In May 2025, following weeks of Israeli forces turning humanitarian aid away from the Gaza Strip, claims (archived) circulated that China had broken through the blockade to drop humanitarian aid over Gaza.
One TikTok video posted on May 16, 2025, which had 1.7 million likes at the time of this writing, carried the text "Chinese aircraft break through Israel's blockade." The video claimed to show a Chinese plane dropping aid over Gaza and locals celebrating.
The claims circulated on X (archived), Facebook (archived), Threads (archived), Bluesky (archived) and TikTok (archived). Snopes readers emailed in as early as May 10, when the claim also appeared on X, to ask whether it was true.
However, it remained unclear whether Chinese authorities had dropped aid on Gaza in May 2025 before Israeli authorities lifted their border blockade. According to a spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, no "aid or commercial supplies" entered Gaza from March 2 to May 19, 2025, including via airdrop, due to the blockade.
Videos claiming to show the drop used clips that circulated years before May 2025. Chinese media last reported on aid deliveries to Gaza in February 2025.
We reached out to the Palestinian Ministry of Health (an agency in the Hamas-controlled government of Palestine), the Palestine Red Crescent Society, the World Health Organization, the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the Chinese embassy in the U.S. to ask whether any of these officials could confirm reports of a Chinese airdrop between May 10 and May 19, 2025. A PRCS spokesperson said the group could not comment and the Chinese embassy referred us to the China International Development Cooperation Agency. We await replies to our queries.
Videos promoting claim used old clips
Popular examples of the claim featured a compilation of clips purporting to show the Chinese airdrops. However, these clips were either old or unlikely to depict a Chinese operation.
For example, the TikTok video above used two old clips. One, showing aid boxes parachuting to the ground (time code 0:10), circulated on X (archived) and Facebook (archived) around April 9, 2024. U.S. Central Command, which is part of the Department of Defense, said it carried out an airdrop of humanitarian aid into northern Gaza on this date. Snopes did not independently confirm whether the clip depicted this specific drop. Regardless, the clip circulated well before May 2025, when the video claimed China carried out an airdrop into Gaza.
Another clip in that video showed children holding a sign with a Chinese flag (0:14). This sign read, in part, "2023-11-26" and "Yiwu China," indicating Nov. 26, 2023. Screenshots from the clip featured in a December 2023 news report in a Chinese media outlet that children in Gaza were thanking the Chinese city of Yiwu after they discovered humanitarian aid parcels had come from there.
Snopes did not independently confirm whether the claims in the Chinese report were true but, again, this clip clearly circulated more than a year before May 2025.
Another popular TikTok video showed a clip of people running toward aid dropped from the sky (time code 0:06). We found early postings of the clip (archived) dating to September 2024 — again, long before the claimed drop date of May 2025, and before Israel started blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza in March 2025.
Both TikTok videos used clips of planes dropping humanitarian aid from the sky. One British defense publication, UK Defence Journal, reported that these aircraft were C-17 Globemaster IIIs, an aircraft built by Boeing and used by the U.S. Air Force and other countries in Europe and the Middle East.
China, notably, does not use the C-17 and has instead developed its own equivalent aircraft, the Y-20. Because of the similar appearance of the two planes and the blurry quality of the footage in question, Snopes has not independently verified whether the TikTok videos above show C-17s or Y-20s.
China last documented aid drops pre-blockade
The China International Development Cooperation Agency did not publicly confirm that China had carried out any aid drops during the Israeli blockade.
On May 19, 2025, the Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories authority said (archived) on X it allowed five U.N. aid trucks to cross into Gaza, the first delivery since early March. The U.N. said (archived) on X that same day that Israeli authorities allowed nine trucks to enter Gaza, but called efforts "a drop in the ocean."
Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have previously accused Hamas of stealing aid. Netanyahu repeated this accusation when he announced