Israel's 'aid' programme is genocidal

This isn't about feeding Gaza. It's just another means to facilitate genocide

You don’t need to be a prophet. Sometimes, you can see an image, and you can quickly judge that this image will be remembered throughout the ages as hideous evidence of a heinous crime.

Like in the Vietnam War, the picture of a 9 year old year old girl running naked through the streets among other wailing children after her body was burned by a US napalm attack, or a Viet Cong captain being shot in the head by the South Vietnamese police chief.

Like, in the Bosnian war, starving, emaciated Bosniaks behind barbed wire fence in a concentration camp.

In Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, there have been so many images in this, a genocide which has been more documented and more confessed to than any other genocide in history.

But here is one image which will no doubt be remembered throughout the generations as helping to define an abominable crime. It shows starving Palestinians, who have been deliberately and systematically denied the essentials of life by Israel, penned into cages in order to get food.

I’ll explain what’s going on here, but there is no doubt that the Israeli state believes that this behaviour will humiliate and degrade Palestinians as a people - all part and parcel of the process of genocide.

But these images simply attach to Israel. People all over the world think Israel and they think, starvation, slaughtering children and babies, apocalyptic mayhem, blowing up hospitals, massacring medics, we could go on.

Now some context, because this is so so important in terms of understanding what Israel is currently doing, as they claim to simply be offering food aid for Palestinians, defying claims they are starving Palestinians.

Israel instituted a total blockade on anything, literally anything, entering Gaza on 2nd March this year, having destroyed Gaza’s agriculture and production.

As part of its propaganda campaign, Israel justifies its campaign of starvation by claiming Hamas is stealing food. So let’s listen to Cindy McCain. She is the widow of the late John McCain, the hawkish and staunchly pro-Israel Republican Senator John McCain.

She is now the director of the World Food Program, and says any aid being allowed in by Israel is a “drop in the bucket” compared to what is needed. On CBC Nation, she was asked about Israeli allegations that Hamas was stealing aid, and asked if she’d seen evidence they were “stealing the food”. McCain’s response: “No, not at all.” She clarified:" “[Looting] doesn't have anything to do with Hamas... it has simply to do with the fact these people are starving to death."

It’s very straightforward - if you starve an entire people, and then allow in minimal aid, you are going to get looting. And we should note that the Israeli army has systematically targeted Palestinian police officers in Gaza whose job it was to guard food trucks. They will have known what the consequences of that would be.

And then there’s David Satterfield. He’s a US diplomat who served as senior advisor on Iraq to George W Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He was appointed as US Ambassador to Turkey by Donald Trump. And he was appointed by Joe Biden as the Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues after 7th October. On CNN, he stated that Israel not only didn’t make this allegation in private, but never provided any evidence to substantiate the claim they’re making in public. If Hamas had taken any aid, he added, it was “minimal.”

Indeed, according to Israel’s own army, not a single example of 110 aid looting incidents was perpetrated by Hamas. The whole claim by Israel of Hamas stealing aid, used by Israel to justify mass starvation is a lie.

Now, in February, a shadowy US-Israeli organisation called the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ was set up. Supposedly in order to take charge of distributing aid, it bypassed all of the existing organisations charged with doing just that and who had experience of doing that at scale, not least the United Nations.

The whole thing is completely opaque. It’s not at all clear who is funding it

Chris Gunness, the former spokesperson for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said of it: “There’s only one word to describe this, and this is aid-washing. This is a cynical attempt by the state of Israel and its allies … to use aid to hide the fact that what’s actually going on is people are being starved into submission”

The UN aid chief, Tom Fletcher, says that this Israeli plan “makes starvation a bargaining chip.” “It is cynical sideshow. A deliberate distraction. A fig leaf for further violence and displacement.”

Indeed aid groups have condemned it as a mechanism for Israel to use food as a weapon, to “weaponise aid” for the military and political ends of Israel, violating the fundamental principles of humanitarianism, as well as emphasising it will not meet the needs of the population.

