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File: Palestinians collect water from a UNICEF tanker in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on July 9, 2024. (Eyad BABA / AFP)
Times of Israel
5 August 2024
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich implied on Monday that he believes blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is “justified and moral” even if it causes two million civilians to die of hunger, but the international community won’t allow that to happen.
“We bring in aid because there is no choice,” Smotrich said at a conference in Yad Binyamin hosted by the right-wing Israel Hayom outlet. “We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.
“Humanitarianism in exchange for humanitarianism is morally justified — but what can we do? We live today in a certain reality, we need international legitimacy for this war.”
Smotrich asserted that barring humanitarian aid from Gaza was more likely to get all the hostages being held by Hamas released, as opposed to the current hostage-for-ceasefire deal that is being negotiated and only ensures the release of some.
“Everyone wants to bring the hostages back, but the deal only gets a minority of hostages and condemns the majority and therefore it’s not right and not moral and it endangers the nation,” he said, adding that he was against releasing terrorists from Israeli prisons in exchange for hostages.
He claimed that Hamas plundering the aid that is sent in is the “main factor” extending the war.
The far-right minister said that while he supports Israel resettling Gaza, he hasn’t demanded that this be defined as one of the war’s goals. He argued, though, that if Israel hadn’t pulled out of Gaza in 2005, the October 7 massacre would never have happened.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it is unrealistic to resettle Gaza, angering far-right allies.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, announced in May that he was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for, among other charges, “causing starvation as a method of war including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies.”
After the war began with Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, in which terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages [FW comment: the "terrorists" were not solely responsible for this toll, as many casualties resulted from Israel's own "Hannibal Directive"] the government announced a blockade on the Gaza Strip in which no humanitarian aid would be allowed. However, by the end of October, Israel had agreed to resume entry of aid at US President Joe Biden’s urging.
Over the past 10 months of war, Israel has repeatedly been accused of not allowing enough aid into the Strip. A number of solutions were attempted, including airdropping aid packages into Gaza or delivering aid by sea via a temporary US-built pier, but ultimately, truckloads of supplies entering via ground crossings were found to be the best method.
Israel, meanwhile, has been highlighting its efforts to expand humanitarian aid to Gaza and blaming the humanitarian crisis on aid agencies failing to properly distribute supplies and on looting of aid trucks by terror groups and gangs.
It is believed that 111 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of 39 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Hamas released 105 civilians during a weeklong truce in late
November, and four hostages were released before that. Seven hostages
have been rescued by troops alive, and the bodies of 24 hostages have
also been recovered, including three mistakenly killed by the military
as they tried to escape their captors.
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