Some aid groups accuse Israel of using hunger as a weapon in its war against Hamas.
A top Hamas police commander met in mid-March with Gaza tribal chiefs who have been requisitioning aid for starving Palestinians. He told them to stop receiving shipments or they would be killed. A week later, the commander was killed by Israeli forces.
The Israelites did not do what the tribe wanted. Instead, all three – Hamas, the tribes and the Israeli military – are fighting a bloody battle for control of northern Gaza and aid distribution, making an already troubled process even more dangerous and unreliable. According to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, famine was a threat and people began to die from starvation.
A senior Hamas official and several other local officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the dead commander, Fayek al-Mabhouh, organized a safe route so that people desperate to make bread from animal feed could reach it. Wheat flour. . Gazans said Israeli forces killed several others working with Mahbhouh and the security route disappeared.
Israeli military officials acknowledged that Mabhouh and his colleagues, along with nearly 200 other Hamas members, were killed in the operation at Shifa hospital but said it had nothing to do with aid. “We are at war with Hamas and he was killed as a senior Hamas terrorist,” spokesman Maj. Neil Dinard said.
International aid groups are also central players in Gaza and are often in conflict with Israel. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the East (UNRWA) is essentially a Palestinian organization that Israel is trying to shut down on the grounds that it is too close to Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.
Many governments have stopped funding UNRWA as a result of the accusations, and UNRWA said last week that although it was best placed to deliver aid to those in need, Israel was preventing it from doing so, exacerbating hunger and suffering. While food is needed everywhere along the coast, it’s most severe in the north.
A recent UN-backed report said famine is imminent in northern Gaza, where 70% of the population is on the verge of starvation. The Hamas-run health ministry said about two dozen people, including babies, had died of starvation in the northern region. That’s why many countries, including the United States, are seeking an immediate ceasefire. Israel says it must completely destroy Hamas and that aid difficulties are not its fault.
Some aid groups accuse Israel of using starvation as a weapon in its war against Hamas, which began on October 7 when Hamas agents broke into Israel and killed, tortured and kidnapped hundreds of people. Israel’s retaliatory war has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians, according to Hamas officials, who make no distinction between civilians and militants.
“Israeli authorities have consistently and arbitrarily refused U.S.-funded humanitarian assistance,” the International Rescue Committee said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in response to a query from Bloomberg that “one in five humanitarian missions to the north were denied access between March 1 and 15. This does not include delays, obstacles and Israeli Authorities have blocked the import of items urgently needed to save lives in Gaza, including generators to power medical operations.
Simon Friedman, a spokesman for the Israeli military’s civilian wing, denied the accusations, saying Israel had been facilitating the delivery of aid to northern Gaza but that international aid groups had not added trucks, workers or hours as needed.
He added, “It is absolutely not true that we are blocking access to generators. Our soldiers have delivered some generators to hospitals. We are prioritizing water, food and shelter equipment.”
His department has pushed back against the UN-backed hunger report, saying it “suffers from multiple factual and methodological flaws, some of which are serious”. The rebuttal added, “We categorically reject any accusation that Israel deliberately starves civilians in Gaza.”
Gazans in the southern city of Rafah have reported sharp falls in some prices in recent days. The price of frozen chicken, which used to be 80 shekels ($22) per kilogram, has dropped to 20 shekels.
Khalid Hamms, who runs a charity in Gaza, said one of the biggest problems is that the farmland is located near the Israeli border, which has been off-limits since the war.
“The land is inaccessible, fishermen have no access to the sea, and Gaza relies on aid to deliver food, but it is slow,” he said, adding that Hamas “has not responded effectively to the crisis.”
Sheila Efron, a policy adviser at the Israel Policy Forum, a liberal U.S.-based group and a former adviser to the Israeli Defense Ministry, said the fight over aid is emblematic of a fight over control. “If you have aid, you have power,” she said, “so the fight to control aid can have unintended consequences.”
She said foreign groups and the United Nations were right to view Israeli inspections of aid trucks as a major bottleneck. “Israel closes crossings at 4 a.m. every day and on Shabbat and holidays,” she said. She added that Israeli complaints about a lack of trucks and drivers for aid organizations were also valid.
Israel says its job is to “facilitate” aid, not to provide and distribute it – which is the job of aid organizations. But Efron said international humanitarian law requires occupying forces to provide aid to the people.
“The overall responsibility for aid lies with Israel,” she said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
