Experts talk to JNS about Israel's suspension of humanitarian aid in Gaza, how it is viewed by international law and the moral premise that underpins it.
Trucks loaded with International humanitarian aid enter Gaza through the Israeli Kerem Shalom Crossing, in the southern Gaza Strip, on July 1, 2024. Photo by Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90.
On March 2, Israel suspended all humanitarian aid delivered into Gaza after Hamas rejected a ceasefire extension proposed by Washington. The Israeli government announced that until further notice, no goods or supplies would enter the Strip without the continued release of the hostages.
The move, which received the full backing of the United States, was met with disapproval from the international community.
“We express our deep concern at the Government of Israel’s announcement on March 2 to halt all entry of goods and supplies into Gaza,” the foreign ministers of the E3—France, Germany and the United Kingdom—responded in a joint statement.
“We call on the Government of Israel to abide by its international obligations to ensure full, rapid, safe and unhindered provision of humanitarian assistance to the population in Gaza,” it added.
Qatar, a mediator in negotiations between Israel and Hamas, condemned the move, calling it a violation of the ceasefire agreement and of international humanitarian law. Egypt, another key mediator in the conflict, issued a condemnation that read, “Using aid as a weapon of collective punishment and starvation in Gaza can’t be accepted or permitted.”
Still, Israel doubled down on its policy and announced on March 9 that it would also stop supplying electricity to the Gaza Strip—with outraged comments by international actors following promptly.
Arsen Ostrovsky, a human rights lawyer who serves as CEO of The International Legal Forum and a Senior Fellow at the Misgav Institute for National Security, spoke with JNS on March 11 about Israel’s recent decisions and their correspondence to international law.
“International law is crystal clear. Israel is not obliged to provide aid that will be used by an enemy in a time of war,” Ostrovsky stressed.
“Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt certainly were not expected or required to provide aid to Nazi Germany during World War II. Yet what we are seeing is a systematic double standard being applied against Israel,” he continued.
When asked about comments made by British media personality Piers Morgan decrying Israel’s decision to cut the power to Gaza, the human rights lawyer branded them as “sadly misinformed.”
Before Oct. 7, 2023, Ostrovsky relayed, “Israel supplied roughly half the electricity to Gaza through a number of power plants. The other half was produced domestically in Gaza. Notwithstanding the Palestinian Authority was meant to pay Israel under this arrangement, it continuously refused to do [so], creating an estimated 2 billion shekel ($550 million) debt in the budget of the Israel Electric Company.”
He went on to say that Israel was under no obligation to provide this service to Gaza “but nonetheless did so as a gesture of good faith. Oct. 7, 2023, naturally changed that. If Piers Morgan was so concerned about the electricity supply in Gaza, perhaps he ought to be asking how it is that Hamas still has ample electricity to continue operating the tunnels where they are holding hostages captive and [producing] the obscene hostage release spectacles for the last two months.”
Ostrovsky was adamant that every step that Israel is taking in the current war, including the suspension of aid, is done in “full accordance” with international law.
He said that Israel was even “going above and beyond its requirements in conforming to international law standards such as that no other country in the history of modern warfare has.”
Partial vs. full blockade
Israel’s current halt of humanitarian provisions was its second attempt to push forward this policy since the start of the war on Oct. 7, 2023.
The first suspension—in the wake of Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel’s western Negev, roughly murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 more into the Gaza Strip—lasted for 48 consecutive days and was Israel’s longest suspension of humanitarian relief into the Palestinian enclave since Hamas took control over Gaza in 2007 in a violent coup.
Suspensions from previous rounds of hostilities have all followed the same pattern. Israel cuts the flow of goods in response to Hamas’s attacks, which meets a flurry of international condemnations and mounting political pressure and ends with the Jewish state caving and alleviating the suspension.
Although blockades can be an effective military tool to subdue one’s adversaries, especially if one of the belligerents has favorable economic and military conditions, it is unlikely that Israel can maintain a long-term barring of humanitarian aid with modern-day demands of international law and conventional views of morality.
Ostrovsky remarked that while a blockade with narrower objectives, such as pressuring Hamas to resume negotiations and release more hostages, meets international law criteria, an indefinite blockade could be legally problematic and, anyhow, is not intended by Israel.
Indeed, the allegation that Israel is starving Gazans, he continued, “has been one of the biggest lies and blood libels of this war. The only ones starving in Gaza are the Israeli hostages.”
