Gaza under Siege

Afew​ years ago I had a meeting with a European diplomat in Brussels. He was a well-intentioned mid-career official looking for ways to get more aid into the Gaza Strip. At the time Israel was limiting the number of trucks allowed in, as it had been doing since tightening the blockade on Gaza in 2007. The diplomat was trying hard to increase that number. I praised his work, but said that the real issue was not the number of trucks entering, but the fact that Israel controlled that number in the first place. I argued that the goal of the international community shouldn’t be to make life under the blockade liveable, but to challenge the illegal and immoral blockade itself.

Such conversations are constrained by notions of what is ‘possible’ and ‘pragmatic’; any proposals that fall outside those parameters are deemed ‘utopian’ and ‘idealistic’. The diplomat couldn’t quite grasp that in the long term his efforts – and those of the European Union – were making it easier for Israel to sustain the blockade at the cost of great suffering to Palestinians, who might get some immediate relief if a few extra trucks were allowed in, but would remain at the mercy of a lethal occupying force.

Humanitarian aid has long served as cover for Israeli crimes. Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying force is charged with caring for the population under its control. Yet rather than compel Israel to abide by its obligations, international benefactors have consistently footed the bill of the occupation by providing food and supplies to Gaza and the West Bank without holding Israel accountable. We are now seeing the logical culmination of playing by the occupier’s rules. Even as Palestinians in Gaza starve, the discussion around the delivery of aid remains limited to the possible and pragmatic. After Israel went to war against Iran, and pulled the US into the fray, international attention moved away from the starvation campaign and the genocide, which nonetheless continues.

On 2 March, six weeks after agreeing a ceasefire with Hamas, the Israeli government announced a total siege on Gaza, blocking the entry of food, water, fuel and medicine. Israel had already carried out three total sieges since the war began, twice on parts of Gaza, once on all of it. These sieges are part of its ‘starvation campaign’ – as Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on food, has called it. By December 2023, Palestinians in Gaza accounted for 80 per cent of those facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide. ‘Never in postwar history,’ Fakhri wrote last July, ‘had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely.’

For Israel, the ceasefire had proved more successful than its military operations at securing the release of the hostages held by Hamas. Yet on 18 March, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government resumed hostilities, claiming that this was in the country’s interests. Israel has killed more than five thousand Palestinians in Gaza since then, bringing the total number killed since October 2023 to more than 55,000. Hamas’s terms for a permanent ceasefire have been plain for more than a year: the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in exchange for the release of the remaining Israeli captives who are still alive and the bodies of the rest; the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza; and the cessation of all hostilities. But Netanyahu insists that there will be no permanent ceasefire until Hamas is destroyed – an objective widely understood to be unachievable.

What, then, is the goal of starving Gaza? Israel has often used its civilian population to tighten the noose around Hamas. This was the original logic behind the blockade of Gaza, which began in the early 1990s and was made stricter after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006. Israel, in co-ordination with the Bush administration, decided that if it made the blockade sufficiently punitive, the Hamas government would be overthrown. This was a policy as blinkered as it was illegal, given the record of collective punishment as a tactic in any number of arenas since Vietnam.

Israel’s then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, imposed a ‘complete siege’ on Gaza on 9 October 2023. Just nine months later, Fakhri reported that Israel had ‘used starvation to induce forcible transfer, harm and death against people in the north, pushing people into the south, only to starve, bombard and kill people in newly created refugee camps in the south’. This March, the trickle of supplies that had been allowed in was cut off altogether. On 17 April, the heads of major aid groups in Gaza warned that the humanitarian crisis was at its worst since the start of the war. By 25 April the UN World Food Programme had exhausted its stocks in Gaza. A few days later Gaza’s civil defence agency ran out of fuel for most of its vehicles in southern Gaza, limiting its ability to maintain order. On 7 May, World Central Kitchen, which had been delivering millions of meals to Gaza, ran out of provisions; on 12 May the World Health Organisation said it was running very low on medical supplies.

