds of people converge on the drop sites, fighting with fists and sticks over the aid.

The direct Canadian participation began as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defied mounting pressure to agree to a ceasefire, vowing instead that the war would continue. Israel’s Channel 12 reported Monday that Mr. Netanyahu was considering expanding the war and seizing the entire Palestinian territory.

A Canadian Air Force CC-130J Hercules cargo plane − flying from the Jordanian capital of Amman – took part in Monday’s six-country mission.

It was the first time that Canada had directly delivered help to the besieged Palestinian enclave, where aid organizations say famine is spreading. Previous loads of Canadian assistance were airdropped by the Jordanian air force.

In a statement, Global Affairs Canada said 21,600 pounds of assistance had been delivered to Gaza. Posting on social media, the Israeli military, which opened its airspace to the airlift, said 120 food aid packages had been delivered by a coalition of six countries, including Canada, Jordan, Egypt, Germany, Belgium and the United Arab Emirates.

Airdrops, which are seen as the slowest and most expensive method of delivering aid, have been made necessary by Israel’s tight restrictions on the overland delivery of assistance into the narrow coastal territory.

Videos of Israeli hostages increase pressure for ceasefire as warnings about famine in Gaza grow

Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of UNRWA, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, criticized airdrops last month as “a distraction and screensmoke” that would not halt the advance of famine in Gaza.

“They are expensive, inefficient and can even kill starving civilians,” Mr. Lazzarini said in a July 26 statement, referring to the possibility that people on the ground could be hurt by plummeting parcels of assistance.

UNRWA spokeswoman Tamara Alrifai told The Globe and Mail that 10 trucks could deliver as much aid as 300 airdrops – and that UNRWA had 6,000 trucks loaded and waiting in Egypt and Jordan for permission to enter Gaza.

Footage of Monday’s airdrop, verified by the Associated Press, showed crowds of Palestinians cheering as pallets of aid parachuted toward Zuweida, in central Gaza. Hundreds of people raced toward the parcels after they hit the ground, and fistfights broke out, with some men wielding batons.

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At least one aid parcel fell on a tent where displaced people had been sheltering, injuring a man who was taken to a hospital. It wasn’t clear if the aid had been dropped from the CAF Hercules, or another participating aircraft.

As of late Monday afternoon, neither Global Affairs nor the Department of National Defence had responded to queries from The Globe on whether there is evidence that the incident involved aid airdropped from the CAF aircraft.

Israel has banned UNRWA from operating in the territories under its control, instead funnelling aid via the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, which has no background in aid distribution.

The UN said Friday that 1,373 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire while seeking food since May 27, including 859 who had been killed in the vicinity of GHF sites.

The direct Canadian involvement in the Gaza airlift began five days after Mr. Carney announced that his government intended to recognize an independent Palestinian state at next month’s session of the United Nations General Assembly.

“The humanitarian disaster in Gaza is rapidly deteriorating,” Mr. Carney wrote in a social-media post announcing the Gaza airdrop. “Canada is intensifying our efforts with international partners to develop a credible peace plan and will ensure aid moves forward at the necessary scale.”

But peace seems as far away as ever. After a weekend of large protests in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities − calling for the government to accept a ceasefire deal that would see Hamas release the 22 remaining hostages it has been holding in Gaza since the Oct. 7, 2023 attack in exchange for an end to the war − Mr. Netanyahu made it clear he would continue to pursue a military solution.

The Prime Minister told a Monday meeting of his government that he would convene Israel’s security cabinet later this week and direct the country’s military to continue to pursue the trio of war objectives he had set for them.

“We must continue to stand together and fight together in order to achieve the objectives of the war we have set, all of them: defeating the enemy, releasing our hostages and ensuring that Gaza will never again threaten Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

He made no mention of any ceasefire negotiations during the parts of the government meeting that were open to the public.

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Gaza was under Israeli military control from 1967 until 2005, when it withdrew its soldiers and settlers. Hamas won power in the enclave a year later.

Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence on a military solution goes against the advice of much of the country’s security establishment. On Sunday, 600 former senior officers of the Israeli military, as well as the Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services, wrote to U.S. President Donald Trump, calling for him to use his influence to force Mr. Netanyahu to end the almost 22-month-old war.

“We urge you to end the Gaza war,” reads the letter, which was signed by a group called Commanders for Israel’s Security, and published by several Israeli media outlets.

The group said Israel had “long accomplished” all it could militarily, and that only a negotiated solution could return the hostages. In addition to the 22 living hostages, Hamas is also believed to be holding the bodies of 27 dead Israelis.

“It is our professional judgment that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel,” the group of commanders wrote. “Chasing remaining senior Hamas operatives can be done later. Our hostages can’t wait.”

Addressing Mr. Trump directly, the group called on him to “end the war, return the hostages, stop the suffering,” and to forge a regional coalition to support the efforts of the secular Palestinian Authority, or PA, to offer itself as an alternative to Hamas. The PA has limited self-governing powers in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since a 1967 war.

More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Another 40 were reportedly killed by Israeli fire on Monday alone, including 10 who were killed near GHF aid sites. Five other deaths were attributed to starvation.

Gaza’s hospitals have now recorded 180 deaths − including 93 children − as being the result of starvation, as human-rights groups have warned that famine is spreading among the 2.1 million residents of the narrow coastal territory.

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UNICEF said Monday that an average of 28 children a day – “the size of a classroom” – had been killed each day by bombardments, malnourishment, or a lack of access to vital services since the start of the war.

Last week, the international aid group Save the Children said it was seeing record rates of malnutrition among kids, something the group said was a result of the Israeli government’s restrictions on food aid entering the territory.

“This is starvation of children by design,” said Ahmad Alhendawi, Save the Children’s regional director for the Middle East, Eastern Europe and North Africa. On Monday, the group said that 40 per cent of the pregnant and breastfeeding women visiting its Gaza clinics were malnourished.

The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza has pushed long-time Israeli allies Canada, France and Britain to announce plans to recognize a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly meeting.

(While the French move appears to be unconditional, Canada’s planned recognition of Palestine is predicated on the PA adopting a series of democratic reforms, while Britain’s is triggered if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire in Gaza and stop the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank.)

The diplomatic moves are intended to put pressure on Israel to end the fighting and move toward a two-state solution to the conflict.

Mitchell Barak, a Jerusalem-based pollster, said that Hamas saw no reason to agree to a ceasefire at a time when the Israeli assault on Gaza was creating growing international sympathy for the Palestinian cause. The militant group dealt negotiations another blow on Saturday when it declared that it won’t disarm until a Palestinian state is established.

“Whereas Netanyahu is going towards achieving his total victory, his military victory, the total diplomatic victory is going to the Islamic resistance movement, to Hamas,” he said.

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Calls from inside Israel for the government to accept a ceasefire deal spiked after Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad released videos over the weekend showing two emaciated Israeli men being held in the tunnels beneath Gaza.

The videos of 24-year-old Evyatar David and 22-year-old Rom Braslavsky – who were both taken hostage during the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that killed more than 1,200 people – provoked large demonstrations in Tel Aviv on Saturday night, including a protest that blocked the highway to the country’s main airport. Mr. David was shown digging what he said was his own grave, while Mr. Braslavsky, in a separate video, said he was too weak from hunger to stand or walk.

Mr. Barak, a one-time adviser to Mr. Netanyahu, said about three-quarters of Israelis wanted to see an end to the war. But that was less important to Mr. Netanyahu, he said, than holding together his cabinet, which includes far-right cabinet ministers who have said they will quit and bring down the government if it signs a ceasefire deal before Hamas is completely destroyed.

Mr. Netanyahu, who faces corruption charges at home – as well as an International Criminal Court warrant for his arrest in relation to alleged war crimes committed in Gaza – faces an uncertain personal and political future if his government collapses.

“Even though the majority of the people in this country want to stop the war, some of the hardcore elements within his government, meaning some in Likud and the Zionist religious parties, want to keep it going,” Mr. Barak said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and its coalition allies.

“So, it’s not relevant that 80 or 70 per cent of the country want to stop it.”