Since phase one of the ceasefire came into force on Jan. 19, Israel facilitated the entry of 25,200 aid trucks carrying food, water and medicine to Gaza, alongside more than half a million tents and 2,100 fuel tankers—a greater level than had been delivered to Gaza before the war, Ostrovsky noted.
According to Israeli estimates, Hamas has now stockpiled supplies sufficient for four to six months.
Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, of which Israel is a signatory, stipulates the obligation of a belligerent to allow free and unhindered passage of humanitarian supplies to civilians in war zones.
However, “the Article is also very clear that Israel should allow the free passage of humanitarian aid provided—and that is a very big caveat—that there is no serious reason to believe that these supplies are being diverted from a destination or being used for military purposes,” Ostrovsky stressed.
Since “Hamas has been systematically diverting aid and using it for military purposes against Israel, as well as to maintain its ongoing captivity of the hostages,” he continued, Article 23 does not apply to Israel’s war in Gaza.
Yet, international law makes a distinction between having no obligation to facilitate aid versus the enforcement of a blockade, Ostrovsky noted.
“Blockades are an entirely lawful military tactic in a time of war, provided that they are not being used to intentionally starve a local civilian population,” he said.
Blockades in history
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a blockade is the isolation by a warring nation of an enemy area by troops or warships to prevent the passage of persons or supplies.
Historically, “the purpose of a blockade is to subdue the enemy without a fight; to cause terrible scarcity,” military historian Uri Milstein told JNS over the phone on March 11.
“An extended blockade causes shortages to those besieged, ultimately forcing them to surrender. Most human beings want to survive. If you are threatened by an adversary, and you come to the conclusion that it can’t be overcome, it’s better to surrender [and live] than to die,” the historian said.
Since humans started dwelling in permanent residencies, blockades have been used as a military tactic to avoid costly battles against fortified locations. With walls erected around cities to fend off foreign invaders, the attackers would impose a siege on the city, cut it from external supplies and wait for its defenders to surrender or launch an assault when they were significantly weakened.
One of history’s most notable blockades was the Siege of Alesia in 52 B.C. Julius Caesar led a Roman army against Gallic forces that retreated to the heavily fortified city of Alesia, situated in modern-day France. The Romans built two lines of fortifications around the city: the first to encumber the beleaguered Gauls, the second to keep a Gallic relief force out. After prolonged starvation and failed relief efforts—and despite having greater numbers than the Romans—the Gauls surrendered to Caesar, bringing an end to Gaul’s independence.
The Romans also laid a siege on Jerusalem to quell a significant Jewish revolt. Causing shortages and starvation to the besieged Jews in 70 B.C., the Roman army eventually breached the city walls, destroyed the Second Temple and expelled the surviving Jews into exile, dramatically changing the course of the Jewish people.
Blockades were part of military strategies in the modern world as well.
During the final stages of World War II, the United States Army Air Forces executed a naval mining operation against Japan, Operation Starvation. More than 670 Japanese ships were sunk or damaged by naval mines dropped from the air, crippling Japan’s effective transportation of food and fuel.
Throughout the war, U.S. submarines intentionally targeted Japanese merchant vessels, sinking about 1,200 ships and 5 million tons of supplies. Japan’s industrial output plummeted, and its population starved, contributing to the Empire’s eventual surrender.
In today’s context, Milstein speculated that had Israel imposed a total blockade on Hamas, the Gazans “would have no water, no food, no electricity, nothing. Then, naturally, they would surrender.”
However, the historian was skeptical that this could be executed today after the entry of tens of thousands of tons of supplies since the beginning of the truce. “Hamas must have confiscated large portions of the aid to withstand a [prolonged] blockade, so [now] Hamas will not surrender,” he said.
In any case, in the present day, “Israel can’t impose a blockade [on Gaza],” Milstein emphasized.
“The minute it shuts the electricity, the world intervenes, and Israel is not autarkic [economically self-sufficient]; it depends on international relations, both economically and politically and militarily,” he stressed.
The moral whitewash of foreign aid
Elan Journo is a long-time writer and public speaker on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the author of several books on foreign policy, including “What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” and a Senior Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI).
Speaking with JNS via Zoom on March 12, Journo said that international expectations of Israel to permit aid into Gaza are not unprecedented.
America’s own story with regard to foreign aid and its enemies, for example, goes back to the 1920s and the Soviet Union, he noted.
“At the time, [the Russians] were struggling; their economy was collapsing; and it was the United States, through various private and governmental organizations, that stepped in and convinced the Soviets to accept aid,” he stressed.
