I hope I won’t sound callous or unfeeling if I argue that the food shortage in Gaza has been exaggerated by the UN and the world media. I would argue that, from what I know, there is enough food in Gaza for everyone. The problem is that it’s not being properly distributed, as people are taking the humanitarian free food and selling it in the open market or the black market. And Hamas, of course, is purloining much of it for its own needs. I am not arguing that people aren’t going hungry in Gaza. Old people, people without means to buy food from the market, and those who just can’t fight the scrum around the food trucks—these people are hungry and need help.
Now I’m not sure what kind of help they need given the three videos below from Tom Gross’s newsletter, but one thing that would help is to eliminate Hamas. Terrorists are stealing food meant as humanitarian relief, they are attacking and shooting food-truck drivers (see below), and they are hijacking entire trucks. Further, UNRWA should not be in charge of distributing food, as they’re in league with Hamas. I’m glad that Israel seems to be doing quite a bit to help, especially in moving in food from the north and getting IDF soldiers to deliver it. This is going above their pay grade.
Here are three of Tom Gross’s videos and one additional one I found. The titles in bold are from Gross:
Palestinian food market in Gaza that the western media won’t show you. Rafah. March 6, 2024
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Egyptians furious and scared as Hamas murder and injure humanitarian aid drivers
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And at the end of this one we have a staged example of a “victim”, presumably of hunger or the IDF, who miraculously revives when the camera turns off.
What is in those free Gaza food packages airdropped by the US? (Please watch this video to the end to see the hospital recovery)
Finally, from MEMRI, we have an article and a video about a Palestinian man disdaining airdropped food and throwing it in the bin. Click on either the screenshot or headline to see the video. Here’s the transcript:
In a video posted on March 4, 2024 on Fouad – Palestine Gaza @Fouad_Diab80 on X (formerly Twitter) “Ibrahim from Gaza” complains about an American aid packet and throws it in the trash. The man says that the packet contains “things you cannot even call food and they stink”, adding that he does not want aid airlifted from Jordan, and that he will not accept aid from a country that is “an accomplice to our starvation and to this genocide.” He continued to say that he wants aid from Arab countries, Brazil and South Africa.
Ibrahim:“This is the American aid that we are receiving by air. Let me show you what it is. Things that you cannot even call food and they stink. Here it is. Take a look. I don’t want aid that comes by air from Jordan. Am I supposed to accept aid from a country that is an accomplice to our starvation and to this genocide? I don’t understand. I don’t get it, okay?
If he’s starving (he doesn’t look like it), why does he throw food away, or at least give it to people who are starving? Has he no heart? This doesn’t fit the narrative.
The solution to everything the world is asking for in Gaza seems to be eliminating Hamas and creating a governance for the area that isn’t full of terrorists. Yet the whole world, now including the U.S., seems bent on keeping Israel from eliminating Hamas. And the world also wants terrorists (aka the Palestinian Authority) to govern Gaza when the war is over.
About thirty years ago we were in Kenya, visiting friends south of Mombasa. On our way back north, our taxi driver asked if we minded if he took a diversion in Mombasa. We said no problem, so we stopped at a school that was being used as a home for refugees from Somalia. After a while, our driver returned with a 50 kg bag of flour labelled “Gift from the USA” or similar. The refugees, or rather the dominant thugs in charge, were selling off the food aid. It seems that times do not change.
Biden has announced he is going to build a pier Allow Aid Into Gaza by Sea.
If there is enough food then why is this needed. And if there is a pier there will need to be US troops in Gaza to distribute the food.
Sounds like a version of the D-Day Mulberry harbours that only lasted a few weeks until the sea got the best of them.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/07/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
I am confident that any action the administration takes regarding Gaza has been workshopped by the DNC, then run by focus groups, designed to appeal to some proportion of the electorate.
The idea of a temporary port makes little sense to me. This is one of the subjects that I know a great deal about.
What they are talking about could be built in a few days, once the causeway sections are brought into the area. But again, that means moving large ships close to the war zone, where they would self-unload, a slow process.
Even then, the cargo would need to be carefully checked. The Palestinians have a history of sneaking missiles and explosives into inbound humanitarian cargoes.
On the shore side of the dock, they need to build and secure a staging area to organize the cargo and put it on trucks for distribution.
We did something similar in Mogadishu, where I lost faith in the whole humanitarian aid system. We never really did secure the port, and were under sniper fire the whole time. Hamas, Islamic Jihad &co. are a lot better equipped than the Somali militias.
