Israel allying with ISIS affiliated militants to starve Gaza

Israel's publicly declared policy of starving Gaza has many elements. One of them is allowing criminal gangs to run rampage - including ISIS.

The Israeli state made clear that it was going to starve the Palestinian people, and deprive them of other essentials of life, from the very start. That the Western media failed to frame their coverage accordingly - instead only intermittently reporting on the resulting famine as though it was a natural disaster - is one element of the biggest journalistic scandal of our age.

The different means used by Israel to deliberately blocks aid from getting in has been extensively documented throughout, with overwhelming evidence by the United Nations, aid organisations and human rights organisations, Palestinian journalists and so on. Most devastatingly, two US government agencies - the US Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugee agency - concluded Israel was deliberately blocking aid from entering this April, which the US administration simply chose to ignore because it legally impels the US to stop supplying Israel with weapons.

Obstructing aid from getting in, including intentional delays at crossing points to closing routes to arbitrarily banning things, and then there is the mass destruction of infrastructure within Gaza itself, which prevents aid moving within, as well as checkpoints, as well as of course as constant bombings and military onslaughts, attacks on aid convoys, the biggest slaughter of aid workers ever recorded, and indeed the killing of foreign aid workers, notably the World Central Kitchen attack which led to international aid organisations suspending their work, we could go on

Back in October, the US administration sent a letter to the Israeli state listing the various ways they’re obstructing aid from getting into Gaza, and threatening unspecified consequences unless that was rectified. Now, this was all for show for the election, and indeed as soon as the election was over they made clear they weren’t going to take any action, despite aid agencies declaring conditions in Gaza were worse than ever, and aid reaching Palestinians had fallen to the lowest point since the genocide began.

Nonetheless, the letter was useful because it showed that the US is fully aware of Israel’s deliberate starvation policy - that is, a siege deliberately imposed on the essentials of life. Since then, the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, with the starvation policy at the core of the charges.

But it is also the most basic responsibilities of an occupying power under international law to ensure the adequate provision of food, medical supplies and other life essentials, and to maintain law and order. In the case of allowing aid to reach a population in the midst of mass violence, the latter is clearly a matter of life and death. Earlier this year, even the US administration reprimanded Israel for deliberately targeting police units within Gaza charged with escorting aid convoys  - clearly in the apocalyptic circumstances Gaza faces, with a desperately hungry population, and the collapse of civilisation, without armed escorts, aid simply can’t simply travel. This systematic attack on the security forces in such desperate circumstances led to a collapse in law and order at the beginning of the year.

It gets so much worse. The evidence is absolutely overwhelming for what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz succinctly describes in its headline - ‘The Israeli Army Is Allowing Gangs in Gaza to Loot Aid Trucks and Extort Protection Fees From Drivers’.

According to this article, the IDF is allowing armed men to loot aid convoys as they enter Gaza and to extort protection money from them. This is based on sources from international aid organisations. Note by the way why these are anonymous sources - because aid organisations are desperate not give Israel any excuse to block them from operating at all, or to be targeted in various ways.

According to this Haaretz piece, the armed men are from two clans in Rafah which blocked a large chunk of the aid shipments entering Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing. The sources tell Haaretz: “the looting is systematic, yet the IDF has turned a blind eye.” Such armed attacks take place a few hundred metres away from Israeli soldiers, and truck drivers even seek help from the IDF, who then refuse to intervene, and even block them from taking safer alternative routes. Note that the Israeli army are trigger happy when it comes to butchering children, but won’t fulfil their legal obligations as an occupying power to make sure aid gets to the population and law and order is protected. (Not Israel refuse to declare Gaza an occupied territory, even though the United Nations regarded Gaza as legally subject to Israeli occupation prior to 7th October).

