Five days before he was killed by a falling aid package, father-of-two Uday al Qaraan called on world leaders to open Gaza’s borders to food – and criticised the use of airdrops.

“This isn’t aid delivery,” said the 32-year-old medic as a crowd of children rummaged through the remains of an airdrop behind him. “This is humiliation.”

Using footage from social media, satellite imagery, eyewitness testimony and flight tracking data, Sky News has examined the dangers posed by airdrops – and just how little difference they are making to Gaza’s hunger crisis.

A tangled parachute and a crowd in chaos

Based on six videos of the airdrop that killed Uday, we were able to locate the incident to a tent camp on the coast of central Gaza.

We determined that the drop occurred at approximately 11.50am on 4 August, based on metadata from these videos shared by three eyewitnesses.

Flight tracking data shows that only one aid plane, a UAE Armed Forces C-130 Hercules, was in the area at that time.

Footage from the ground shows 12 pallets falling from the plane. The four lowest parachutes soon become tangled, and begin to fall in pairs.

As a crowd surges towards the landing zone, a gunshot rings out. Nine more follow over a 90-second period.

Sakhr al Qaraan, an eyewitness and Uday’s neighbour, says that Uday was among those running after the first pallet to land.

“He didn’t see the other pallet it was tangled up with, and it fell on him moments later,” says Sakhr.

“People ran to collect the aid in cold blood, devoid of humanity, and he suffocated under that damned blanket – under the feet of people who had lost all humanity.”

The scene descended into chaos as Palestinians, some armed, tussled over the limited food available.

By the time Uday was pulled from the crowd and rushed to hospital, it was too late.

The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.

Parachutes failed in half of airdrops analysed

This was not the first time that airdrops at this location had posed a threat to those on the ground.

The day before Uday was killed, the same plane had dropped aid over the site.

The footage below, shared by the UAE Armed Forces, shows the view from inside the plane. Just before the footage ends, it shows that one of the parachutes was broken.

Hisham al Armi recorded the scene from the ground. His video shows the broken parachute, as well as another that had failed completely.

Military planes dropped aid at the site on eight consecutive days between 30 July and 6 August. Sky News verified footage showing parachute failures during four of those eight airdrops.

Flight tracking data shows that almost all of the 67 aid flights over that period followed a similar route along the coast, which is densely packed with tent camps.

An Israel Defence Forces (IDF) official told Sky News that the airdrops are routed along the coast, because this is where much of Gaza’s population is now concentrated.

An IDF spokesperson added the Israeli military “takes all possible measures to mitigate the harm to uninvolved civilians”.

Hisham al Armi told Sky News he is grateful to the countries that donated the aid, but “the negatives outweigh the positives”.

“Fighting occurs when aid is dropped, and some people are killed … due to the crush and parachutes.”

Other dangers are also posed by the airdrops.

The footage below, taken on 29 July, shows Palestinians venturing into the sea in order to chase aid that had drifted over the water. The IDF has banned Palestinians from entering the sea.

One woman, a relative of Uday who witnessed his death, described the airdrops as the “airborne humiliation of the people”.

“There is not enough aid for them,” she said. “It creates problems among the people, and some are killed just to obtain a little aid. And most people don’t receive any aid, they remain hungry for days.”

Between 27 July and 1 August, Gaza received an estimated 1,505 tonnes of food aid per day via land routes – 533 tonnes short of what the UN’s food security agency says is needed to meet basic needs.

Based on flight tracking data, we estimated that airdrops added just 38 tonnes daily, 7% of the shortfall.

“The quantities involved are minuscule in terms of the scale of the need,” says Sam Rose, Gaza director of UNRWA, the UN agency previously responsible for distributing food in the territory.

UNRWA claims it has enough food stationed outside of Gaza to feed the population for three months, but that Israel has not allowed the agency to bring in any food since 2 March.

“We should be dealing with that rather than introducing something else which is costly, dangerous, undignified and somehow legitimises … the access regime by suggesting that we found a way round it through airdrops,” Rose says.

COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for coordinating aid deliveries, referred Sky News to a statement in which it said there is “no limit on the amount of aid” allowed into Gaza.

An IDF spokesperson also denied restricting aid, and said the Israeli military “will continue to work in order to improve the humanitarian response in the Gaza Strip, along with the international community”.

In his interview five days before he was killed, Uday al Qaraan appealed to world leaders to open Gaza’s borders.

“What would happen if they just let the aid in?” he asked. “If you can fly planes and drop aid from the sky then you can break the siege, you can open a land crossing.”

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Seven hours is a long time in US politics.

At 10am, Donald Trump accused Russia of posing a threat to America’s national security.

By 5pm, Mr Trump said there was a “good prospect” of him meeting Vladimir Putin “soon”.

There had, he claimed, been “great progress” in talks between his special envoy Steve Witkoff and the Russian president.

It’s difficult to gauge the chances of a meeting between the two leaders without knowing what “great progress” means.

