Harris Accuses Israel of Blocking Aid to Gaza

From the start of the Gaza war on October 8, 2023, to October 12, 2024, Israel has allowed into the Gaza Strip 1,074,745 tons of aid in 54,454 trucks. There has been no dearth of aid. Repeatedly we have been assured that there is “famine” in Gaza or “people are starving in Gaza,” but none of these fearful conditions have actually come to pass. There has not been starvation or famine in Gaza. What there has been is a maldistribution of aid once it enters Gaza from outside. Armed members of Hamas seize the trucks and drive them to their own warehouses, where they take as much of the aid as they want for their own members and those members’ extended families. They also take some of the aid for resell to ordinary Gazans.

Not everyone is willing to look at that record. Or to examine the sources that insist that Israel has drastically cut back on the number of aid trucks entering Gaza since October 1.

Among them is Kamala Harris, about whose alarm over humanitarian aid supposedly being limited by Israel is discussed here: “Kamala Harris Repeats Claim Israel Blocking Aid From Entering Northern Gaza Contradicted by UN, Israeli Data,” by Corey Walker, Algemeiner, October 14, 2024:

US Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday repeated a claim that the Israeli government has hindered food from entering northern Gaza since the beginning of October, contradicting data compiled by both the Jewish state and humanitarian aid organizations affiliated with the United Nations.

“The UN reports that no food has entered northern Gaza in nearly 2 weeks. Israel must urgently do more to facilitate the flow of aid to those in need. Civilians must be protected and must have access to food, water, and medicine. International humanitarian law must be respected,” Harris posted on X/Twitter.

The Democratic presidential nominee was referring to a recent report produced by the UN World Food Program (WFP) claiming that, due to Israeli military actions, nearly all food distribution points in northern Gaza have been shut down since Oct. 1. The report said that communities in northern Gaza were left with dwindling supplies and on the brink of total starvation….

According to Axios, however, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant told US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a phone call on Sunday that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was not carrying out the plan to seal off aid to northern Gaza….

Israel has decided, for now, not to seal off aid to northern Gaza. So to charge it with doing what it most emphatically not doing is alarming. And even were Israel to adopt this plan, aid would continue to be provided everywhere else in Gaza and in the north, and would be made available to every civilian who chose to move to specially-designated humanitarian zones.

Between October 8 2023 and October 12 2024,, Israel had transferred 1,074,745 tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Keep that figure in mind as you are bombarded with charges that Israel has been preventing aid from entering Gaza.

The UN has long been accused by critics of harboring a bias against Israel. In June, the global organization placed Israel on its so-called “list of shame” alongside other “countries that kill children” in armed conflict. The United Nations Human Rights Office also published a report in June claiming that Israel cut off humanitarian assistance to Gaza without noting that Hamas terrorists often attempt to steal and hoard aid or that Israel has allowed large numbers of supply trucks to enter the war-torn enclave. The United Nations’ special rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, has repeatedly circulated an unsubstantiated claim from a medical journal that 186,000 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

That figure of 186,000 people killed in Gaza is four and a half times as large as the exaggerated figure of 42,000 dead Gazans put out by Hamas. It comes from a letter published in The Lancet; the letter was not peer-reviewed; no evidence was presented to substantiate that claim; it was plucked from the air, it seems, by the letter’s authors Salim Yusuf and Rasha Khatib. It is not surprising that the antisemitic Francesca Albanese would happily accept and disseminate that bizarre figure of “186,000 Gazans” supposedly killed by the IDF.

Last year, the UN General Assembly condemned Israel twice as often as it did all other countries combined. Meanwhile, of all the country-specific resolutions passed by the UN Human Rights Council, nearly half have condemned Israel, a seemingly disproportionate focus on the lone democracy in the Middle East.

Harris’s office did not respond to a request for comment by The Algemeiner.

What might Harris have said instead? She could have said that Israel had since October 2023 allowed into Gaza about 1.1 million tons of humanitarian aid in 55,000 truckloads. She could have said that during that time the chief problem for Gazans was not the amount of aid being provided, but the fact that Hamas stole so much of it once the aid trucks were inside Gaza, both for its own members and their extended families, and for resale. She could have said that since October 1 of this year, aid continued going into Gaza, but in significantly reduced amounts, and that she earnestly hoped that Israel would again increase aid to its levels of just a month ago.

She could have added that she realizes that such aid takes time to be delivered because of the need for the IDF to thoroughly inspect each shipment both for weapons, and for “dual-use” items that might in Hamas’ hands have a military application. And finally, she might have said that she has every confidence that Israel, which clearly has been trying throughout the war in Gaza to minimize civilian casualties through its elaborate system of warning civilians to move away from areas, or buildings, that are about to be targeted, will recognize the need to increase the level of humanitarian aid back to what it was just a few months ago. And Israel, of course, will do exactly that.