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Famine is predicted to spread through Gaza this month, with Israel restricting food aid by truck. Jordan and other countries have also been doing airdrops. But falling pallets have killed some of the people they were meant to feed. NPR's Jane Arraf caught up with one U.S.-based aid group working on a less dangerous way of dropping aid.
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JANE ARRAF, BYLINE: We're in a hummus factory in Amman. Mohammad Ghaith (ph) is taping foil packages of the chickpea dip to plastic sleeves of flat pita bread. And then he plans to drop them off the roof.
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ARRAF: He's with a California-based aid group called Rebuilding Alliance that has operated in Gaza for years. It ran aid kitchens until the food ran out this year because of Israeli border restrictions. Now it's developing very lightweight meal packets it wants to drop by air.
MOHAMMAD GHAITH: It will be a mix. Hummus, energy bars, you know?
ARRAF: Hummus because it has protein. It requires no cooking fuel because it's ready-made.
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ARRAF: The hummus and the energy bars, sweetened with dates, are made in Jordan.
GHAITH: It's a cinnamon spice, 70% dark chocolate. Zero added sugar, so it's healthy.
ARRAF: Jordan's air force has conducted hundreds of airdrops into Gaza with partners including the U.S. and European and Gulf Arab countries. The heavy pallets are loaded with cardboard boxes with mostly uncooked supplies. Some land with the force of a sledgehammer. Rebuilding Alliance wants these packages to fall like a leaf. An inventor and a team of engineers have designed a lightweight cardboard box that opens automatically in the air.
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ARRAF: Donna Baranski-Walker, the founder of Rebuilding Alliance, is an MIT engineer.
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GHAITH: Hello.
DONNA BARANSKI-WALKER: Hello.
GHAITH: Hi, Donna? How are you?
BARANSKI-WALKER: Hi. Good. How are you?
ARRAF: Today, she's overseeing this test remotely from California.
BARANSKI-WALKER: Squish it so that it's just almost flat...
GHAITH: Yeah.
BARANSKI-WALKER: ...Neatly.
GHAITH: Yeah, yeah, got it. And then...
BARANSKI-WALKER: Make it flat.
GHAITH: And then this...
BARANSKI-WALKER: And also, try one that's upside down.
ARRAF: She and the team, which includes aeronautics engineers, have done dozens of tests in Jordan.
GHAITH: Sample 1. Ready? OK.
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GHAITH: Sample 1, two breads with one bar.
ARRAF: Throwing various iterations of bread, hummus and energy bars off a variety of tall buildings. The project's lead inventor, Ted Selker, is best known for inventing the pointing device in a ThinkPad keyboard.
TED SELKER: Perfect. Beautiful. Fantastic.
ARRAF: At home in Palo Alto, he's volunteered to perfect and test the ability of his boxes to open to release hundreds of smaller packages.
SELKER: The bottom and top, which basically, they're like sails. They're like leaves themselves. You know, they're very lightweight.
ARRAF: Among those killed by dropped aid are relatives of Rebuilding Alliance staff in Gaza. Baranski-Walker has had multiple meetings in Jordan with officials and air force commanders who also want safer airdrops. Israel has to approve the flights, and for now they're not, Jordanian officials say. But the aid group is hoping that will change.
BARANSKI-WALKER: The trucks can't get there fast enough, if they're getting through at all. Ours doesn't solve the famine, but it definitely responds to it. And it responds to it every day.
ARRAF: Each cargo plane could hold 16,000 of the small meals. Over 15 seconds, the aircraft could drop packages every 10 feet over about half a mile.
BARANSKI-WALKER: We avoid the stampede. There's nothing to run for. We avoid the profiteering that might take it away from people who need it. It's one edible meal coming down locally, distributed over a large area.
ARRAF: Back in the industrial section of Amman, I'm on the hummus factory roof with Ghaith.
GHAITH: It's high.
ARRAF: It does look like a long way down. And tell me what you are doing now.
GHAITH: I'm going to throw this sample. It's one piece of bread with energy bar. And I'm going to throw hummus also. You see how it folds? It's like a leaf, folds perfectly.
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ARRAF: And it is kind of falling like a leaf, just a little bit of a splatter.
GHAITH: (Speaking Arabic).
ARRAF: Ghaith calls down to see if the hummus survived intact. It did. These are extraordinary measures when Gaza is just a three-hour drive away. But the aid group believes it's one of the few ways now to help feed starving people.
Jane Arraf, NPR News, Amman, Jordan. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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