Israel has approved a plan to renew food aid to Gazans who are, according to humanitarian organizations, in desperate need of sustenance. The only problem is that these same humanitarian organizations are refusing to distribute the food—or have anything to do with humanitarian supply to Gazan civilians.
Puzzled? Don’t be. The only consistent feature of NGOs and other third-party Gaza interventionists has been their singleminded focus on prolonging the conflict.
Israeli political and military leaders are seeking to solve the defining riddle of the war: how to defeat Hamas. Because Israel is unwilling—no matter the lies you’ve doubtless heard a thousand times—to simply wipe Gaza out, and because no country (looking at you, Egypt) will enable Palestinian civilians temporary shelter within their borders, the process is more difficult and more dangerous for the IDF.
That danger got tensions boiling at a cabinet meeting a couple weeks ago. Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the planned resumption of aid to Gaza even without a cease-fire and stressed that the aid must not be diverted into Hamas’s hands. New IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir reportedly responded that the military would not double as an aid-distribution network. At which point Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich blew up; “the army does not choose its missions,” he said, and if Zamir wouldn’t do it the government would find someone who would.
Increased IDF involvement in aid distribution makes soldiers stationary targets of Hamas, which has been bragging again this week about executing non-Hamas Palestinians who have tried to access aid storage facilities.
But then Smotrich, in a bid to cool tempers, told reporters his problem wasn’t with Zamir but with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, because the government must be willing to order the kind of military deployment that would enable the IDF to control the flow of aid inside the strip.
Since that time, the Israeli government formulated a plan that would indeed enable aid to reach Gazan civilians, but supposed humanitarian groups promised to boycott it. Why?
The groups’ explanations fall into two general categories. The first is logistical: Protecting aid distribution requires having fewer distribution centers within the Gaza Strip. Currently, the aid has been going to Hamas, which has hoarded some and sold the rest at marked-up prices. This keeps Hamas in power and, crucially, it negates the goal of the aid by putting it out of reach of the people who actually need it. A wider security perimeter for the distribution center—only possible with fewer such centers—is one solution to the problem.
But what if the aid groups don’t want to solve the problem? The other, main problem with the plan, says the UN, is that it is “designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic.”
Translation: Israel’s plan enables it to feed the Palestinian population without sustaining Hamas. In other words, it is the only kind of plan that truly makes sense at this point in the war. The subtext of the UN statement, however, is rather astonishing. It is essentially saying that not feeding and supplying Hamas is contrary to the principles of humanitarian intervention.
And I suppose in a way it is—contrary to the UN’s conception of humanitarian intervention, that is. Let’s remember that UNRWA, the UN agency devoted to the descendants of Palestinian refugees, including those internally displaced within what was then Mandate Palestine, was established separately from the UN agency that handles all other refugees. It counts as refugees many millions of people who are manifestly not refugees, even by the UN’s own definition. Its primary use of funding is toward schools that hire Hamas members, serve as Hamas battle stations and weapons depots, and which replaced an educational curriculum with a program of indoctrination into medieval anti-Semitism.
The purpose of all of this is, obviously, to prolong the conflict by teaching violence, offering no alternative, and refusing to resettle refugees and their descendants until Israel is destroyed and the Jews can be wiped out.
The truth is, Hamas has entirely coopted anything that might once have been called a “pro-Palestinian” organization outside of Gaza. Campus pressure groups fly the Hamas flag and wear the green headband, all while Hamas openly murders, maims, and tortures the Gazans who want to be free. Aid groups’ new policy of refusing to feed Gazans unless they and Israel acquiesce to continued Hamas rule—and let’s be frank, that’s exactly what this is—serves the same purpose.