And this was the supposed plan. If you are a Palestinian who wants aid, then you need to go to one of four so-called ‘secure distribution sites’. Here’s a really important point. None of these sites are in the north of Gaza. If you’re in the north of Gaza, then you have to flee to get aid in order to feed you and your family. And Israel is trying to force the entire Palestinian population out of the north into tiny confined areas - in practise, concentration camps - so they can then mass remove them altogether from Gaza. This is just part of a strategy to destroy the Palestinian population of Gaza - and using aid to forcibly remove a population is a crime against humanity.

The executive director put it in charge of it was Jake Wood, a former US marine. But he has just resigned because he said the Foundation cannot abide by the "humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon".

It is in this context that Palestinians were hemmed into cages for the first delivery. As the brilliant Palestinian analyst Muhammed Shehada noted, what he describes as an aid concentration camp in Rafah, in the south, was run by American mercenaries. He notes one spoke with an Iraqi accent, suggesting where he had previously served.

Shehada also posted a video of a masked American mercenary clearly enjoying the sight of being front of a camp of desperate, hungry Palestinians.

What happened next? Starving Palestinians overran the checkpoint and took the supplies while being fired at by Israel, as as the US mercenaries fled.

As anyone who knows anything about aid could have predicted, it was a disaster on its own terms. As Jeremy Conyndyk, president of Refugees International, said:

I cannot stress enough that ANY HUMANITARIAN could tell you what will happen if you cut off a population for two months and then introduce a symbolic amount of aid at a single-point distribution.

You will be overrun by desperate people. It's just math.

He also makes another important point:

The aid package is also really problematic. This video shows the contents - mostly dried and prepackaged food (pasta, flour dried beans, tins).

Why is that relevant? Because it still has to be prepared - and the means of preparing it are still being blocked.

For example, turning dried pasta or raw flour into deible food needs clean water and fuel to cook - but these aren’t in the boxes and they’re being barred from entering Gaza.

You may recall founder of World Central Kitchen, Chef José Andrés, who is something of a doyen in US establishment circles, and whose aid workers were massacred by the Israeli military last April. He said:

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has left Palestinians without food. The people that created it are selfish. And now because people are really hungry just stormed the distribution place damaging the fence. It seems a helicopter began shooting…..😔@WCKitchen system of kitchens is the way…Palestinians feeding Palestinians..

World Central Kitchen posted an update stating:

**UPDATE:** At this time, WCK cannot access Gaza with aid. While the IDF has allowed some WCK trucks into the Kerem Shalom crossing, this aid is being held just inside the border. The IDF has not yet provided safe routes for bringing supplies to our kitchens.

So you can see what is happening here. Israel is using this Foundation as a ruse - to justify blocking other aid, to further its genocidal ends, while providing a tiny amount of aid which in any case cannot be practically used because of the siege on Gaza.

As ever, just listen to what Israeli leaders and officials are saying. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that Israel will only let the bare minimum into Gaza so that the world doesn’t stop Israel - that is stop Israel from its genocidal ambitions.

We should remember that last week David Lammy, British Foreign Secretary, said that Britain was taking action against Israel because of its “intolerable” behaviour, despite continuing to arm this genocide. One of the tokenistic actions he took was to suspend negotiations over a trade deal with Israel. Why on earth, you may rationally ask, is Britain trying to strike a trade deal with this genocidal state in the first place.

But in any case, on Monday, the UK Embassy in Israel posted a tweet featuring Lord Ian Austin, who is the UK Trade Envoy to Israel and someone who spends a lot of time viciously attacking those who oppose the Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. The tweet reads:

Great to welcome Lord Ian Austin to Haifa!

In a day full of innovation by the Carmel, the UK Trade Envoy to Israel visited the cutting-edge Customs Scanning Centre, Haifa Bayport, the Haifa–Nazareth Light Rail project, and the Technion - witnessing 🇬🇧–🇮🇱 cooperation at every stop

What is going on here, then? It exposes the British government for empty posturing. Suspending negotiations over a trade deal was frankly risibly tokenistic, but they can’t even stick to that as their Israeli embassy openly touts the UK Trade Envoy to Israel visiting the country on business.

I should note that the only media outlet to take this seriously is The National, which I’m proud to write for, which splashes with ‘UK IS ACCUSED OF ‘MOCKERY’ AS TRADE ENVOY VISITS ISRAEL’. The failure of the British media to scrutinise British involvement in genocide is one of the many ways in which it is complicit. Both our government and our media will be damned by history.