The view from 2,000 feet is confronting.
At first, it looks like northern Gaza is blanketed in a thick grey ash. But then you see it is piles of twisted concrete and metal — homes and buildings that have been demolished by Israeli bombs and missiles.
Large swathes have been destroyed and turned into a wasteland.
Amongst the rubble, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians struggle every day to survive — without access to food, water, medical aid, or shelter.
Today, help is arriving from above.
Besieged on all sides, slowly starving, Palestinians in northern Gaza can sometimes rely only on aid dropped from a plane. But surely there is a better way than this.
It's nearly impossible to witness this destruction from above because of Israeli military controls.
But the ABC was granted rare access onboard a Royal Air Force (RAF) mission to drop urgently needed humanitarian aid supplies into the north.
It's a costly, and some would argue, ineffective way of supplying aid.
But for some Palestinians, it's their only hope.
The process for the drop starts on a tarmac deep in the Jordanian desert, where troops from the RAF pack pallets with non-perishable supplies like flour, oil, rice, sugar, baby cereal, water and tinned tuna.
The pallets are built on plywood bases, stacked high with food, and secured at the top with a parachute — a vital piece of equipment to get the aid safely to the ground.
Everything is carefully constructed and weighed.
The pallets have to be tightly bound together with measured pieces of ropes to avoid damage on impact.
They can't be too heavy or too light, and the parachutes are checked repeatedly.
On previous airdrops conducted by other countries, parachutes have failed to open, and Palestinians have been crushed or killed by the freefalling packages.
With all the safety checks done, the pallets are moved by forklift and packed into formation on one of the RAF's largest transport planes, the A400.
After a 40-minute flight to Gaza, the release button is hit, and the pallets roll off the back of the plane in seconds, carried on the breeze, hopefully to the ground.
The mission is a success, logistically.
But in reality, the cargo load is tiny.
A drop in the bucket of what's needed
Twelve pallets of food, weighing about 11 tonnes, is the equivalent of just one truck full of food.
But in some parts of northern Gaza, this expensive and risky operation is the only way aid is getting to people who need it.
Since Israel imposed a partial siege on Gaza after the October 7 attacks, it has nearly exclusively controlled the flow of goods, including humanitarian aid, into the strip.
All trucks entering Gaza through a limited number of ground crossings are being vigorously inspected by Israeli authorities.
Human rights groups have accused Israel of blocking and restricting aid and causing unnecessary delays in the distribution process.
The United Nations human rights chief has warned that "extensive restrictions" by Israel on aid entering Gaza could amount to a war crime.
Even the United States President Joe Biden has criticised Israel for using aid as a "bargaining chip" and called on the country to allow more aid in.
Israel denies blocking aid and says the backlog was caused by distribution problems with the UN — which the organisation has disputed.
And after increasing international pressure, including from the US, Israel has increased the number of aid trucks allowed to go through the ground crossing points each day.
But the UN's Palestinian Refugee agency — UNRWA — says the amount of aid is still nowhere near enough.
"So far in April the average number of trucks entering the Gaza Strip via Kerem Shalom and Rafah landing crossings [in the south] is 192 trucks per day, which is still well below the operational capacity of both border crossings and the minimum target of 500 trucks per day," UNRWA says.
The situation is particularly acute in Gaza's north, where aid trucks were largely cut off until a few weeks ago.
UNRWA reports that during April, 35 per cent of aid missions to northern Gaza were denied or impeded by Israeli authorities.
And some parts of the north get no ground help at all, which is why they're being targeted with airdrops.
Countries including Jordan, the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, Egypt and others, have formed a coalition to deliver airdrops into Gaza in recent weeks, with several flights scheduled each week.
But the missions are fraught with risk.
Israel has imposed flight restrictions on the crew who would usually drop cargo from a height of 400 feet.
Over Gaza, they cannot go below 2,000 feet, increasing the difficulty of ensuring the packages go to the right areas and don't endanger lives.
Some airdrops in recent weeks have been blown off-course into the sea, and Palestinians have drowned while trying to reach them.
