There is real hardship in Gaza, but the situation on the ground is more complicated than Israel’s critics make it out to be.
First, there was the “imminent” famine in Gaza of which the United Nations’ Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) warned back in March of last year — a claim that was breathlessly retailed by dozens of media outlets before the IPC belatedly recanted. “The available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring,” the outfit confessed weeks later, an admission that was received by its once fevered audience with indifference.
Then there was the famine this past May, in which “food-starved” Gazans “resorted to grinding lentils, pasta and rice for baking bread amid severe shortages of flour,” as the Agence-France Presse put it. The allegation that a long-foreseen starvation campaign had begun in earnest following the collapse of a short-lived cease-fire between Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces was buttressed by the IPC’s claim that roughly 14,000 “babies” would die of nutritional deficiencies within the next 48 hours in the absence of international intervention. Then came the “clarification”: not “babies” but children, not “death” but possible malnutrition, and not “48 hours” but twelve months, and only if the conditions that prevailed in May persisted in perpetuity. Once again, the correction received a fraction of the attention the original salacious accusation earned.
The U.N.’s ire may not have been genuine, but those who mourn for the state in which the Gazan people find themselves are undoubtedly sincere. Today, there is real hardship in Gaza, and food shortages in the Strip have proven more verifiable than they were previously. The United Nations and its allies want you to believe that this unacceptable reality is the fruition of an Israeli strategy — one that has long been alleged but which has now finally arrived in earnest. The truth is more complicated.
Earlier this year, Benjamin Netanyahu paused the inflow of goods and supplies into Gaza via U.N. intermediaries “because Hamas steals the supplies and prevents the people of Gaza from getting them,” using those supplies to finance its terror machine.” To prevent the onset of a humanitarian catastrophe, Jerusalem, in coordination with the U.S. government and private philanthropic interests, reintroduced aid via the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). In the space of two months and with just four distribution sites, the GHF claims to have delivered over 100 million meals to the Strip’s 2 million people.
GHF put an end to the U.N.’s “self-distribution” system, which is an antiseptic way of describing a chaotic ransacking of aid trucks as locals take what they can. The GHF’s approach deprived Hamas of a source of revenue and the means to extort the population, but it created bottlenecks. Those chokepoints were exacerbated further by Hamas attacks near GHF’s distribution sites as it sought to scare locals away from a project that risked undermining its influence.
Almost from the outset, the U.N. and its allies lent credence to the cartoonishly evil notion that the U.S. and Israel’s humanitarian enterprise was a mirage — a way to lure unsuspecting Gazans into a kill box where they were to be slaughtered. And when Palestinians weren’t being wantonly shot, they were being deliberately famished. “The newly developed distribution scheme is more than just the control of aid,” said senior U.N. official Jonathan Whittall. “It is engineered scarcity.”
For weeks, we were privy to this claim and the implicit conclusion that only the United Nations could properly distribute food aid. It was a claim that utterly disregarded verifiable evidence — indeed, the evidence of your own eyes — that Hamas has routinely raided U.N. convoys, pilfered their goods, and hid them away from the population (culminating, on at least one occasion, in a riotous effort to liberate aid from a Hamas-run U.N. facility). But the IDF has now confessed that the GHF’s efforts, substantial though they may be, are insufficient to prevent the prospect of widespread malnutrition (the IDF maintains that there is no famine in Gaza, but it has admitted that the prospect is real).
So, Jerusalem relaxed its restrictions on aid distribution through U.N.-linked channels. But the aid did not move. As Israel claimed and proved, once again, via ample video evidence, thousands of tons of aid and 950 trucks sat idle on the Israeli side of the Gaza border even as the Netanyahu government urged the U.N. to act. But it would not. Why?
According to the Israelis, the impasse stemmed from two disputes. First, the U.N. maintained that the IDF would have to lower its standards for what products it would allow onto the Strip. “But other reasons concerned the U.N.’s unwillingness to move through certain areas that the IDF said were secure, but that the U.N. did not take its word for it, refusing to advance,” the Jerusalem Post reported. That suggests that the U.N. sought to leverage food aid to secure for itself a veto over Israel’s security priorities in the Strip.
The Post continued:
A top IDF official met with leading UN bureaucrats regarding the issue on Tuesday, demanding to know how they could accuse Israel of causing famine in Gaza, which, again, has not happened yet but might shortly should the UN continue to abandon its trucks — while simultaneously leaving the aid trucks to sit there without distributing the food.
According to the senior IDF official, the UN bureaucrats sat quietly for at least 20 seconds, struggling to come up with a response. Eventually, one of them said that they would make more of an effort to get the trucks moving again, the IDF reported.
Democrats should recognize the difficulty associated with getting aid into the right hands in the Strip. Joe Biden encountered it when he erected his ill-considered pier in the Mediterranean, which broke apart after a few months, during which American contractors were shelled and shot at by Hamas terrorists. No one seems willing to ask themselves why Hamas is so protective of the U.N.-administered aid apparatus, nor why the U.N. is just as protective of its partners in Gaza.
Quite unlike previous disputed claims of widespread nutritional deficiencies in the Strip, few today argue that conditions in Gaza are not dire. There is still plenty of “Pallywood” to sift through. The viral images of an allegedly starving child, who in reality suffered from cerebral palsy and hypoxemia, are indicative of that ongoing campaign of misdirection. In addition, the allegation that Hamas has long tried to popularize — the tendentious accusation that Israel is deliberately engineering a famine — has gone mainstream. In certain quarters, the extraordinary claim that verges on blood libel is accepted at face value. Even in outlets that are typically friendly toward the Netanyahu government, some now acknowledge that Netanyahu’s throttling of the U.N.’s access to the Strip — however tactically and strategically justified — has backfired.
But it must also be said that Jerusalem is playing to an audience that applies a double standard to Israel. Hamas has lost the war it started on October 7, 2023. Its continued resistance serves only to immiserate the Gazan people. The war would end tomorrow if Hamas surrendered today. But neither the U.N. nor its supporters place any onus on Hamas — the supposed governing authority in Gaza — for its people’s welfare.
To hear Israel’s critics tell it, the righteous defensive war imposed on it by Hamas has reached its sell-by date, if only because Hamas has proven that it is willing to sacrifice every last Palestinian to its cause. The terrorist entity has grown bolder as the West tires of Israel’s commitment to its sovereignty and the longevity of its citizens, even flirting with recognizing a Palestinian state, not as a reward for good governance in the territories but to punish Jerusalem.
Hamas has every reason to believe that pusillanimous elements in the West will save it from total defeat. They might be right. And if the lesson of this war is that genocidal terrorism pays out in the end, we will see more genocidal terrorism.
