There should be no amnesia: the blame for Gazan misery lies with Hamas
Having triggered the war with Israel, Hamas still hands out morality lessons on how to be a good international citizen. But Israel will further alienate its remaining friends if it continues to allow 2.1 million Gazans to starve.
The world has seen many brutal Islamic terror groups, from al-Qa’ida and Islamic State to Hezbollah, but Hamas is in a league of its own when it comes to inflicting cruelty on its own people.
Having triggered the war with Israel by slaughtering 1200 Israeli men, women and children knowing that this murderous act would lead to the decimation of Gaza and its people, Hamas still hands out morality lessons on how to be a good international citizen.
This week the terror group welcomed the letter signed by Australia and 27 other countries that condemned Israel for the “drip-feeding” of aid to Palestinians in Gaza and the “inhumane killing” of more than 1000 people as they tried to access food aid.
Weeping crocodile tears, Hamas decried the “wide-scale violations committed by the fascist occupation government against innocent civilians (in Gaza)”, which it said threatened a “mass death catastrophe due to famine”.
There was no mention by Hamas of the fact it started this war, deliberately putting Gaza’s “innocent civilians” in the path of “mass death” by hiding under their homes, hospitals and schools as Israel sought to destroy the group.
There was no mention of the fact Hamas could end this conflict and the suffering of its “innocent civilians” tomorrow by releasing the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages and giving up power in the enclave.
There was no mention of the fact the current and admittedly flawed aid distribution system in Gaza was created to try to stop Hamas from stealing aid and reselling it at exorbitant prices to desperate Gazans to fund its war against Israel.
And there was also no mention of the fact it was Hamas, not Israel, that this week refused to accept the most generous ceasefire proposal yet, forcing US and Israeli negotiators to recall their negotiators. Under this blocked deal, 10 living Israeli hostages would have been released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners during a 60-day ceasefire, followed by US led-negotiations to end the war.
Of course, all of these grievous crimes committed by Hamas do not excuse Israel from its own sins in this horrific war. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has made many mistakes and cruel calculations in its conduct of the war in Gaza that have left too many civilians dead and have badly tarnished Israel’s reputation. But whenever Israel is criticised for its own failings by the international community there should be no amnesia about who started this war and who bears prime responsibility for it.
In Australia the Greens, the pro-Palestinian movement and many Australian Muslims have perfected their amnesia about Hamas’s culpability and they continue to do so. And although the Albanese government has always been critical of Hamas, it has still adopted UN resolutions against Israel that make no mention of the central fact that Hamas triggered this war by its massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023.
To be fair, the joint statement criticising Israel this week signed by Foreign Minister Penny Wong and her counterparts in Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Spain and Japan, among others, does also condemn Hamas for its “cruel continued detention” of hostages and calls for a negotiated ceasefire.
The central aim of the statement was to call out the horrific situation now unfolding in Gaza and in particular that the new US and Israeli-backed aid system has not delivered the aid needed to prevent the near-starvation of Gazans.
Anthony Albanese further emphasised these concerns in a statement on Friday, saying that “Israel’s denial of aid and the killing of civilians, including children, seeking access to water and food cannot be defended or ignored.”
The statement signed by Wong and others said, “The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached dangerous new depths. The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity. We condemn the drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, to meet their most basic needs of water and food. It is horrifying that over 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid. The Israeli government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable.”
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley did not directly criticise Wong’s decision to sign the statement but made the point that while the Coalition wanted to “see aid reach those who deserve it”, it was Hamas’s responsibility to allow aid to reach civilians.
US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called the statement “disgusting” because it put pressure on Israel rather than Hamas, while Israel said it was “disconnected from reality” and should not have been released.
Regardless of its merits, this statement will not influence the Netanyahu government’s aid policies or its broader conduct of the war in Gaza. But it does serve to highlight that the rift between the international community and Netanyahu’s government over Israel’s approach to Gaza has never been wider than it is today.
The daily scenes of desperation and despair among Gazans as they scramble for the little aid that arrives into the enclave are compounded by the fact, the UN says, more than 1000 people have now been killed, mostly by Israel soldiers, as the people try to access that aid.
A true picture of what is unfolding on the ground in Gaza, free of spin from Hamas or Israel, was documented by reporters from the reliable Wall Street Journal this week as they watched an aid delivery unfold.
“Thousands of hungry Palestinians amassed outside a barbed-wire fence surrounding the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid centre” at Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, The Wall Street Journal wrote. “The moment the gates cracked open, the crowd surged forward. American security contractors tried to keep control, but scores of men pushed through the barricades and snatched boxes of food awaiting distribution.
“Others sprinted in behind them. Men on speeding motorcycles raced past the pedestrians to grab whatever food they could. Gunshots rang out – it wasn’t clear from where. Within about 15 minutes, all the food was gone.”
The UN Human Rights Office now says 1054 Gazans have been killed while trying to get food since late May. Of these, 766 were killed while heading to sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the rest were killed when gunfire erupted around UN convoys or aid sites.
More than 100 aid agencies have warned of “a sharp and unprecedented rise in acute malnutrition” as “mass starvation” spreads across Gaza.
The situation is increasingly desperate and has exacerbated the rift between Israel and the West (with the exception of the US) about what is the acceptable price to pay for the pursuit of Hamas.
Israel began to severely limit food and other aid into Gaza in May in an attempt to weaken Hamas, which routinely stole incoming aid from UN and other aid groups, reselling it at inflated prices to Gazans to help pay its fighters and fund its war with Israel.
To try to prevent this, the US and Israel created the GHF, which has just three distribution points in Gaza guarded by private security firms with the Israeli military on the periphery to keep order and to keep Hamas away.
The model was designed not to starve Gazans but to solve the problem of Hamas theft; however, it has failed on several levels. First, it does not provide nearly enough aid to feed the population. Second, it forces hungry Gazans to walk long distances to receive the aid along confusing military pre-approved routes, resulting in large crowds and chaos at distribution sites. Third, the frequent riots that occur as food is distributed have led Israeli soldiers to open fire as crowds surge, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries.
To encourage Gazans to use the GHF sites, Israel has placed severe restrictions on the ability of UN and other agencies to bring aid into Gaza through traditional routes. Israel has done this by limiting the routes they can take and the amount of aid they can bring in.
The cumulative effect of these policies has been to create the most severe food shortages in the besieged enclave since the war began in October 2023.
The desperation of Gazans is now so acute that no aid deliveries under any system are safe from being besieged by hungry mobs.
As retired Israeli general Israel Ziv said this week: “The area is not stable, it’s under chaos. The threat of starvation under those conditions is so severe that there’s no way you can create a stable system in unstable surroundings.”
While the West increasingly is outraged by the cruelty of this policy towards ordinary Gazans, Netanyahu has defiantly pursued it, believing it has greatly weakened Hamas by robbing it of the money that funds its existence.
Israel claims some success here, saying Hamas can no longer afford to pay its fighters and its police or repair its network of tunnels because of the cash crunch caused by the loss of aid-related income.
But the bottom line is that the terror group continues to survive and refuses to formally surrender despite the fact it has been militarily decimated by Israel.
Its leadership is largely dead and its chain of command is no longer reliable. The organisation has been reduced to rag-tag groups of small guerrilla groups that often fight separately from what remains of its central command.
Yet Netanyahu – despite his stunning regional victories in taming Hezbollah in Lebanon and cowing Iran with his attacks on its nuclear facilities – has failed to fully defeat Hamas or remove it from power despite destroying the group as a coherent military force. Gaza largely lies in ruins with more than 59,000 dead, as well as almost 900 Israeli soldiers, yet Israel’s military strategy right now is unclear and appears to wax and wane from week to week. Rifts are becoming increasingly apparent between the military and Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition. Donald Trump, Israel’s best friend, appears increasingly disenchanted with the war and with Netanyahu. Meanwhile polls show three-quarters of Israelis want an agreement that would release all the hostages in exchange for an end to the war. More than half disagree with Netanyahu’s handling of the war.
Israeli troops now occupy large areas of the Gaza Strip and have split the territory with corridors to try to increase pressure on Hamas, forcing much of Gaza’s population into ever-smaller slices of territory. This week, troops began ground operations for the first time near the central Gazan city of Deir al-Balah as part of their gradual occupation of more territory across the enclave.
The statement signed by Australia and others criticised the latest plan hatched by Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners for a new “humanitarian city” in southern Gaza. This zone would accommodate 600,000 Palestinians initially and then eventually Gaza’s whole population, which eventually would be encouraged to migrate to other countries.
The Israeli military reportedly has dismissed the plan as “unworkable” while the statement signed by Australia and others said the idea was “completely unacceptable” because “permanent forced displacement is a violation of international humanitarian law”.
This week brought more bad news for Gazans when Hamas effectively scuttled the latest negotiations for a ceasefire by adding more demands to the ceasefire proposal that Trump had said, only days early, was on the cusp of being agreed to.
Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff accused Hamas of being “selfish” and of “not acting in good faith”, saying Washington would now “consider alternative options to bring the hostages home”, without saying what these might be.
Under the proposal, 10 of the approximately 20 living Israeli hostages plus 18 slain hostages would have been released in exchange for a large number of Palestinian prisoners. The US then would have led negotiations for a permanent end to the war.
Hamas agreed in principle with this deal but then raised new demands. These included seeking to limit the extent of Israel’s redeployment along the border, renegotiating the formula for how many prisoners Israel would release in exchange for hostages, and placing new demands on how aid would be distributed during the ceasefire.
An angry Netanyahu warns that if Hamas sees Israel’s willingness to negotiate as a “weakness” then “it is gravely mistaken”.
Hamas says it is willing to release all of the hostages at once in exchange for a permanent end to the war but such a deal is unacceptable to the Israelis because it would leave Hamas in power in Gaza. Israel insists it will keep fighting until Hamas is removed from power and disarmed.
The most positive aspect of a ceasefire deal – apart from the release of 10 living hostages – would be that the US, rather than Israel, would then lead negotiations for an end to the conflict. Trump has made it clear that he wants the war to end and, while he still demands the removal of Hamas, he is sick of the suffering of Gazans. Trump is the only world leader who has the potential to pressure Netanyahu and Hamas to end the war, even if that remains a long shot in the short term. Yet even if a ceasefire is reached, many questions remain.
Will it hold and will it lead to a permanent peace? Which entity will eventually replace the rule of Hamas in Gaza? Will Israel maintain a long-term military presence there? Who will pay for the rebuilding of Gaza? And is a two-state solution now merely a pipedream?
Hamas has the blood of a generation of Palestinians on its hands because of its crazed and disastrous decision to slaughter Israelis in their homes.
But Israel will further alienate its remaining friends if it continues to allow 2.1 million Gazans to starve in the name of starving Hamas.
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