Israel’s aid plan for Gaza is a key part of its strategy to expel Palestinians
The forcible expulsion of the Palestinian people is now the explicit goal of Israel’s war on Gaza. Late on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel would only end the war if “Hamas surrenders, Gaza is demilitarized, and we implement the Trump plan.”
Trump walked back his February plan for the U.S. to “own” Gaza, expel its people, and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” but Netanyahu seized upon it all the same and took it as a green light to exterminate Gaza. The latest phase in this plan is Israel’s weaponization of humanitarian aid for the purpose of furthering the Gaza final solution.
The plan is simple: starve Gaza’s population, and only create one designated flattened stretch of land where they can come to get food rations — facilitated by the Israeli army and run by a U.S. private contractor. Gaza’s population will be forced to go to these collection points, where they will be corralled inside what would effectively be a concentration camp, located in what used to be the city of Rafah, now a flattened wasteland.
Netanyahu made all this clear in his latest announcement, which came a day after Israel said it would allow “minimal” amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza for “diplomatic reasons” — to avoid war crimes charges and images of famine.
On Monday, the Israeli war cabinet finally approved the entry of the aid, after two months of a complete Israeli blockade on the besieged territory. This forced starvation has led to the spread of hunger and disease, with the Gaza Government Media Office reporting that at least 70,000 Palestinian children have been hospitalized for severe malnutrition.
The cabinet decision followed intense negotiations with Hamas in Qatar, with the mediation of the Gulf state, and pressure from the U.S. envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. The talks started following Hamas’s release of Israeli-American soldier Edan Alexander earlier last week.
The U.S. reportedly pressured Israel into sending a negotiating team, which later led to the decision to allow the entry of food.
Talks continue to be held over the possibility of a ceasefire, with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisting that Israel will not commit to ending the war and will retain control of Gaza. Hamas insists on U.S. guarantees and a UN Security Council Resolution that Israel will not restart its assault on Gaza after the release of Israeli captives. However, for the time being, Palestinians in Gaza are expected to receive some relief from starvation, as Israel has already begun to allow a small number of food trucks to enter the Strip.
On Tuesday, the UN said that the nine trucks that Israel allowed to enter the day before represented “a drop in the ocean” of the needs of the devastated population. But the quantity of the aid allowed into Gaza is not the only concern looming around the issue. An additional fear is rising that aid might be used as a tool for Israel to achieve its primary wartime goal — to facilitate the expulsion of Palestinians out of Gaza.
Israel’s goal: Ethnic cleansing
When Israel announced its latest offensive aiming to control all of Gaza, dubbed operation “Gideon’s Chariot,” Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported that one of the phases of the the operation would include transferring the majority of the Palestinian population to the south of the Strip, especially in the Rafah area. These reports appeared simultaneously alongside Netanyahu’s statements to Israeli reservists last week that Israel aims to force Palestinians out of Gaza, and that the main obstacle is finding countries willing to accept them. The concentration of Palestinians in southern Gaza is seen by most analysts as a preparatory step for forcing them out. It is believed that this new plan to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza might be the last piece of this strategy.
This strategic use of food distribution has been discussed by the Israeli war cabinet since last year, months before the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was reached. In September 2024, Netanyahu was already discussing the best mechanism to allow the distribution of aid in the north of Gaza, where the Israeli army was planning an expansion of its ground operations at the time. Netanyahu said in a cabinet meeting that the Israeli army will “take responsibility” for distributing aid in the areas where it was also focused on defeating the Palestinian resistance.
The Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon reported at the time that the Israeli Prime Minister was following the suggestions of his hardline far-right cabinet allies, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and Orit Strock, who reportedly supported the Israeli army’s control of aid distribution, as part of a larger plan of expanding the ground assault on the northern part of the strip. The newspaper quoted Smotrich referring to the plan as “a strategic change” that would “bring the military effort to its maximum” in order to defeat Hamas.
Two months later, the Israeli army sealed off the entire northern Gaza governorate, causing an immediate drop in the quantity of food available and pushing some 400,000 Palestinians to the edge of starvation as part of what was known as “the Generals’ Plan,” designed to force Palestinians out of northern Gaza. This effort caused the population of northern Gaza to plummet below 100,000, reaching as low as 75,000, according to some reports. Israel was never able to implement that plan’s vision of controlling aid distribution because the blockade of the north alone drove most of the population out of the area, and the ceasefire was eventually reached in mid-January.
New aid plan
Even though the Israeli war cabinet approved the entry of aid trucks on Monday, the actual implementation of the entry of aid has been gradual. On Thursday, the Gaza Government Media Office announced that some trucks arrived in the Strip for distribution three days after they were due.
International organizations, including UN bodies such as UNRWA and the World Food Programme (WFP), have traditionally been key players in aid distribution in Gaza. But minutes following the cabinet’s decision this week, the Times of Israel reported that Israel would be adopting a new mechanism to distribute aid through the Israeli army, bypassing international organizations.
The most important component of this new mechanism is that aid wouldn’t be distributed to all parts of the Gaza Strip, but to specific distribution points where Palestinians would be required to move to receive it.
This Israeli plan has actually been previously announced as a joint U.S.-Israeli plan, which included the distribution of aid determined by limited rations to households. In Israel’s new plan, rather than working with traditional aid groups, the distribution would be organized by the recently established, U.S.-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. On May 4, international organizations present in Gaza unanimously voiced their rejection of the plan in a joint statement, saying that “it contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic as part of a military strategy.”
The statement was followed on May 6 by a statement by UN aid teams, who said the plan “appears to be a deliberate attempt to weaponize the aid.”
A month earlier, on April 8, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres rejected Israeli control over aid distribution in Gaza, stating that it risks “further controlling and callously limiting aid down to the last calorie and grain of flour.” Guterres added that the UN “will not participate in any arrangement that does not fully respect the humanitarian principles: humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality.”
Meanwhile, Gaza starves
As Israel continues to be formally engaged in ceasefire talks with Hamas in Qatar, its decision to allow the entry of aid was presented as a step forward in the effort to end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. However, if carried out according to Israel’s plan, the delivery of aid itself could become another step in the ongoing Israeli strategy to fulfill its now explicit goal of expelling the strip of its Palestinian population.
In the meantime, hunger in the strip accentuates by the minute, claiming so far the lives of at least 57 Palestinians, mostly children, since October 2023 according to the Palestinian health ministry, and provoking the miscarriage of 300 pregnant women due to lack of nutrients. Gaza’s government media office also said that an unspecified number of elderly people had died due to the lack of medicines, in the same time period.
All of this continues as Israeli forces escalate airstrikes across the strip, killing 82 Palestinians in the past 24 hours (Tuesday to Wednesday), according to the Palestinian health ministry. Since October 2023, the Israeli assault on Gaza has officially killed more than 53,000 Palestinians, with most estimates of the genocide’s total toll being much higher.