Who is really to blame for Gazans going hungry?

Andrew Fox – former British Army officer and associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society – was granted unprecedented access to Gaza and to the aid-distribution sites managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Speaking to Brendan O’Neill for the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show, Fox says that the reality on the ground bears little resemblance to the Western media narrative. Gazans are indeed going hungry – not thanks to Israel, but mostly due to Hamas’s theft of aid and the United Nations’ complicity in this racket. What follows is an edited version of the conversation. You can watch the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: You are one of very few Britons who have recently been to Gaza. What was the atmosphere like?

Andrew Fox: The one thing that jumps out from the start is the temperature. It’s almost hotter there than it is in Israel. You come across the border, you’re in an armoured vehicle, body armour, helmet and when you step out it’s like being punched in the face with heat. That’s really important, because it gives you context as to what people are living in. Local civilians aren’t staying in air-conditioned buildings like in Tel Aviv. They’re in tents. Everything is made harder by the heat, because the requirement for food and water goes through the roof.

When you’re driving through Rafah, it is devastating. I know ITV put out a video recently that was filmed from one of the Jordanian aircraft doing aid drops. Everyone is shocked about how destroyed the place is. It has looked like that for a year. There’s not a single building left standing there. Obviously, the IDF had to blow their way through them as they advanced, and now they’ve bulldozed the rubble. Then you get to this distribution site with these big sand walls. The aid is all laid out on one side, with the contractors and the American staff on the other side. When the green flag goes up, a horde of humanity descends on the aid packages. It’s quite something. It was a bit of a sensory overload, quite frankly.

O’Neill: What was your sense of the condition people were in?

Fox: The people I saw were okay, in the sense that they’re trying to survive in a warzone. There wasn’t anywhere near the sort of Biafran levels of famine that we’ve been hearing about. Unquestionably, there are pockets of the Gaza Strip where people are going genuinely hungry, and I think it would be extremely foolish to deny that. But the bulk of the people appear to be getting by, even if they’re not as well fed as we would want them to be.

We know that before the war, Gaza’s population was 50 per cent under-18. So it’s no surprise that the vast majority of people there are younger males, and they have the sort of feral aggression that young men do – a Lord of the Flies kind of situation. There was certainly a free-for-all at the aid site, lots of knives. There were also a couple of slightly shady characters who were much cleaner, had fancy trainers on and sharp haircuts. They were cutting around at the side and didn’t seem that interested in the aid. So, there’s definitely nefarious actors floating around, too.

The women and children came afterwards, in a second wave. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation crew kept back around five per cent of the aid, which they released once they’d cleared out all the men. It was really orderly, actually. Very chilled. Everyone knew they were going to get something. Lots of smiles, lots of people really delighted to be getting free food for the first time during the war. Some of them were surprised that they didn’t have to pay for this stuff when it first came, because that’s how absolutely corrupt the aid distribution in Gaza has been for so long.

O’Neill: The discussion about Gaza seems to be caught between two very opposing views. On the one hand, we’re told that Israel is intentionally starving people. Some counter that by saying there’s plenty of food, even obesity. What is your sense of things there?

Fox: The UN figures are a good starting point. There is enough food in Gaza for everyone. There are 3,000 calories per person a day that have gone into Gaza throughout the war, on average. That’s more than you or I would need to eat a day to stay healthy. The question then is why are people going hungry? Well, if you look at UN figures, 85 per cent of its lorries transporting aid have been intercepted and didn’t make it to their destination. This is a staggering failure on the UN’s part. Why on Earth isn’t it getting hammered for this? The UN’s one job is to distribute this aid in Gaza, and it has catastrophically failed to do so for the past year.

Now, there are reasons for this issue. There’s the fact that it’s a warzone. There’s the fact that there are multiple militias of psychopaths who are stealing the aid and trying to get it into their warehouses rather than people’s stomachs. So why is the UN not engaging with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has had a zero per cent interception rate for their trucks?

We obviously have to level the bulk of the blame at Hamas. It is stealing the aid. It’s using it to pay its fighters and using it to control the people of Gaza. We also have to say that Israel’s decision to cut off the aid for two months was a really stupid thing to do. It didn’t need to do this. This not only put Gazans in a hard place, but it also handed Israel’s enemies a free pass to criticise it. Overall, there are a variety of factors at play here – but the idea that Israel is starving people is nonsense, and the idea that everyone is fine is also nonsense. It’s shades of grey.

O’Neill: How culpable is Hamas for the current situation?

Fox: If we look at the strategic goals for Hamas, the end state that it is trying to achieve, it comes down to keeping control. Currently, there’s the international information campaign to delegitimise the Israelis, and to mire them down in years, if not decades, of legal challenges. But also, Hamas is simply trying to survive – because if it survives, it has beaten the Zionist entity. It will have beaten this regional superpower, which has F-16s and F-35s and 2000-pound bombs. And that’s a very powerful message to the rest of the Middle East.

Aid factors into both of those things. First of all, it suits Hamas for people to go hungry. It gives it pictures. It degrades Israel on the international stage. So Hamas has every incentive to withhold food from people that aren’t directly affiliated with it. On top of that, being able to sell food is a source of massive power. In that sense, aid is a key lever Hamas has to pull in order to ensure survival.

O’Neill: There was an interesting piece in the Washington Post recently about Hamas being so financially strapped that it is on death’s door. How accurate is that?

Fox: There’s a really irritating phrase that’s been used throughout the war, but it does kind of apply here, and that’s that ‘You can’t kill an idea’. Now, you can kill an idea – but what you can’t do is create a society in Gaza where there will be no militant groups hostile to Israel. We tend to be lazy. We say ‘Hamas’, when what we mean is Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and all the other extremist groups that are out there. You can keep killing the fighters, you can keep destroying their infrastructure, you can keep taking out their leadership. But as long as there are people in Gaza who hate Israel, there will be militias that are hostile to it. That’s immutable.

You’re right in that Hamas has been hammered – 20,000 to 25,000 fighters dead, every commander dead, hundreds of kilometers of tunnels destroyed, rocket capability gone. But Hamas thinks in generations. It’s not going to care that it has lost fighters now, as long as it knows it can rebuild over 20, 30 or even 100 years – and that it can keep taking the fight back to Israel. It’s not a promising or happy outlook.

Brendan O’Neill was in conversation with Andrew Fox. Watch the full thing here: