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| Palestinians gather to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Tuesday. (Hatem Khaled/Reuters) |
| President Donald Trump came into office with grandiose visions for the Gaza Strip. He promised peace after more than a year of devastating war, laid the calamity that had befallen the Palestinian territory at the feet of Hamas militants and his predecessor, President Joe Biden, and conjured up a quixotic plan to somehow take over war-ravaged Gaza, remove its population and rebuild it as a luxury tourist destination. But more than 100 days into his second term, Trump has seemingly lost interest in Gaza. A fragile ceasefire collapsed in early March, and Trump did little to salvage it as the White House shifted the focus of its regional diplomacy toward Iran. Israeli airstrikes and bombardments resumed, killing myriad civilians. No lucrative real estate deals for Gazan waterfront properties seem in sight.
Instead, what exists now is a total siege. For 60 days, Israeli authorities have blocked the entry of humanitarian aid and commercial goods into the territory. That has left the already beleaguered residents of the Gaza Strip in an even more miserable predicament. The World Food Program said this week that its warehouses are empty and that the bakeries and soup kitchens are rationing their last stocks. U.N. experts say that malnutrition rates are rising and that the prospect of a full-blown famine is now all-too real. In interviews with my colleagues, locals in Gaza describe their predicament as one of the most arduous of the brutal conflict that flared after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a strike on southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and abducting hundreds of hostages. The Israeli campaign that followed has destroyed most of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, displaced more than 90 percent of its population and killed more than 50,000 people, according to local health authorities.
“The situation now is the hardest by far from previous periods in the war,” Haroun al-Khatib, 29, told my colleagues, describing how his family lost the stockpile of food they had amassed during the brief truce when forced to flee without their belongings in the face of an Israeli advance. “We spend our days between looking for water and food and charging batteries so we can see at night, and waiting to die,” said Mohammed Murtaja, 25. He lives in Gaza City with about 40 relatives and eats once a day at most, my colleagues reported. Much of Gaza’s population has been displaced multiple times, and each flight leaves civilians in more precarious circumstances. Israeli officials insist there’s no shortage of aid and justify their decision to stop the transit of goods on largely evidence-free claims that Hamas is engaged in a widespread diversion of aid. On Thursday, Tom Fletcher, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief, decried Israel’s “cruel collective punishment” of Gaza’s population, saying that Israeli authorities had been “bracingly honest” about withholding aid to pressure Hamas. “To the Israeli authorities, and those who can still reason with them, we say again: lift this brutal blockade. Let humanitarians save lives,” Fletcher said in a statement, noting that “international law is unequivocal” about Israel’s obligations as an occupying power in Gaza. | ||||||||||||
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| (The Washington Post) |
| Instead, Israel appears to be consolidating control of the territory. My colleagues detailed how, in the past six weeks, Israeli forces have declared about 70 percent of the enclave either a military “red zone” or under evacuation. They have also enlarged “security” or buffer zones in various parts, particularly along the border with Egypt. “While Israel’s leaders say these moves are necessary for security and to pressure Hamas to return the Israeli hostages it holds, some Israeli officials have also signaled that the territorial changes could presage an extended occupation of Gaza that could last for months or more,” wrote The Post’s Miriam Berger and Júlia Ledur. In the face of both international condemnation and domestic disquiet, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition have made it clear that there would be no respite for Palestinians in Gaza until Israel’s military goals were met. “Releasing the hostages is a very important objective, but we have a supreme objective in this war — victory over our enemies,” Netanyahu said in a speech Thursday. Bezalel Smotrich, the country’s far-right finance minister, was blunter. In remarks this week, he gestured to a broader geopolitical project underway, where Israel would keep pummeling the vestiges of militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon and instigate the partition of Syria, where Israeli forces have launched dozens of strikes in recent days. He also said Israel’s campaign would only end after “Gaza is cleansed of Hamas and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are on their way out of it to other countries.” Trump will head to Saudi Arabia this month for a trip he has cast as a prelude to peace deals. In recent interviews, he suggested Riyadh was destined to soon “go into the Abraham Accords” — the normalization pacts that Trump brokered in his first term between Israel and a clutch of Arab monarchies. But Saudi officials have balked at normalizing ties with Israel absent significant political progress regarding the plight of Palestinians. At hearings at the International Court of Justice this week, the Saudi representative to the United Nation’s top court slammed Israel’s “barbarity” for restricting humanitarian assistance. Mohamed Saud Alnasser, the representative, also said that Israel’s actions were aimed at “bringing about the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, displacing or killing the Palestinian population to make room for Israel to settle and annex the territory.” But the deliberations in The Hague have not had much of a chastening effect on Israel, where numerous analysts and politicians cast the U.N. as a biased institution, bent against the Jewish state. Gilad Erdan, Israel’s former ambassador to the U.N., even called on the United States to help hasten its end by withholding funding. “Israel must lead a global campaign to defund the U.N. completely, to dismantle the U.N. completely,” Erdan said at a conference last weekend. | ||||||