Food aid becomes main sticking point in Gaza ceasefire talks

Hamas is insisting that the UN and Palestinian Red Crescent control all the aid running into the enclave, mediators said

Men walk carrying sacks of flour that were taken from a raided truck carry sacks of flour after raiding a truck that was carrying foodstuffs in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Tuesday (local time). Picture: AFP

Control over food has moved to the centre of the fight between Israel and Hamas, with ceasefire negotiations now stuck over who distributes humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip once a deal goes into effect, Arab mediators said.

Hamas is insisting that the United Nations and the Palestinian Red Crescent control all the aid running into Gaza, the mediators said. The US proposal on the table has those groups participating in distribution, but not in control. The US-designated terrorist group is also demanding that an Israeli-American aid effort, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, be cut out entirely from aid distribution, the mediators said.

White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff plans to travel to the Middle East this week to revive efforts to reach a Gaza ceasefire deal and set up an aid corridor into Gaza, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said on Tuesday (local time). She didn’t say where he would be travelling.

Israel has refused to allow the UN to have control over aid because of its distribution through a large network run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is in charge of Palestinian refugees, the Arab mediators said. Israel alleges that UNRWA has close ties to Hamas and has said some members took part in the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The agency fired nine of its staff over the allegations, and some countries have since restored funding it had previously withheld from the agency.

Palestinians wait for food aid at a distribution centre in Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Tuesday (local time). Picture: AFP

The Israeli prime minister’s office declined to comment. Hamas didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Israeli-backed food distribution program has been marred by chaos and violence after soldiers opened fire on Gazans attempting to reach fortified aid centres. Hundreds of people have died trying to reach the aid points, according to Palestinian officials, though Israel disputes the toll.

Aid has become a key tool for both sides in the war. Israel says Hamas uses aid to fund its war effort. Israel backed GHF to commandeer the distribution of aid away from the UN and other humanitarian groups, saying those groups enable or look the other way when Hamas steals, stockpiles and sells aid, or offers it to young men as payment for fighting Israel.

For Hamas, resuming the previous system of aid distribution, which was largely controlled by the UN, is essential to quelling anger over the widespread destruction and suffering that the war has created. Some Palestinians have taken to the streets calling for an end to the war.

“The No.1 source of pressure on Hamas is from civilians due to the killing, the starvation, the siege,” said Nahed al-Fakhouri, a Hamas official in charge of the group’s prisoners’ affairs department.

Israel’s military offensive in Gaza has reduced much of the strip to rubble and killed more than 57,000 people, most of them civilians, according to local health authorities who don’t say how many were combatants.

Israel is also using the threat of a new offensive in the Deir al-Balah neighbourhood of Gaza as a means to pressure Hamas at the negotiating table, say Israeli political analysts. Israel on Sunday ordered a massive evacuation of the neighbourhood in central Gaza, which remains full of civilians and where Israel believes the group holds hostages. It hasn’t entered the area yet because of the potential harm to soldiers, civilians and hostages, Israeli officials say.

“In order to show Hamas that Israel is serious, it is deploying troops to areas where the IDF has not yet operated” such as Deir al-Balah, said Jonathan Conricus, a former Israeli military spokesman and a fellow at the Washington, DC-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. “The message is: Take a deal, the best possible deal available for Hamas, or face enhanced IDF operations in Gaza, which this time may actually go all the way.”

Israeli and Hamas officials are currently in Doha, Qatar, negotiating a deal mediated by Egypt, Qatar and the US that would see the fighting end for 60 days. As part of the deal, Hamas would release 10 Israeli hostages and 18 dead bodies in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons.

Some disagreements, including when to begin negotiations to end the war, have largely been solved in recent weeks, the Arab mediators said. Other issues that remain unresolved include how wide of a buffer zone Israel would maintain in the so-called Philadelphi corridor, a strip of land between Gaza’s border and Egypt, the mediators said.

Hamas is threatening to abandon negotiations in Doha by the end of the week if its conditions aren’t met, the people said.

Only a trickle of aid has come into Gaza since the breakdown of a previous ceasefire deal in March, with Israel and the UN accusing each other of hampering aid distribution. UN and human-rights groups say that the situation has turned dire in recent weeks for Palestinians, who are increasingly facing severe malnourishment.

Hamas has been facing a cash crunch in Gaza as a result of an effort by Israel to weaken the group. The group has used the flow of humanitarian and commercial goods to build new income streams, The Wall Street Journal has reported, citing Arab, Israeli and Western officials. This has included charging taxes on merchants, collecting customs on trucks at checkpoints, and commandeering goods for resale. Hamas also has used overseas cash to buy humanitarian goods that are then sold in Gaza and turned back into cash, the officials said.

Israeli officials say Hamas made hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and goods in the first year of the war by reselling or taxing aid or contraband and demanding protection payment, the Journal has reported.

In addition to limiting the amount of food entering the Strip, Israel also banned some supplies such as fuel for generators. All 25 bakeries in Gaza supported by the World Food Program closed in April due to a lack of supplies. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the system the UN uses to measure hunger crises around the world, reported in June that all two million people in Gaza face a high level of food insecurity.

“It’s truly catastrophic. Famine is hitting us hard. I personally have lost 20 pounds in just two months,” said Fatima Majdi Hamouda, a woman from Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip who fled to the south. “We have no hope left. It feels as if the war started all over again and will never ever end.”

Dow Jones