The blockade was a disaster

Hamas militarizes the aid. Blocking it for so long was still wrong.

This post is mostly about the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza and how Palestinian civilians already suffering from Hamas’ cruelty were driven into even deeper suffering by a misbegotten Israeli policy.

But first I want to share two quick reflections on other aspects of the war from recent days:

1. The hostages are heroes.

Today marks the 614th day in captivity for the hostages snatched on Oct. 7. They are often framed as victims, but a remarkable interview with the survivor Eli Sharabi aired on Israeli television on Friday night challenges that view. Sharabi explains how he and his fellow hostages survived the deprivation and psychological torture of their captivity: By counting good things. At first, he says, they could only come up with one a week or every 10 days. But eventually, they got up to 10 or 12 a day. And that sustained them. He explained how they celebrated a weekly Shabbat kiddush, with a glass of water.

When Sharabi came home, he learned that his wife and two daughters had all been murdered on Oct. 7, and his brother killed in captivity. Instead of returning to the family he was expecting, he returned to unspeakable grief. And yet, Sharabi goes on. He is happy through his grief, he insisted to the interviewer. He also told her he does not understand why his story has resonated so much with people. She told him it’s because of his ability to go to the darkest places known to man and to find strength there.

Every day the hostages survive, that is what they are doing.

2. The ugliest urban warfare

Friday also brought news that another four Israeli soldiers had been killed in Gaza, this time when a booby trap exploded in a building they were searching. One sees images of the destruction from Gaza and finds it hard to believe that any more is even possible. One learns of IDF plans to raze structures across the strip and wonders how this could possibly be necessary. And then one learns that as the military moves through Khan Younis, every other building is booby-trapped. One remembers that 75 percent of the hundreds of miles of tunnels Hamas constructed beneath Gaza are intact, with hidden access points everywhere — in mosques, hospitals, schools, bedrooms. The destruction we see reflects the nature of the fight — a type of battle Westerners have not been exposed to since World War II. The West Point analyst John Spencer has compared it to the battle of Manila in WWII. I don’t agree with everything Spencer writes, but read about that struggle, and the comparison seems apt.

3. The disaster of the blockade

For many months, the international humanitarian community had it wrong. Consider two examples.

• Time and again, outside experts warned that Gaza was descending into famine. Time and again, no famine materialized.¹ For example, the Times of Israel reports:

  The FRC’s March [2024] report asserted that famine was “was projected and imminent,” in particular in northern Gaza, and that 677,000 people in the Gaza Strip were already in the Phase 5 Catastrophe level of its food insecurity scale.

  If this were correct, it would have meant that at least 135 people were dying of starvation every day in March 2024. … In June 2024, the FRC itself published an updated report stating that “the available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring,” despite its dire predictions from March. The March report also did not provide any statistics on the mortality rate from the malnutrition and starvation it asserted was happening and predicted would strengthen from March to July.

• After months in which the Biden administration argued that it was impossible to evacuate the city of Rafah and operate there militarily without unleashing a full humanitarian breakdown, Israel ended up pulling it off quite successfully.

Throughout the war, in short, Israel seems to have had a much better handle on the actual nutritional, medical, and humanitarian situation in Gaza than the international experts did, and seemed to have more capacity for managing this situation than outsiders assumed.

Israel did institute repeated, contained freezes on aid flows to Gaza before this January. I was always somewhere between skeptical and opposed to these, but I understood the context: Much of the aid in question was being diverted to the control of Hamas, providing it with food for fighters and functionaries and with much-needed cash — as well as shoring up its political position. The first two points make for a serious military problem that the international community has refused to acknowledge. To my reading, they also make withholding aid clearly legal under the Geneva Conventions and other international law obligations Israel is under. (To go into the legal weeds, I recommend reading this post concluding Israel has “considerable discretion” to refuse deliveries, and these reading the law more narrowly to say that doing so to the point of starvation or under ceasefire conditions would cross a legal line.) But suffice to say that “legal under international law” and “ethical” are not the same.

I was always uncomfortable when Israel imposed blockades and sympathetic to arguments that inspections were too intrusive. I have had very limited tolerance for using blockade as negotiating tactic, even when the assumption is that there is enough food within the Strip. But within a certain margin, it’s just impossible to judge whether all the considerations were being balanced appropriately. All of this was worlds removed from the wild accusations that Israel was starving Gazan civilians — accusations that generally ignored the primary culpability of a Hamas that started the war and manipulated the aid to its own ends.

All this kept me quiet in recent months as Israel imposed its longest aid blockade yet. I trusted that the military was monitoring the situation, and that the crazies in the government were being allowed to play to their base as long as supplies remained available inside Gaza. I thought the balance between reasonable and unreasonable people was still being maintained on this front.

I was wrong.

IDF officials now acknowledge that Gaza has been brought to the brink of starvation, and indeed that is what prompted a resumption of aid delivery through the normal channels.² Meanwhile, the new mechanism Israel has set up to feed Gazans appears to be — at best — rushed, chaotic, and inadequate. Repeated reports of Gazans being shot as they seek to access the distribution centers are deeply distressing, and terse IDF statements about “warning shots” leave me unsatisfied though not yet ready to conclude the worst.

I may walk through some thoughts about the mechanism and its theoretical pros and cons in another post. But what is certainly true is that the mechanism should not have been launched as Gazans were already on the brink. Things might have been different if Israel has worked on deploying this mechanism more slowly, and outside the context of a chronic food shortage that it created by layering blockade onto the reality that Hamas will feed itself first and its civilians last.

Leadership matters. In announcing the resumption of aid deliveries, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not mention the imperative to feed starving children in Gaza. He cast the move as essential so that global powers would permit Israel to continue fighting the war. Again, from the TOI:

“Senators I know as supporters of Israel… come to me and say, ‘We’ll give you all the help you need to win the war… but we can’t be receiving pictures of famine [in Gaza],” Netanyahu says … Until the distribution centers are established, the premier states that Israel must provide minimal aid to the Strip in order to prevent mass starvation among the civilian population.

He made it sound as though he would have been willing to receive pictures of famine. Others go even further. Bezalel Smotrich, the grotesque Finance Minister, vows to leave the population so “totally despairing” that they will seek to leave Gaza (as if huge numbers of Gazans wouldn’t have already fled if they could).

Israel did not choose this war. We can debate whether it should continue — my leaning is definitely toward no — but so long as it goes on, fighting it ethically may cost more Israeli lives. I don’t take that lightly as a person who has never put his own life on the line, let alone sent a son or daughter into battle. I think of people I know who have sent loved ones there, and I shrink at asking them to bear this burden.

But the cost of any war — chosen or not — is both suffering and responsibility. Israel must defend her people. But she must also defend her ideals, including the protection of the innocent.

1. Gazans were obviously enduring horrors, and it’s hard to believe that displacement and shortages did not kill people. But the context for that was an active war zone in which the population is prevented from fleeing to a third country.

2. Don’t just believe the New York Times - which has indeed published lies about Israel quite recently. Similar statements have appeared in the Times of Israel and on Israeli television news, where a correspondent quoted military officials as telling their civilian superiors, “There will be no starvation in Gaza with us.”