Hunger in Gaza Has Many Authors, but Israel Isn’t One of Them
On Tuesday, Israel delivered 1,829,520 meals to suffering Gazans through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — a nongovernmental organization created this year, with U.S. support, to replace UNWRA, the corrupt, Hamas-infiltrated U.N. relief agency. That is enough to feed nearly the entire Gazan population.
Indeed, since May 26, the foundation reports that it has distributed at least 108 million meals in Gaza. According to the Israel Defense Forces’ Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Israel has facilitated the delivery of almost 1.9 million tons of international humanitarian aid to Gaza since the start of the war by land, sea and air — including food, water, flour, baby formula, cooking gas, shelter and medical supplies.
Far from deliberate starvation in Gaza, Israel is doing something no nation has ever done, or even been expected to do: Feed the population of the aggressor force that attacked it while the war is still going on. “There is no historical precedent for a military providing the level of direct aid to an enemy population that Israel has provided to Gaza,” John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, recently pointed out. The United States did not feed Germany and Japan while the war was going on; we forced their armies to surrender and then fed their populations.
Today, despite having been defeated militarily, Hamas refuses to surrender. Hamas fights on because it clearly doesn’t care about the suffering of the people of Gaza. Indeed, the suffering is central to Hamas’s strategy of survival, which is to weaponize images of Palestinian misery to build international pressure on Israel to stop its military campaign before Hamas is destroyed.
Unfortunately, that strategy is working. We see its success in the coverage by Western media outlets, such as the New York Times, which recently published a front-page photo of a Gazan mother holding her emaciated child to illustrate the suffering Israel was supposedly inflicting. It turned out the boy was suffering from “pre-existing health problems” affecting his brain and muscle development, the Times later acknowledged in an editor’s note — though it continued to report he “suffers from severe malnutrition.” Of course, they failed to show his healthy, well-fed older brother, perhaps because his inclusion would have undermined that assertion.
We see the success of Hamas’s strategy in the response of governments like France, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Spain and Norway, which have declared, in response to the international outcry Hamas has generated, that they will recognize a “State of Palestine” — thus rewarding Hamas for the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack and its refusal to release Israeli hostages.
This success is why Hamas is determined to stop Israel and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation from delivering aid by systematically stealing it. The United Nations reports that, from May 19 to Aug. 4, a total of 2,545 trucks carrying aid entered Gaza. Of those, 2,310 — or about 90 percent — were “intercepted” (either by hungry people or armed actors) and 31,113 tons of aid was taken. As Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) explained on the Senate floor, Hamas resells looted supplies on the black market allowing it “to rake in more than half-a-billion dollars in profit — profits that fund Hamas’s campaign of terror against Israel and its own people.” Meanwhile hundreds of trucks have sat inside Gaza filled with undelivered aid, because the U.N. wouldn’t distribute it — and refused to let the Gaza Humanitarian Fund distribute it. Whose fault is that?
Who else is responsible for Gaza’s suffering? Its neighbors. The normal way to get humanitarian relief to civilians in wartime is allow them to leave the conflict zone as refugees. For example, there are more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe. Poland has taken in nearly 1 million, while Germany has accepted 1.2 million. During the civil war in Syria, more than 4.2 million civilians fled that conflict, taken in by Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and other neighboring countries.
It would be easier to feed Gazan civilians if they were in safe third countries. But Gaza’s neighbors refuse to allow its civilian population to flee. Jordan’s King Abdullah II declared at the start of the war: “No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt.” Indeed, Egypt’s response to the suffering of the Gazan people has been to reinforce its border wall with Gaza. They claim it is because Israel might not allow them to return. But the real reason is that they do not want to import Gaza’s problems. Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi admitted as much, when he pointed out that accepting Gazan refugees risks bringing in Hamas operatives, which could use Egypt as a base for terrorist attacks.
Of course, there is a policy of deliberate starvation in Gaza. It is being carried out by Hamas, which last week released photos of two emaciated Israeli hostages. The brother of one of the hostages told the U.N. Security Council this week, “As my younger brother, a living skeleton, was forced to speak and dig his grave, the chubby and well-fed hand of a Hamas terrorist entered the frame. Suddenly, Hamas confirmed what we have known for months — the terrorists have plenty of food. The only ones starving in Hamas’s tunnels are the hostages.”
To lay the blame for this situation at Israel’s feet, rather than on Hamas, requires a stunning level of moral blindness — which apparently is plentiful when it comes to what is happening in Gaza.