If you asked me, a military and shipping logistics guy, about the fastest and most efficient way to get aid to Gaza, I would suggest containerized aid sent via the container terminal in Haifa, then trucked down to Gaza. You still have the current distribution issues.
If we needed to get it there the fastest way possible, then we send it in via landing craft from ships anchored offshore. That is how we did it after the 2004 tsunami.
Since in wartime, port facilities are often destroyed, controlled by the enemy, or in the wrong place, the US is really good at this sort of thing.
The big caveat is that anything we do there will need to be defended as long as it is there. It seems like a great way to get US Marines on the ground in Gaza exchanging fire with the locals.
My opinion is that it does not matter how much aid gets into Gaza. The Terrorists will always get first dibs, and if it is good pr for them to have starving children, then some children will be starved and photographed.
It did not matter in Somalia, either. All the aid became a tool for the warlords to use to reward their friends and punish their enemies.
Thank you.
I am more optimistic about Israel defeating Hamas than I am about Palestinian self-government.
I love MREs but they stop me up. I knew they wouldn’t want food aid from the “Great Satan!”
If these videos are genuine – and I have no reason to doubt that they are – then the failure of news reporters to cover them is unforgivable.
It makes Palestinians look bad and anything like that is avoided.
Got to hand it to the Palestinian propaganda machine.
Making a fool of most, most of the time.
If the guy with the food can bin it, he’s not hungry, he’s full of bullshit ideology…
Exactly! I bet they were even culturally sensitive enough to not air drop anything with pork in it.
That is readily observed from the videos, how desperately they all need food, sarcasm.
Positively sleek, they are. Not even grounding Julius Caesar’s concern about lean and hungry looks.
The despicable meets the gullible.
I see food distribution as a great opportunity for Israel to demonstrate their commitment to fighting Hamas only. Yes, it takes resources from the IDF, but when Gazans can choose between being supplied by Israel and being ripped off by Hamas, then I would expect a significant portion of the population turning their backs on Hamas.
As a EU citizen I would welcome the option to divert aid money for Gaza towards the IDF.
+1
I strongly disagree. Israeli troops preoccupied with driving unarmoured trucks through narrow streets in a combat zone to deliver food to people who bitterly hate them will be vulnerable to snipers and IEDs, or outright confrontational attack as the clumsy trucks are trapped in alleyways. That would be a waste of good soldiers.
If the citizens of the EU think soldiers should be schlepping food to the starving, let them send their own soldiers.
Did I say anything about home delivery? Obviously, the IDF would create distribution centers with secure perimeters and work together with Gazan volunteers, creating personal connections between IDF soldiers and Palestinians.
If you would prefer the EU to send a mission, I could support that. Though it would deprive Israel of a chance to win over civilians.
As regards humanitarian aid and Hamas, I am afraid it’s always been like that, everywhere, with humanitarian aid in wars and civil wars. There’s a very good book on the dark sides of humanitarian aid by Dutch journalist Linda Polman (the German Version appeared 2011, the English title seems to be The Crisis Caravan). Refugee camps are almost always ruled by the same militias who are part of the reason for the crisis. I know from witness reports in Turkish that the Western aid that goes to “Syria” (meaning Idlib nowadays) gets taken by the Sunni Islamist thugs our politicians called rebels, who sell what they don’t hoard to generate an income. This is of course why war parties (like Assad) sometimes refuse to allow humanitarian aid to come in, they know it is the lifeline of their military enemies. It’s a horrible dilemma, and the press mostly simply pretends it doesn’t exist.
People like to see the issue of aid in simplistic terms.
A story I have probably told before is about my Grandmother. She was a member of a church that focused on aid and missionary work, and much of that was about Haiti. One of the missionaries had returned, and gave a slide show presentation about the conditions, especially starvation, experienced there.
After watching it, she concluded that their problems could be easily solved by sending them an assortment of seeds, as she noticed it was an incredibly fertile place. Of course, if the primary difference between her community and theirs was a shortage of food, she would be right.
Hunger is sometimes a symptom of larger systemic issues, like homelessness is often a symptom of drug abuse and untreated mental illness.
Between the first and the last time I was in Somalia, the only thing that really changed is that the population doubled. So, twice as many starving people. If you try to quantify the suffering, then we doubled it. More, really, because any interruption in food aid would be more catastrophic, since their food production was not enough to support the earlier population.
You always think, “are we only making it worse?”, by trying to fix the unfixable.
Because aid is (or at least is planned to be) distributed to all members of the aided population, including children, large quantities of aid are expected to disrupt the natural population control based on available resources, and drive an unsustainable population growth dependent on continuous aid supply. As we see with the Palestinians.