Is Russia “inclined” towards agreeing a ceasefire, as Ukraine’s president now claims?

Is Mr Putin prepared to meet with his Ukrainian foe, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, too?

The very fact that we’re asking those questions suggests something shifted on a day when there was no expectation of a breakthrough.

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Mr Trump repeatedly vowed to end the war within 24 hours of becoming president.

On day 198 of his presidency, he might, just might, be one step closer to achieving that.

There was always a heavy hint of charade in the company of “Arthur Knight”.

It was hard to square the man presenting as a bumbling aristocrat in Glasgow’s west end with one of America’s most wanted. And yet, there were always clues.

Like his knowledge of Kay Burley. On the day I first arranged to interview him, he told me that TV was a mystery to him and that he never watched it.

Then he said he hoped he wouldn’t be nailed to the wall by Kay – our then Sky News colleague and presenter.

How did he know Kay if he knew nothing about television, I wondered.

He also asked how we would “chyron” him, an American term for an on-screen title that I was unfamiliar with (and I’m in the business).

There was also the matter of the plasma TV screen on his front room wall – he knew TV, alright.

Such was the international interest in the story of “Arthur Knight” – real name Nicholas Rossi – there was no escaping the attention of TV and everyone else.

His was a tale lifted from the pages of a fictional thriller – a fugitive pursued halfway across the world and discovered only when he had the misfortune to catch COVID and leave his tattoos exposed on a hospital ward.

Medical staff at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital did the eyes-on execution of an international manhunt.

As careful as he was, Rossi left a digital footprint that US authorities followed to a flat in Glasgow.

When we first arrived, he had been arrested but was out on bail.

It was dark inside his flat, and there wasn’t much floor space.

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It made movement difficult for Rossi because he was in a wheelchair.

When physical movement demanded finesse, like in lifting him into a car, his wife Miranda manoeuvred him Sumo-wrestler style.

Quite the spectacle.

We sat down for a number of interviews with Rossi and his wife, Miranda. Always, he addressed my questions with the busy eyes of concentrated deceit.

Once, he insisted on sitting with his back to a bookcase. It featured the tome Machiavelli, prominently in shot.

It made me wonder how much of him was enjoying this.

He was a performer, certainly, and I suppose he’d been thrust centre stage.

He claimed to be an Irish orphan, but he never did get the accent right.

It was like a comedy fake when he wrapped an Irish lilt around gravelly tones.

He would suddenly start to sound Irish when you reminded him that he was, eh, Irish.

Not that he had the paperwork to prove it.

There was no birth certificate, no ID for his parents, no idea of exactly where in Ireland he’d been born.

He was the boy from nowhere because he knew he had to be – give any journalist a place to go looking for confirmation and therein lies a trail to ruin.

So “Arthur” kept it vague – his freedom depended on it.

When he did commit to detail, he ran into difficulty.

He told me he’d been raised in homes run by the Christian Brothers in Ireland, and I asked him which ones, specifically.

His reply was: “St. Mary’s and Sacred Heart.”

A quick check with the Christian Brothers revealed they have no facility named Sacred Heart in Ireland, and anything called St Mary’s wasn’t residential.

Of course, it was never going to last for him.

The extradition court in Edinburgh had fingerprint and photographic evidence, and there was a tattoo match, too.

Next week sees the start of his latest trial.

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Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday

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He is accused of raping a woman to whom he had been engaged.

The allegations offer a duplication for Rossi’s crime modus operandi – isolating women, refusing to leave their company, and engaging in sexual assault.

“Evil,” is how he was described by Brian Coogan to me. Brian is a former state representative in Rhode Island who, at one stage, was on the verge of adopting the young Rossi.

He was warned off by the adoption judge, who refused to let it happen, having seen the file on the young man.

Violence in childhood duly extended into adulthood, and Rossi was convicted in 2008 after sexually assaulting Mary Grebinski on a college campus in Ohio.

A DNA sample from that attack is what linked Rossi to rape in Utah, and it’s what caused the long arm of the law to reach as far as Scotland.

The footnote to the story concerns Miranda, Rossi’s wife, whom he married in Bristol in 2020.

Rossi faked his death in 2020, and his “widow”, a woman by the name of Louise, ran around telling people he’d passed away.

Father Bernard Healey, of Our Lady of Mercy Parish Church in Rhode Island, took a call from an English woman – sounding like “Hyacinth Bouquet”.

She said Rossi had died and asked if he would hold a memorial mass.

The priest agreed, but when the invitations started going out on social media, he took a call from the police telling him to cancel the arrangements, as Rossi wasn’t dead – he’d faked it and was in hiding.

The voice that rang round reporting news of Nicholas’ demise was familiar to anyone who has heard his wife Miranda. The two voices sound identical, indeed.

How much was Miranda involved in the deceit? It remains an open question in a story about to enter a new chapter – this time, set in an Utah courtroom.