Humanitarian aid and weaponising starvation
Making food accessible to people who have been suffering from extreme hunger for more than a year due to Israel’s blockade of Gaza is not “humanitarian aid”; it is a basic duty and its violation is a serious war crime
By Orly Noy • Translated by Sol Salbe
Israel’s “Ramadan Kareem” greeting to the tortured residents of Gaza this year was particularly savage: after violating the agreement with Hamas, at the beginning of the blessed month, the army hermetically closed all the crossings into the Gaza Strip and prevented the entry of goods, first and foremost food.
This heinous crime, which constitutes a dramatic escalation of the deliberate starvation policy of more than two million people, has been referred to — by Israel itself and by all the media outlets that covered it — as “preventing the entry of humanitarian aid.” This framing is critical in establishing the Israeli narrative in two ways.
First, “assistance” is something voluntary, beyond the letter of the law, and not a basic obligation according to both human morality and international law, since Israel is the de facto ruling power in the territory. Just as we do not call the establishment of schools “educational assistance” to civilians, making food accessible to people who have been suffering from extreme hunger for more than a year due to Israel’s blockade of Gaza is not “humanitarian aid”; it is a basic duty and its violation is a serious war crime.
Second, the portrayal of the closure of the crossings as a halt to “humanitarian aid” creates the impression that Israel is providing food and other items to the starving residents of Gaza. In reality these are collected by aid agencies and international bodies, and Israel supervises their transfer — or non-transfer — into Gaza. It is a fatuous right that Israel has taken for itself for many years, to decide how much and what food products Gazans are allowed to consume, up to the level of daily calories that Gazans should be allowed, long before the last war.
The hair-raising document, Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip — Red Lines, which details the food restriction policy for the Gaza Strip that was in effect between 2007 and 2010 and was revealed only after a long legal battle by Gisha, includes detailed tables of food consumption in the Gaza Strip by food type, weight, and nutritional values, and summarises the administrative work done by the defence establishment, in cooperation with the Ministry of Health, with the aim of “identifying the point of intervention to prevent malnutrition in the Gaza Strip.” This misrepresentation, as if Israel finances the food and medicine entering Gaza during the war, has fuelled the fierce opposition to the entry of goods among various Israeli groupings. “We must understand that Gaza is an enemy and you don’t assist the enemy in times of war,” said a resident of the border area in response to the opening of the Erez [Beit Hanoun] crossing for the passage of food and medicine in May 2024. “One doesn’t help the enemy in time of war,” said the demonstrators, who came to block the transfer of food trucks and basic equipment to Gaza with their bodies.
Over the years, a consensus has been established here that respecting the most basic rights of the Palestinians, or the most minimal reductions of their oppression, are “gestures of goodwill,” always in the sense of favour that the master grants to on their subjects, and whether they choose to give or deny, is never taken for granted. The language we use plays a huge role in shaping the reality in which we live. After 17 months of deliberate destruction and starving that has already claimed the lives of babies and children, we must call things by their name: this is not “humanitarian aid” that Israel can grant or deny, and preventing it is not “stopping the aid,’ but rather taking the policy of weaponised starvation to an extreme level for the purpose of military decisiveness, one of the most despicable of war crimes.