It gets much worse. Because some aid groups will not pay up the extortion money, that aid simply ends up sitting in - or rather rotting in - warehouses. And guess who controls the warehouses? The Israeli army. The Israeli state shut down the main Rafah crossing with Egypt 6 months ago, and so most most aid enters via the Kerem Shalom route and as Haaretz note - “armed gangs control the area on the Gazan side”

What we’re talking about here is plausible deniability. Israel says: look, we’re allowing the aid in! We’ve allowed X amount of aid in! (Despite, of course, huge limits on the actual aid entering Gaza at all). But they know that they are deliberately allowing that aid to be stopped from getting to desperate vulnerable Palestinian civilians. As Haaretz notes, this aid represents the vast majority of food and equipment Palestinians in Gaza depend on because there are almost no commercial imports.

Haaretz underlines that what remains of the local police forces try to take action against looters - but then get attacked by the Israeli army as they do so, who in any case use ‘Hamas’ as a catchall label to ensure the net is cast as large as possible when it comes to potential targets.

But it gets so much darker. The Israeli state, as this Israeli newspaper point out, have considered making the clans from which these armed looters spring from in charge of distributing aid to Gaza’s residents. And here is the killer quote: “even though some of the clans' members are involved in terrorism, and some are even affiliated with extremist organizations like the Islamic State.”

Here an Israeli newspaper points to Israel seeking to give the armed extremists who are looting aid responsibility for distributing aid - including ISIS. Note how central to Israeli propaganda - particularly in the first months - the claim ‘Hamas is ISIS' was.

Now this was subsequently corroborated by the Washington Post. Citing an internal United Nations memo which concludes that gangs ‘may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence’ or ‘protection’ from, the IDF, and citing a gang leader establishing a military like compound in an area ‘restricted, controlled and patrolled by the IDF”. The UN has declared Gaza to be lawless.

This piece finds that organised gangs are stealing what aid is allowed into Gaza by Israel, and bear in mind just how much of it is blocked from entering, and - according to testimonies from aid groups, humanitarian workers, transport companies and witnesses, they are “operating freely in areas controlled by the Israeli military.” Indeed Israeli authorities are denying most requests from aid organisations to introduce better measures to safeguard convoys, and as was also noted by Haaretz, their forces repeatedly fail when positioned within observing distance to intervene as looting was underway, as again aid workers, UN officials, transport worker sand truck drivers testify. Last Saturday, 90% of trucks carrying UN food aid from Kerem Shalom were ransacked.

We know that there has been a total siege imposed in northern Gaza since the beginning of October, with Israel openly declaring they are ethnically cleansing it, with the population forbidden from returning to their homes.

But this article notes that officials say “criminal looting has become the greatest impediment to distributing aid in the southern half of Gaza, home to the vast majority of displaced Palestinians.” Things were already bleak in southern Gaza, but not as cataclysmic in northern Gaza - well, that may now change. As noted here, aid truck drivers have been killed, beaten and kidnapped - and this clearly deters aid agencies and aid drivers from working in Gaza 

And here is a harbinger of Gaza’s proposed future. The gangs are identified here as “rivals of Hamas and, in some cases, they have been targeted by remnants of Hamas’s security forces in other parts of the enclave.”

Some may look at this Washington Post article as evidence contradicting my critique of Western coverage, by the way. But there have been examples of good journalism in multiple Western outlets: the scale of the crime is simply too big to feasibly suppress. The problem is they are orphaned: detached from wider coverage, and not used to frame that coverage.

There is another crucial article at the always excellent Drop Site News, which discusses how surviving members of the Palestinian security forces killed at least 20 members of an organised gang alleged to be looting aid trucks, and offers even more detail about this pillar of Israel’s genocidal onslaught. The point being made here is this looting is being done by collaborators with the Israeli occupation.

Gaza Security Forces Ambush Gang Accused of Looting Aid with Israeli Support

It’s very clear what’s happened here. Israel has de facto allied with criminal collaborators in Gaza as part of a systematic attempt to starve the people. That is up to and including Isis.

As was reported last December, Benjamin Netanyhau tasked his top advisors with plans to “thin” the Palestinian population in Gaza “to a minimum”. It’s not even subtle. This is genocide.