We’ve seen videos claiming to show a Chinese airdrop of aid material over Gaza circulating widely on social media. According to these posts, China delivered humanitarian aid to Gaza without seeking approval from Israel. In the video clips, planes can be seen dropping packages by parachute over a war-torn landscape. Some clips also show planes flying over the Giza Pyramids in Egypt – purportedly en-route to Gaza.
Many of these claim posts also appear to be praising China as a “new superpower” with the military strength or moral fortitude needed to carry out the aid drops. Alongside this is also the implication that Chinese planes are circumventing or “evading” Israel’s military blockade of Gaza, with some goes as far as claiming that China was able to “penetrate Israeli defences.”
However, given that such an act (as described in the claims) by China is fairly aggressive (particularly since Israel stopped all deliveries of humanitarian aid or commercial supplies to Gaza on 2 March this year) and would likely be labelled as military aggression, we looked further to see if the videos really depict aid being dropped by Chinese planes in Gaza.
The landscape visible in the video does appear to resemble Gaza and does not present as AI generated or modified. However, we searched for the original video sources and found that the clips depicting parachuted aid have been in circulation for over a year – with many different contexts attributed to the same clips. The earliest clip we could find originates from an Al Jazeera journalist based in Gaza on Instagram on 20 April 2024 and makes no mention of China.
According to the reporting we could find on aid in Gaza, several large drops were carried out by air in March and April 2024 by the United States and Jordan, which suggests that the clips likely depict American planes delivering aid rather than Chinese ones. While we were not able to confirm with definitely which country dropped the aid shown in the video, countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, France, and Germany also delivered aid by air around this time. However, we could not find any reports of China doing so. 
Finally, a search for the video of planes flying over the Pyramids in Egypt also showed that those clips were taken during joint China-Egypt military drills that took place earlier this year – with no indication that those jets were part of an aid drop.
Based on our research, it does appear that China has recently delivered aid to Gaza – though land rather than by air. According to a statement by a spokesman from China’s Foreign Ministry, 60,000 food parcels were transported from Jordan through aid trucks in February and March 2025.
Therefore, it appears that different clips from different time periods were stitched together and mislabelled to claim that China has recently dropped aid over Gaza. The claim video does not show China circumventing Israel’s blockade of Gaza to deliver aid by air. Instead, clips from 2024 were misrepresented to craft an alternative narrative. We give this claim a rating of false.
While perhaps in part prompted by Gazans posting on social media about recently received Chinese aid (delivered through land), the framing of these claims in terms of military manoeuvres seems to be intentionally done to spread disinformation.
Given the existing tensions between China and the United States alongside the fraught conflict between Israel-Hamas, this claim has stoked and inflamed various narratives about various world powers and their military actions. As the conflict continues, it is important to be aware of how media can be manipulated and re-labelled with inaccurate context to produce different narratives.
