Gaza Aid: Israel Is Damned If It Does, and Damned If It Doesn’t

Israel is damned if it does, and damned if it doesn’t, as British journalist Brendan O’Neill scathingly notes in an article here: “Israel’s latest crime? Feeding the people of Gaza,” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, May 27, 2025:

What’s really bugging the anti-Israeli elites is that this uppity little state has the temerity to circumvent the UN. Israel outlawed UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian-assisting wing, in Gaza and the West Bank following revelations that some UNRWA employees were involved in Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023. Its new humanitarian foundation is designed precisely to get around UN mechanisms and put grub and drugs directly into the hands of Gazans who need them. To some of us, this makes sense – UNRWA is a profoundly morally compromised institution. But to the army of influencers who hate Israel, it is tantamount to blasphemy.

Behold the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen on the Today programme this morning. In tones of such world-weary vanity, he insisted Israel should be working with the UN, not the US. After all, there were only ‘a dozen or so cases’ of UNRWA being ‘infiltrated by Hamas’, he said, with the breeziness of someone ordering a caramel latte. Actually there have been more cases than that. But even if it were only a ‘dozen or so’ instances of a UN body being infiltrated by an army of anti-Semites devoted to the destruction of the Jewish nation, shouldn’t that be enough to put Israel off? In Bowen’s eyes, how many cases of UN complicity with 21st-century fascism are acceptable? Twelve? Twenty? A hundred? He should say….

At least a dozen UNRWA members took part in the atrocities that Hamas carried out on October 7, 2023. In addition, the IDF found in Gaza lists of Hamas members which revealed that “hundreds” of UNRWA employees were also members of Hamas. Furthermore, UNRWA quietly allowed its school buildings to be used by Hamas to store men, weapons, and rocket launchers.. It even allowed Hamas to build its main command-and-control center underneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters, without a syllable of protest that in so doing, Hamas was endangering the lives of UNRWA staff.

Hamas has instructed the people of Gaza not to cooperate with Israel’s delivery of aid. The UN has noisily rejected it too. And the commentariat is branding it ‘problematic’. They’re all on the same page. They’re all telling the suffering folk of the Gaza Strip not to accept the Jewish State’s help. This is a kind of psychosis. If you really believed that Gaza faces one of the worst famines of modern times, you would tell its people to take anything they can get. The hysterical reaction to the Gaza Humanitarian Fund suggests these people either don’t believe that, and they’ve been lying, or they do believe it but they hate Israel so much that they would rather see Gazans starve than eat Israel’s evil food. And honestly, I don’t know which is worse.

The Gaza Humanitarian Fund now has in place the four centers for the distribution of humanitarian aid. The first day of its operation was marred by chaos, as Gazans rioted to grab whatever food they could, pushing one another aside. But as more and more of the aid is delivered in coming days, and those Gazans realize that their initial hysteria about being left without food is unwarranted, they should calm down, be readier not to grab, but instead wait in lines to be handed their proper portion of the aid, and will look gratefully on the soldiers who are both maintaining order, and keeping Hamas operatives from seizing, as they have done so often in the past, far more than their fair share.

Give the Israeli-American operation for distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza a few weeks to iron out the kinks, and to bring order from the initial chaos at the distribution centers, and then let’s see if anyone can, with a straight face, still deny its efficacy and denounce its results.