Starvation in Gaza: A human tragedy fuelled by lies, extremism, and global failure

Key topics.Hunger crisis in Gaza worsens amid Hamas exploitation and aid chaosIsrael’s political dysfunction and failed aid strategy fuel sufferingGlobal misinformation and UN inaction deepen the humanitarian mess.By Ilan Preskovsky.Let’s cut straight to the chase: there is massive suffering in Gaza right now with a great many people, who having already faced injury, homelessness, and seeing their loved ones die, are now facing hunger and malnutrition. This is absolutely horrific and should never, ever have happened. There are no if and buts about it. The worldwide outrage over the situation, then, is entirely morally appropriate and humane. What’s sorely missing, however, is context. Not context that justifies these horrors, but context that is needed to truly understand what is going on, how it reached this point, and what needs to be done to address it. It’s also context that, as we’ll see, is less about absolving any one party than about illustrating just how many different factors and different actors share responsibility for the entire mess. We can divide this somewhat neatly into three separate, but interlinked categories. One is obvious but largely ignored; one is most commonly blamed but is most misrepresented and misunderstood, and one has the most relevance to what can be done internationally, but is ignored and misunderstood in equal measure. To take them in order: 1. Hamas Everything that has happened in Gaza since 7 October 2023 is the fault of Hamas. This is the simple, absolute truth of the matter, and anyone who denies this has nothing of value whatsoever to add to the conversation. Hamas’ unprovoked, barbaric massacre of 1200 Israelis and foreign nationals on 7 October and kidnapping of over 250 more was a crime of unspeakable magnitude against not just its immediate victims, but against all of those who would suffer and die in the 20 months after that as a result of Israel’s inevitable and justified military response. It was also the culmination of decades of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and of nearly two decades of iron-fisted rule of Gaza, where the radical Islamist group stole literal billions of dollars in aid to enrich themselves and to turn the entire strip into one large terror base; infiltrating the enclave’s civilian infrastructure so fully that by the time Israel retaliated there was no functional difference between civilian and military areas. You can talk all you want about how “the war didn’t start on October 7th” or about any legitimate or illegitimate claims that the Palestinian people as a whole have against the state of Israel, but these all suppose that Hamas’ noxious beliefs and actions have anything to do with improving things for the people they claim to represent. They don’t. Hamas have never hidden their intentions. What they want is the murder of Jews, the destruction of Israel and the creation of a caliphate based on the most regressive, fundamentalist reading of Islam imaginable. They have made it abundantly clear that they would repeat their crimes of October 7th over and over again until their goals are reached, no matter how many Palestinians have to pay for it with their lives. There is, very simply, no hope for the Palestinian people or for peace in the region as long as Hamas continues to rule Gaza after this war. 2. Israel That Hamas is singularly and entirely at fault for the war did not and does not allow Israel to conduct itself however it sees fit, and there are numerous legitimate criticisms to be levelled against the Netanyahu government for its conduct during this war. It’s just a pity that almost all of them get lost in a sea of illegitimate, or at least simplistic, sloganeering that not only removes all nuance from the conversation and cultivates antisemitism worldwide, but also entirely misses the point. Israel is not committing genocide against the people of Gaza. It is not wilfully starving the civilian population and it is not killing people indiscriminately. Israel has let in enough food and supplies throughout most of the war (more on that in a second) to easily feed and provide aid to the entire population of Gaza for longer than the war itself has gone on. And though every civilian death is an unquestionable tragedy, the civilian to combatant casualty ratio (somewhere between 2:1 and 1:1) is well within the “norm” for this sort of war – and even better considering how Hamas hides within the civilian population and Israel’s neighbouring countries have prevented Gazans from seeking refuge within their borders. By focusing on these “maximalist” war crimes that Israel is not committing, its critics are missing the very real sins that Netanyahu and his government actually are responsible for. A Confederacy of (Political) Dunces Though Israel is not committing genocide, Netanyahu has within his government far-right, religious-nationalist extremists who have openly used genocidal language about the Palestinians and have tacitly endorsed – and in the case of (heaven help us) national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, no doubt covered for - the despicable attacks on Palestinian civilians in the “West Bank” by a small but persistent group of extremist settlers. They do not directly set policy in this war and both the vast majority of the Israeli public and the Israeli Defence Force itself have little time for their open bigotry and messianic plans for a “Greater Israel”. But because Netanyahu’s ruling coalition would fall apart without them, he gives people like Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich far more leeway than they deserve and is usually careful not to say or do anything that would upset them to the point that they might flee the coalition for good. That he has to do this while at exactly the same time maintaining the other key part of his coalition, the