Hamas Increasingly Seen as Main Cause of Gaza Humanitarian Crisis

Even while President Biden, at least to a “point,” agrees with critics who accuse him of enabling an Israeli “genocide,” there are increasing signs that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is largely caused by Hamas. “They have a point,” Mr. Biden said as three protesters interrupted his North Carolina campaign stop Tuesday, where he tried to talk about health care. “What about health care in Gaza?” the protesters demanded, accusing the president of abetting genocide there.“Everybody deserves health care,” Mr. Biden retorted. As the screaming women were escorted out, he told his security detail to “be patient with them.” Then, to the crowd’s applause, he added, “We need to get a lot more care into Gaza.”Yet, Israelis and their American supporters are increasingly poking holes in the near-universal finger-pointing at the Israel Defense Force, which is at war with a terrorist organization bent on erasing any Jewish presence in the Mideast. Arabs, Europeans, the United Nations, and a growing number of Americans are accusing Israel of deliberately starving civilians and denying medicine to Gazans. Such accusations are “bulls–,” Senator Graham of South Carolina said Wednesday, following meetings at Tel Aviv with Prime Minister Netanyahu and a war cabinet member, Benny Gantz. “You’re talking about an accusation that is just a blood libel,” Mr. Graham said, arguing that the efforts the IDF is making to ease suffering in enemy territory are unprecedented in the history of warfare.While the UN and other bodies highlight an acute lack of foodstuffs in Gaza, a report from the southern part of the Strip shows Israel may not be the biggest stumbling block to aid distribution: following a recent decision by the Hamas-controlled ministry of economy to give up oversight of one crossing into Gaza, at Rafah, prices of food there dropped significantly. “Within 24 hours, prices fell by at least 50 percent on all types of food items,” a Gazan, Yosef Zakout, wrote on X. Another Gazan posted a short video on TikTok, claiming one can now buy chicken on the black market for $6, down from $25 only last week. Similar price drops, he said, are notable for those buying rice, sugar, flour, and cooking oil. Europeans and the UN are accusing Israel of impeding the delivery of aid into Gaza. “Starvation is used as a weapon of war” and “Israel is provoking famine,” the European Union foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said recently. “Today I saw long lines of blocked relief trucks waiting to be let into Gaza,” Secretary-General Guterres of the UN said Sunday while visiting the Egyptian side of Rafah. Tacitly blaming Israel security checks of the trucks, he added, “It’s time to truly flood Gaza with life-saving aid.” “Again, the UN is deceiving,” Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories retorted on X. “These trucks are waiting for inspection in Egypt and haven’t reached Israeli crossings. The UN must scale up logistics and stop blaming Israel for its own failures.”On Tuesday, “258 Humanitarian aid trucks were inspected and transferred to Gaza, 166 of these trucks carried over 7 million pounds of food,” Cogat reported. “The UN aid agencies distributed only 116 aid trucks within Gaza today, out of which only 36 trucks carried food.”The UN acknowledges that delivering aid to the needy once it enters Gaza is difficult. “There are tremendous challenges for distribution inside,” Mr. Guterres’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, tells the Sun. While the UN mostly blames war-related chaos, Israel is posting endless video documentation of gunmen riding atop aid trucks. Hamas and price-gougers often confiscate the aid as soon as it enters the Strip. According to the UN, the population of northern Gaza is on the verge of famine. Israel obliterated all organized Hamas battalions there and destroyed most of its tunnels early in the war. Yet, many Hamas and Islamic Jihad combatants have returned to the north since then, assuming Israel would soon be forced into a cease-fire. Israeli troops were forced to re-enter Gaza City’s Shifa hospital, the largest healthcare compound in the Strip, where these operatives have been holed up. In a weeklong raid, special IDF units killed, arrested, and interrogated hundreds of top terrorists who have been using the hospital to stash arms, organize, and re-establish Hamas’s control over northern Gaza. Among the Hamas bigwigs killed at Shifa was Brigadier General Faiq al-Mabhouh. The organization claims he was a security official charged with distributing aid in northern Gaza. Whether his demise would make aid less available, or, conversely, help in getting it to the hands of non-combatants could, perhaps, change Mr. Biden’s idea of what “point” his detractors have.

Hamas Increasingly Seen as Main Cause of Gaza Humanitarian Crisis

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