Ironically, these boasts from Israeli officials are in fact admissions
of war crimes. Israel’s intent with these social media posts is to be
exonerated in the court of public opinion — and perhaps international
courts as well — but it’s effectively acting like its own star witness.
Israel's own data says it's blocking aid
“Israel…does not impose any restrictions on the quantity of aid entering the [Gaza] Strip,” claimed Spokesperson of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Oren Marmorstein, on December 3. Israel’s own data says otherwise.
Facing international backlash after it killed World Central Kitchen workers, the IDF announced
new humanitarian measures in April 2024, pledging that we should expect
to see “the daily average of trucks of food, water, medicine and
shelter supplies going into Gaza to go up…to around 500 per day.” This
falls well short of the 600 daily aid truck quota that USAID assessed
is needed to avert famine in Gaza, but still a welcome improvement
considering the average daily ingress of trucks into Gaza to that point
(January–March 2024) had been a measly 153, according to my analysis of data from the IDF’s COGAT unit.
The daily average since then has been 152 trucks per day.
My analysis of IDF/COGAT data
also shows that incoming aid reached a low point over the last two
months, as the graph below indicates. Israel let in just 1,789 trucks
into Gaza in October and 2,670 in November — the lowest and
second-lowest monthly amounts in 2024, respectively. That works out to
be 58 trucks per day in October and 89 in November.
What explains this shortfall in aid? It’s not a supply problem — on a given day, there are several hundred to several thousand aid trucks awaiting Israel’s permission to enter Gaza. Israel’s Government Press Office recently posted that 900 aid trucks were idling outside one crossing alone.
Declining relief can’t be attributed to demand, either, because humanitarian needs in Gaza are higher than ever.
Rather, there was a dramatic shortfall in aid because Israel has
apparently decided there should be one, which violates international
law. Article 8(2)(b)(xxv)
of the 1998 Statute of the International Criminal Court says
“intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by
depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including
willfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva
Conventions” is a war crime.
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Self-incrimination
Israel tacitly admits to willfully impeding humanitarian aid on social
media. In an apparent bid to reject the charges that it’s obstructing
food and other relief to Gaza, Israeli government-run accounts post
regular updates on its humanitarian activities. A typical post includes
the quantity of incoming aid on a given day and a photo showing an
apparent abundance of aid in Gaza. As a few recent examples, I included
posts from several Israeli government-run X accounts, including for the
state of Israel (@Israel), Israel’s foreign ministry (@IsraelMFA),
Israel’s U.S. Embassy (@IsraelinUSA), and the Israeli military’s COGAT
unit (@cogatonline).
The irony is by publishing this promotional content, Israel admits to
obstructing humanitarian aid on a near-daily basis. First, by
highlighting a daily incoming truck count several times lower than what
humanitarian needs demand. Second, by providing visual evidence that
it’s artificially inflating its aid totals by counting half-full trucks
as full truckloads — IDF/COGAT typically limit humanitarian trucks to
50 percent capacity, purportedly for security reasons.
(IDF/COGAT also inflates its aid figures by
including
commercial cargo as humanitarian aid, even though the former is
prohibitively expensive for most people in Gaza and only the latter is
geared toward humanitarian needs.)
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(Source: https://x.com/Israel/status/1866503989690245379)
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(Source: https://x.com/IsraelMFA/status/1866079250484277462)
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(Source: https://x.com/IsraelinUSA/status/1864320307672014916)
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(Source: https://x.com/cogatonline/status/1861293306648404163)
Israeli authorities’ self-incrimination doesn’t end there. For example,
below are a couple of recent posts from IDF international spokesperson
Nadav Shoshani. In both, he shares video of aid awaiting pickup at
Israeli border checkpoints to argue that humanitarian groups, not
Israel, are responsible for a lack of aid reaching Palestinians in need.
“Israel has done its part, it’s time the international organization
[sic] do theirs [sic],” Shoshani wrote in a November post.
In each of his attacks on U.N. officials and aid agencies, Shoshani
unwittingly admits that Israel is in violation of its legal obligations
under international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention
requires that the occupying power ensure that food and medical supplies reach the population in need. Article 55 of the Convention says:
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the
Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies
of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary
foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the
occupied territory are inadequate.
Crucially, international law demands more of the occupying power than
merely acquiescing to humanitarian aid entering the territory it
occupies — it must
ensure that the aid actually gets delivered. Article 59 of the Convention states:
If the whole or part of the population of an occupied
territory is inadequately supplied, the Occupying Power shall agree to
relief schemes on behalf of the said population, and shall facilitate
them by all the means at its disposal.
The International Committee of the Red Cross’ authoritative commentary on the laws of war
clarifies
that the Fourth Geneva Convention “not only lays down that the
occupying power must ‘agree’ to relief schemes on behalf of the
population, but…must cooperate wholeheartedly in the rapid and
scrupulous execution” of relief operations. Israel is a signatory to this Convention.
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(Source: https://x.com/LTC_Shoshani/status/1864208327653167219)
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(Source: https://x.com/LTC_Shoshani/status/1862139682026397798)
Israel is doing the opposite of ensuring aid can be delivered to
Palestinians in need. For example, a U.N. memo recently obtained by the
Washington Post
concluded that the armed gangs looting aid convoys could be “benefiting
from a passive if not active benevolence” and “protection” from
Israel’s military, and that a gang leader had a military-like compound
in an area “restricted, controlled and patrolled” by the Israeli
military.
The gangs
operate
in areas under Israeli control, often within eyeshot of Israeli forces.
When convoys are looted, Israeli forces watch and do nothing, even when
aid workers request assistance. Israeli forces refer
to one area about a kilometer from its Kerem Shalom border checkpoint
as “the looting zone.” The IDF-designated looting zone might be the only
place in Gaza that Israeli forces won’t shoot an armed Palestinian.
Additionally, Israeli forces frequently take it upon themselves to attack aid workers. In a previous
article
for Responsible Statecraft, I list 14 instances in which humanitarian
organizations were attacked by Israeli forces after sharing their
coordinates with the IDF. Israel deploys more passive strategies to
obstruct humanitarian assistance as well. Here is one example I
discussed in a recent report for Security in Context:
Because Israeli forces have cut off northern Gaza from
the south, any humanitarian movements that must travel between those two
areas must pass through an IDF checkpoint. The IDF has two checkpoints
between the north and south, but it refuses to operate more than one at a
time. This means that all humanitarian missions — responding to massive
humanitarian demands in Gaza — must use the same checkpoint, resulting
in bottlenecks that prevent delivery of urgently needed assistance. When
an IDF checkpoint gate broke in late September, Israeli forces did not
open the other checkpoint. As a result, various humanitarian teams were
stranded in the north for 13 nights before they were able to cross back
to the south. These delays disrupt essential missions, eat up scarce
resources, and make personnel and transport unavailable for other aid
missions.