The aid debacle in Gaza

ISRAEL’S MAMMOTH SICK JOKE

This week saw the horrible unravelling in Gaza of a grotesque public relations stunt that might better — if inadequately — have been described as a mammoth sick joke.  It was in the chaos prompted by the “intervention” of the hastily founded and clearly politically motivated Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and its paltry dumping of aid.  The US State Department was quick to express support, while, at the same time, claiming that the US “has nothing to do with the GHF”.

The GHF is, in fact, a belated effort by the Ntanyahu government to try to stave off growing global criticism of the mass starvation policy they have employed in Gaza:  emaciated and dying babies do nothing to help the Zionist cause.

But the launch and actions of the GHF also served two purposes beyond anything to do with aid:  1.  to restrict minimal aid to areas into which the starving population would have to gather and 2.  to try to finally undercut the existence of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) and independent agencies.

Why undercut UNWRA?  Because it was established initially to assist Palestinian refugees displaced by Zionists in 1948 , and has continued the work with consequent displacements ever since.  So long as UNWRA exists, the world, via the UN, has to accept that Palestinians have been dispossessed and are refugees.  

Other international aid agencies agree and have also worked for decades, especially in Gaza.  They have the experience and the infrastructure, and politically non-aligned which makes them anathema to the Ideologues in Tel Aviv and Washington.

To justify the war crime of mass starvation, the Israeli government and the US, supported almost entirely by the mainstream media, introduced the claim that aid had to be halted “because it is being stolen by Hamas”.  It was — ands remains — a blatant lie as journalist Jonathan Cook revealed so clearly in his post this week, which I reproduce below.

THE LIE OF HAMAS AID THEFT

By Jonathan Cook, May 27, 2025

Israel’s claim that Hamas is “stealing aid” is so preposterous no serious journalist or politician ought to give it any kind of airing – yet there it is continuously cropping up in the coverage of Gaza.

How do I know Israel’s claim is utterly worthless? For this simple reason:
Israel has a fleet of surveillance drones constantly hovering over the tiny strip of land that is Gaza, monitoring every inch of the territory. The incessant whine you hear every time you watch someone there being interviewed is from one of those drones. They are Israel’s eyes on the enclave. If you are outside in Gaza, you might as well be living in the Truman Show.

Were Hamas stealing aid in Gaza, Israel would easily be able to document it. It would have the video footage from its drones. The fact that it has not provided any footage showing Hamas’ theft of aid – its ransacking of aid trucks, or its fighters smuggling themselves into aid warehouses – is confirmation enough that Israel has simply invented this claim to rationalise its plans to starve the people of Gaza to death through months of an aid blockade or force them to flee into neighbouring Sinai, whichever comes first.

Without its disinformation campaign about “Hamas stealing aid”, Israel knows popular revulsion at its starvation campaign would grow quickly, and western governments would further struggle to keep opposition in check.
There are lots of others reasons, of course, to reject Israel’s lies about “Hamas stealing aid”. Not least, because every single charity and aid agency dealing with Gaza says that aid is not being stolen by Hamas.

But also because, were Hamas fighters doing so, they would be stealing from their own families: from their children and grandparents, who are much more vulnerable to Israel’s starvation campaign than they are. The idea that Hamas is stealing aid makes sense only to a racist, European colonial mindset in which Hamas fighters are viewed as bogeymen figures indifferent to the deaths of their own children, wives and parents.

What undoubtedly is happening is that Israel is allowing the strongest extended families in Gaza – often crime families with significant private arsenals – to loot the aid. That has become a serious problem since Israel killed off Gaza’s civilian police force (in violation of international law), leaving no one to enforce public order.

When everyone’s starving, the most powerful families mobilise their strength to grab an unfair share of the aid. That was an entirely predictable outcome of Israel’s policy to smash all of Gaza’s institutions, including its hospitals, government offices, and police stations, on the bogus pretext that they were “Hamas”

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Note too that Israel has long cultivated close ties to Palestinian crime families, because they provide a potential alternative, and more co-optable, power base to the Palestinian national movements and are a good source of collaborators.

The evidence suggests Israel is encouraging these crime families to loot the aid precisely to justify its dismantling of an existing aid system that works remarkably well, given the catastrophic circumstances in Gaza, and replace it with its own militarised, completely inadequate “aid distribution” system, which is designed only to herd Palestinians into the southern-most tip of Gaza, ready to be expelled into Sinai.

No journalist ought to be repeating Israel’s transparent disinformation. To do so is to collude in the promotion of lies to justify genocide. But the western media class have been doing that now for more than a year and half. They have grown entirely insensible to their own active collusion in the genocide.