“American taxpayers, the people reviled under communism as the bourgeoisie and exploiters, were the ones who propped up the Soviets [and saved them from collapse],” Journo said.
America’s provision of wheat to communist Russia lasted for decades, he continued, even during the Cold War when “we came very close to armed confrontations [and] nuclear war. … And all through this time, the U.S. was helping them both materially … and by granting to the recipients a moral standing that they don’t deserve,” he added.
Scholars who study foreign aid have learned that it destroys the economies of the places that receive it, he said. For instance, if a country receives crops as a form of aid, the domestic producers of these crops get “gutted,” Journo noted.
“In aggregate,” he continued, “[foreign aid] doesn’t actually help people. It ends up helping the people you want to help least, the people who are against you.”
Some kind of “moral whitewashing” becomes necessary on the part of the givers to justify their giving, he said.
“Psychologically, it’s difficult to say, ‘This person wants to kill me, and I’m going to help him.’ So you get the kind of whitewashing that we’re helping the mothers, the orphans and the old people. We’re not helping the ideologues. We’re not helping the people wanting to kill us,” he relayed.
Hamas’s undeserved gain
On Oct. 18, 2023, then-U.S. President Joe Biden visited Israel and urged the Jewish state to allow the flow of supplies into Gaza, vowing that in the case Hamas exploits it for its own purposes, international relief efforts will stop.
“Today, I asked the Israeli cabinet … to agree to the delivery of lifesaving humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza. Based on the understanding that there will be inspections and that the aid should go to civilians, not to Hamas, Israel agreed that humanitarian assistance can begin to move from Egypt to Gaza,” Biden said at the time.
“The people of Gaza need food, water, medicine, shelter,” he added.
Last week, Journo told JNS that “most people now recognize that foreign aid into Gaza helped keep Hamas in power. There’s no question about that. It’s hard to comprehend why this continues.”
The root of the problem is a philosophic moral issue, maintained the Senior Fellow at ARI.
“The conventional view of what is morally good tells you, ‘You have to help people in need.’ Not deserving needy people—anyone in need, including the undeserving, and especially the undeserving. And if they’re hostile to you, you have to shut your eyes. You’re not the one to judge. Their need is a trump card,” Journo noted.
People “don’t recognize that this is what’s going on. They don’t want to admit it because it’s the moral view most people accept that you have to serve others; [that] sacrifice is a good thing. And when they see the consequences, they don’t want to believe it,” he said.
For Journo, Gaza is a prime example of this.
“Something that I find really aggravating,” he related, “[is that] for a long time, we’ve heard about how Israel has imposed a blockade on Gaza … that it treats Gaza like a prison. Well, if people believe that—how [was Hamas] able to build all these tunnels?—How is it they were able to bring in all these supplies and the technology that was required to build hundreds of miles of tunnels?”
Journo stressed, “After every round of war, prior to Oct. 7, there was a ceasefire or some kind of pause. [Hamas] rebuilt tunnels. They rebuilt their mortars. They rebuilt their rockets. How did they do that? They did it because there’s a continual supply of international aid that relieves the pressure, which would otherwise exist, on a society that is waging war on Israel.”
The author went on to say that both givers and receivers of aid take for granted the moral idea that “if you’re productive, if you’re able and successful and strong, your moral duty is to help those who are needy; [the] weak underdogs… You have to give up your own self-respect, your own view of the situation, and submit to those who want to harm you—[which leads to the] whitewashing or self-delusion on the part of the givers,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter that so many of the people in Gaza voted for Hamas when they had a choice to do something else. And not only voted for Hamas. When Hamas went to war with Israel numerous times, they put their lives and their bodies and their homes in the path of protecting Hamas,” Journo remarked.
Yet Israel “can never do enough to help the Palestinians. If [Israel] unlocks the gates and lets some [aid] trucks in, the criticism is it takes too long for the trucks to be inspected for weapons. If they allow the trucks to go faster, it’s ‘Why aren’t there more trucks going through?’ At every step that [Israel does] something, it can never do enough. … So long as you have more to give, you’ve never given enough.”
Journo summarized by saying that Hamas is well aware of the moral code of sacrifice “and gains from it. … Foreign aid economically is ruinous. Politically, it is ruinous because it helps aggressive and hostile nations and leaders. And the givers regard themselves as admirable for doing it even as they see the consequences of it. It’s geared to help those who are hostile to freedom, to progress, to success, and [geared to harm] everyone who wants a better life because you can’t really achieve that on this moral premise [of self-sacrifice].”
18/03/2025 by JNS
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