During this period Israel continued to bomb hospitals; it placed the last hospital still standing in north Gaza, al-Awda, under siege for the fourth time since October 2023; bombed the warehouse at Nasser medical compound, destroying whatever supplies were left; killed health workers, including midwives and pharmacists, as well as employees of the UN Relief and Works Administration, bringing the number of UNRWA staff killed to three hundred; and began what it termed an ‘extensive’ ground invasion throughout the territory. Distribution of the small amount of remaining aid became nearly impossible, since more than 80 per cent of Gaza had been placed in militarised zones or under forced displacement orders. By May, 90 per cent of the population was at risk of famine, and 900,000 children were at critical risk. As the cost of a 25 kg bag of wheat rose to $415, there were stories of Palestinians eating grass. People I spoke to who had left Gaza told me that their relatives were going without food for days on end.

As the situation deteriorated, there were reports of looting. Israel has repeatedly blamed this on Hamas, which it accuses of hoarding supplies and denying the population access to food and medicine. Those I spoke to offered a different account: Hamas was trying to impose order in tense, chaotic circumstances by cracking down on armed gangs and attempting to prevent the theft of aid. It has since emerged that Israel was contributing to the disorder by arming and supporting a militia known as the Popular Forces, which was accused last year of looting more than a hundred UN aid trucks.

As it had during previous total sieges, Israel responded to international concern with symbolic gestures. On 18 May, the Israeli cabinet voted to allow a ‘basic amount’ of food into Gaza. It let in five UN lorries. A report based on a survey of humanitarian organisations noted that this concession ‘only creates the appearance of resumed humanitarian access. The siege remains firmly in place and starvation continues.’ Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said that aid was being allowed in ‘so the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes’, while adding that the goal was still to ‘conquer, clear and stay’.

A week later, a new aid distribution initiative called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began operations with US approval, replacing the existing system which had been co-ordinated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Médecins sans Frontières and the Palestine Children Relief Fund, among others. (UNRWA, the organisation best equipped to distribute aid, hasn’t been allowed to operate in Israel since January, which means it can’t operate in Gaza.) GHF is an opaque organisation managed by American security contractors and Israeli soldiers. It contracts onsite work to a private American company called Safe Reach Solutions and provides no information on how its budget of $150 million a month is funded; the former prime minister Yair Lapid and the former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman have suggested that it is paid for by the Israeli defence ministry and Mossad. This has provoked opposition in Israel on the grounds that aid should not be allowed into Gaza; if it must be, it certainly should not be paid for by Israeli taxpayers.

The new system of aid distribution has been roundly criticised by the UN and humanitarian organisations. A daily ration distributed by GHF is meant to provide 1750 calories – a ‘horrifically insufficient’ figure, according to Chris Newton, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. (Following the intensification of the blockade in 2007, the Israeli army calculated that to avoid malnutrition each person in Gaza needed 2279 calories a day; the UN recommends a minimum of 2100 calories a day in emergency situations.) UNRWA and other groups had four hundred distribution centres throughout the strip; GHF has only four ‘fortified hubs’, three of them in Rafah, close to the border with Egypt. Palestinians walk up to ten kilometres to reach them, passing through militarised zones and biometric checkpoints, and must arrive before the 6 a.m. opening time.

This system serves a clear purpose. By concentrating the distribution of aid, Israeli officials can force the movement of already displaced Palestinians. When they arrive at the hubs, Palestinians are frequently met with Israeli gunfire. More than four hundred people have been killed at GHF centres, 57 of them on 11 June alone. These killings are ‘not mistakes of the system’, Newton has said, ‘but by design’. Research by Forensic Architecture shows that since breaking the ceasefire in March, Israel has routinely ‘carried out multiple attacks in areas towards which civilians had been directed’. It’s not only those seeking aid who are being killed, but aid workers too. Israel claimed that the killing of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen in April 2024 was accidental, yet since October 2023 it has killed 452 humanitarian workers and consistently targets the infrastructure of aid delivery.

Israel’s claim that its campaign in Gaza is about destroying Hamas becomes even less convincing when one considers its conduct in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority, controlled by Fatah, which is opposed to Hamas, is in power. Israel has killed a thousand Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, employing many of the same tactics used in Gaza. Israeli settlers have been armed with more than 150,000 assault rifles by the government; access to Palestinian towns and villages has been blocked by occupying forces. Water and food have been withheld from herding communities throughout the West Bank, in an effort to force their displacement – a tactic that has been successful in villages such as Wadi al-Siq. Israel has also ravaged refugee camps, including Jenin and Tulkarm, destroying homes and infrastructure.

The UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, has noted that the West Bank is suffering the worst military assault since the Second Intifada, and that its purpose is ethnic cleansing. Médecins sans Frontières staff have observed ‘ambulances blocked by Israeli forces at checkpoints while carrying critical patients, medical facilities surrounded and raided during active operations, and healthcare workers subjected to physical violence while trying to save lives’. In the fourteen months following 7 October, the WHO recorded more than 694 attacks against healthcare in the West Bank, including on hospitals, infrastructure and personnel. A recent editorial in Haaretz referred to the ‘Gazafication of the West Bank’, a term Palestinians have long used. ‘Everything has been permissible in Gaza,’ it went on, ‘and now, everything is permissible to soldiers in the West Bank as well. In both places, nothing is as cheap in the IDF’s eyes as Palestinian lives.’

Israel’s efforts since 2007 to use the civilian population to put pressure on Hamas have consistently failed. The Israeli security establishment understands this: it’s the reason it negotiated with Hamas in the years leading up to 7 October. And Hamas knows that were it to fulfil Israel’s demands that it disarm and leave Gaza, the genocide would probably continue: within days of the PLO’s capitulation and exit from Lebanon in 1982, more than a thousand of the Palestinian refugees left behind were slaughtered in the camps of Sabra and Shatila. Hamas is in many ways a red herring. In carrying out the genocide and annexing the West Bank – on 11 May, the government announced that all land in Area C, which makes up 60 per cent of the territory, will now be subject to Israeli land registration processes, essentially revoking Palestinian ownership – Israel’s goal is to complete the unfinished business of the Nakba.

On 19 May, the UK, France and Canada issued their strongest statement to date about Israel’s actions, criticising the food supplies allowed in as ‘wholly inadequate’ and calling on Israel to ‘engage with the UN to ensure a return to delivery of aid in line with humanitarian principles’. ‘We will not stand by while the Netanyahu government pursues these egregious actions,’ the statement said. ‘If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response.’ That this language is being used only now speaks volumes about Western complicity. So far, the only concrete actions to have materialised are France’s proposed and pointless conference on the two-state solution (scheduled to have been held in June at the UN in New York but now postponed for ‘logistical and security reasons’), and the imposition by the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway of sanctions against Smotrich and the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir (as if these two far-right ministers are entirely to blame for the policies of the Israeli state). Meanwhile, despite the symbolic suspension of some arms licences, the UK remains intimately entangled in Israel’s military, exporting weapons and weapon parts and receiving imports in turn. Since 2023, the British base in Cyprus has supported Israel with weapons, personnel and intelligence. In May, the new German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, said his country would continue to arm Israel only if ‘what is happening in Gaza is in line with international law’; a few days later, he made clear that Germany had no plans to reduce arms exports, even though most Germans want to see tighter controls.

The institutions of the postwar international order are being severely tested. The US has imposed sanctions on four judges at the International Criminal Court while the International Court of Justice remains hobbled and under threat. In January 2024, the ICJ ruled that there is plausible evidence that Israel is carrying out a genocide and called for interim measures to stop it. In international law, such a ruling makes third-party actors responsible for helping to implement those measures, but states have taken no action. On 4 June, fourteen of the fifteen members of the UN Security Council voted for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, but the resolution was vetoed by the US.

Despite all this, the answer is not simply to allow UNRWA to operate and let the aid flow in. The response to this genocide shouldn’t be to allow more food into Gaza so that Palestinians can be saved from starving but killed by Israeli bombing. Rather, it should be to undo the system of control and killing that Israel has forced on Palestinians, and to hold those responsible for it accountable. The discourse around aid allows politicians to avert their gaze from the political crisis, as if Palestinians had suffered a natural disaster.

‘What can be done?’ the European diplomat might ask me today. For a start, call a spade a spade. This is an apartheid regime carrying out a genocide on a captive population. End military assistance. Suspend arms exports to Israel and stop buying Israeli weapons (Israel’s arms exports increased 14 per cent last year to a record $14.8 billion, more than half of which went to Europe). Impose sanctions: end financial and economic co-operation in trade and banking relations; stop all cultural links and diplomatic partnerships. Support the ICC and the ICJ and meet third-party obligations under international law. Bring criminal investigations against dual nationals who have committed war crimes in Gaza. Stop demonising the Palestinian struggle to end apartheid. The diplomat would no doubt tell me that none of this is possible or pragmatic.

27 June