Human rights group Save The Children has also called the airdrops "theatre" and warned they fuelled chaos on the ground.
The desperate scramble for a few tins of fish
In Gaza, desperate Palestinians look up to the sky as the jumbo plane flies overhead and the packages float down towards them.
They run, drive, and cycle furiously to reach the site where they think the aid will land.
Sometimes they run for kilometres in a chaotic scramble.
These Gazans know how little food there will be in the drop. If they're too slow, they will miss out.
It's a cruel game of luck.
Mohamed Mohamed races towards the site and reaches the last pallet when only a few items remain.
"I come out around here every day at 6am and stay until 5pm, hoping to get food. Today I was lucky," he says.
"I could pick some stuff to feed my children because I cannot buy anything."
Mohamed and others at the site describe the drops as a humiliating experience — where they have to run for food, they say, like dogs.
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He manages to get some tins of sardines, long-life rice and chicken meals, tea bags, tomato juice, and bottles of water.
"We deserve dignity. It is the Israelis' fault that we have come to beg for food — to be humiliated to get food," Mohamed says.
"I am totally depressed and we have come to a point where our dignity is down the drain because of how they treat us."
He packs them into a white sack, hauling it over his shoulder for the long walk back to his family.
Others take just what they can carry in their hands and on their shoulders.
Some Palestinians stack sacks of flour and rice onto bicycles and manoeuvre the load across the sandy dunes.
None of them know when the next food will arrive.
All they can do is look to the sky and hope.
Could the solution lie in Gaza's sea coast?
To address the massive shortfalls of aid to northern Gaza, the US, along with Israel, is in the process of building a maritime pier off the coast of Gaza, that will allow for aid deliveries by sea.
The construction of the corridor will cost an estimated $US320 million and allow 90 truckloads of aid to enter northern Gaza daily.
That number is projected to eventually reach 150 truckloads a day.
While that could provide a substantial boost inside Gaza, even the US admits the maritime route will be less effective than the option of increasing truck deliveries by road.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby says the floating platform has its limits.
"Quite frankly, nothing can replace the ground routes and the trucks that are getting in," he says.
The plan by the US military and Israel is elaborate.
Pallets of aid will be loaded onto commercial ships in Cyprus after undergoing inspection by Israeli officials, then sail almost 400km to the floating platform, which is now under construction about 11km off the coast of Gaza.
This process could take up to two days.
Upon arrival, the pallets will then be loaded onto trucks waiting on the floating pier.
Those trucks will then be transferred to smaller US naval ships before setting sail for a metal, floating two-lane causeway.
There, the trucks will again be offloaded at the 550-metre causeway attached to the shore by the Israeli army.
No US troops will be on the ground in Gaza.
It's believed the pier is being built a long distance from shore to keep it safe from Palestinian militants shooting at it.
Some Palestinians see the establishment of the maritime corridor as a way of entrenching the Israeli military in Gaza.
It's also unclear how effective the sea deliveries will be in addressing starvation because of the difficulties delivering the food once inside Gaza.
There have been only two maritime deliveries of food so far to test the maritime corridor between Cyprus and northern Gaza.
The aid workers of the second delivery, including Australian Zomi Frankcom, were killed by the Israeli Army.
'It is chaotic for us'
It's expected the maritime pier will be complete within days, at which point it's likely the airdrops of food could stop.
The RAF crew know their contribution is small, but say it's one way they can guarantee that some food gets on the ground today.
But inevitably, there are many Palestinians in northern Gaza who miss out, including Issam Nasser, who walked for several kilometres in desperation.
He describes the chaotic scene as people scrambled to get whatever they could.
"I did not manage to take anything, it was crazy here," he says.
"It is a shame for the Palestinians, as aid should come to us in another way.
"It is chaotic for us.
"Aid should arrive next to our homes and not like this, as we risk our life to come here."
Credits
- Reporting: and ABC staff in Gaza
- Production: Orly Halpern
- Photography: Haidarr Jones, Reuters and Maxar Technology
- Videography: Haidarr Jones, British Royal Air Force and ABC staff inside Gaza
- Digital design: and