Ultra-Orthodox/ Charedim, by offering them blanket exemptions from enlistment in the army, it’s no wonder that his leadership throughout the war has been so indecisive and contradictory. And that’s before taking into consideration his own political and legal motives, to say nothing of the unavoidable truth that navigating a war in Gaza is, by definition, unimaginably tricky. And it’s why it has become increasingly difficult to decipher whether continuing the war in Gaza is an unavoidable tactical necessity or if it is just more political manoeuvring by an increasingly embattled politician who will do everything in his power to avoid taking responsibility for both his alleged corruption and for allowing October 7th to happen under his watch. There are many reasons to assume the former - Hamas’ continued existence, its refusal to surrender and release the remaining hostages, its constant rejections of good-faith ceasefire agreements – but the very fact that the latter is a possibility, colours every move Netanyahu makes and every word he utters. The Real Situation in Gaza Which brings us to the issue of the hunger in Gaza and the culpability of Netanyahu and his government. Again, the idea of Israel intentionally starving the people of Gaza is quickly dispensed of the minute you consider just how much aid has gone into the strip throughout most of the war, but something clearly has gone wrong on the Israeli side as mass hunger has become an increasingly pressing issue. Part of it clearly comes from Netanyahu’s inconsistent and half-hearted threats to withhold aid as a strategy of war, but the main reason is that Hamas has continuously hijacked aid for itself, both for its own use and to fund its operations by selling it to Gazan civilians at exorbitant prices. And Israel’s response has been, frankly, a bit of a mess. Between January and March this year, during a rare ceasefire with Hamas, Israel let in hundreds of thousands of tons of food into Gaza that according to the World Food Program should have fed everyone in the enclave for up to six months. When that ceasefire ended at the end of March and believing that the Gazan people were in no real risk of starving in the short term, Israel decided to cut off any further aid in the hopes of forcing Hamas’ hand in reaching a new agreement to release more hostages. It would also give them an opportunity to create a new way of distributing aid in Gaza directly using the IDF for protection, thereby bypassing the UN delivery system that was constantly hijacked by Hamas. And, with the United States helping to develop it, the new system – named the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation - was indeed rolled out at the end of May. What Actually Happened with the Aid Unfortunately, almost none of this worked out as planned. Food ran out far quicker than expected; not least because fearing that food scarcity would result from Israel’s aid ban, many Gazans – to say nothing of Hamas - started to stockpile the aid that was already there, leaving nowhere near enough to go around. Second, though the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has provided millions of meals since its implementation in May, it has only a fraction of the reach of the UN and the aid was irregular and often not delivered to parts of Gaza. Further, with a worsening hunger crisis growing, security was needed to control the ravenous crowds rushing at food that was for many of them their first meal in days, but Israel was woefully unprepared here as well as this job fell to young soldiers who had little training in crowd control and were armed only with their usual live weapons. These aid sites have been calamitous and though it will take months if not years to fully figure out what happened and who was responsible for what, that people have lost their lives just trying to access basic supplies is a red stain on the Jewish State. If this level of incompetence is new for Israel, the hubris of its leaders definitely isn’t. As Haviv Rettig Gur, a journalist and political commentator for the Times of Israel and the Free Press, put it: “Israel has continued to fail to understand the enemy. It tried to play a game of chicken with humanitarian aid. It blinked first. Obviously. How could it have been otherwise? Which Israeli strategist was dumb enough ever to think that Israel’s threshold of tolerance for Gazan suffering was higher than Hamas’? Why did they think this was going to work with a group whose foundational strategy is Gaza’s destruction?” Exactly. This was a strategy doomed from the start. Rettig Gur’s suggestion that Israel should have flooded Gaza with so much aid that Hamas wouldn’t be able to sell any, is a good one, if it’s at all feasible. Regardless, it’s hard to think of a less effective strategy than one that has led to mass hunger and has forced Israel to give Hamas a ten-hour-a-day reprieve from the fighting in order to deliver as much aid as possible through mechanisms Israel spent months trying to avoid – all without the a single concession or the release of a single hostage on Hamas’ part..Read more:.BN Briefing: Joburg's R22bn crisis, Lesufi’s 'window-dressing' shuffle, Gayton's leadership blasted. 3. The International Community To make matters that much worse for Israel, with so much disinformation flying around, you would think that Netanyahu would bother to appoint some sort of spokesperson to explain in clear, basic English exactly what it is Israel is trying to achieve and what is actually happening on the ground. But not only has Netanyahu failed to deliver a clear plan for post-war Gaza, it says it all that I had to piece together the above not through clear communication from the Israeli government, but by relying on Israeli journalists to sift through the lies, slander and half-truths that have enveloped the conversation. Which is why the very idea of Israeli “hasbarah” is so hilarious, let alone that it has any control whatsoever on the media. Whatever failings Netanyahu may be responsible for in public relations, though, absolutely pale in the face of the pernicious smear campaign against Israel that not only puts Jews worldwide at risk and woefully misrepresents the reality in Israel and Gaza, but does untold damage to the Palestinian people. An inability to communicate, after all, is only a problem when dealing with people that have any interest in actually listening. A Jaw-Dropping Response For the past twenty months, a cavalcade of libellous slander against Israel has erupted across social media, the legacy press, the United Nations, humanitarian organisations and our own government. Cries of genocide were heard on 8 October 2023, long before Israel had formulated a response let alone implemented it, but not for those massacred, raped and kidnapped by Hamas, but for the Palestinians in Gaza. Hamas casualty figures are treated like holy writ, while every claim made by Israel is disbelieved by default and no consideration is made at all for the fact that even Hamas openly acknowledge that they don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants in those figures. As the months have worn on, October 7th has all but been forgotten, Hamas has been written off as incidental, at best, and a justified resistance group, at worst. And then there’s the unbridled stupidity of Israeli allies like the UK, Canada and France threatening Israel with unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September. No matter their intentions, all they have done is grant Hamas a symbolic victory and a persuasive reason not to make any concessions towards ceasefire until at least September. A unilateral recognition of such a state by outside parties without negotiated borders and a fixed government doesn’t actually help a single Palestinian in any meaningful way and gives Israel less reason to return to the negotiation table. That Israel’s Western “allies” did this while at the exact same time none other than the Arab League put the blame for the war squarely on those responsible by calling for Hamas to surrender and release all the hostages, only makes it hurt that much more. Perhaps most egregious of all, though, is that the hostages who have remained in captivity for what is rapidly approaching two years barely merit a mention by Israel’s critics or are downplayed as just a few living Israelis whose lives are meaningless against the suffering of thousands of Palestinians. Hamas proved this just a couple of days ago when the terror group released a pair of harrowing videos of two young hostages, starving, on the brink of death, with one forced to dig his own grave, that were met with outrage by Israelis and Israel’s supporters, but with silence or whataboutisms by everyone else. Truths Built on Lies Bringing us to our case at hand, since minute one of the war, Israel has been accused of starving the people of Gaza. It didn’t matter how many tons of aid were entering the enclave or whether Hamas were stealing it for their own benefit. People are now even denying, in fact, that Hamas even stole aid despite all evidence to the contrary. Certainly, no one questioned the UN’s claims of insufficient aid when they admitted that they were only counting what they were directly responsible for. And even as the hunger crisis deepened, the notoriously anti-Israel United Nations were left off the hook for refusing to work with the GHF and left some 950 trucks of aid inside Gaza undistributed even as they blamed Israel for starving children. And the media has only made matters worse. Consider the now infamous New York Times article that formed much of the basis for alerting the world to the current hunger crisis in Gaza. Though it may well have been telling the truth about the situation on the ground, its legitimacy was almost immediately cast into doubt when it was revealed that the photo that accompanied it - a haunting image of a mother clutching an emaciated child – was not, in fact, a photo of a typical starving child in Gaza but of a child with a life-threatening disease that makes it impossible for his body to absorb nutrients, who had been airlifted the previous month out of Gaza and is currently receiving treatment in Italy, accompanied by his mother. More cynically still, the photograph was cropped. In the original photograph, the boy’s younger brother was standing next to him and his mother in what appears be perfectly fine health. It doesn’t mean that the content of the article was wrong and obviously one’s heart breaks for that poor child, but it says everything about the state of reporting on the conflict that even a “highly respected” news source like the New York Times needed to embellish what is already a horrible (apparent) truth with such a grotesquely cynical lie. The New York Times apologised, but the damage was done. The international community has been crying wolf so long that how can anyone possibly be surprised that Israel – not just the government but the Israeli public – would pay no notice of them until the wolf was battering at their door with the cries of hungry Gazans? Why would Israelis have demanded more of their leaders, no matter how unpopular, when even the most valid, well-meaning criticism, coming from even Israel’s greatest allies, have been tainted by the torrents of lies and blood libels that have utterly engulfed them? Why, in short, would Israelis give any credence to a world that has sacrificed its credibility over and over and over again? And what does it say about a “pro-Palestinian” campaign that is directly responsible for so many of these pernicious and harmful lies? Israel has failed the people of Gaza, yes, but so has everyone else has – including, perhaps especially, those who profess to care about them most.

Starvation in Gaza: A human tragedy fuelled by lies, extremism, and global failure

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