Israel’s aid concessions merely offer Gazans survival on a leash
To deflect international outrage, Israel’s strategy is clear: maintain enough control to kill with impunity, and enough relief to look humane while doing it.
Over the past few weeks, the images coming out of Gaza have become impossible to ignore, even for Israel’s staunchest allies. Emaciated children, newborns dying from dehydration, and reports of adults collapsing from hunger made headlines around the world. More than 100 prominent humanitarian organizations signed a joint statement urging “decisive action” to end the siege, while the UN’s World Food Programme warned that a third of Gazans are going several days without eating at all. Even celebrities who haven’t said a word about Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza for two years felt compelled to condemn its latest phase.
In turn, several Western governments that are usually reluctant to openly criticize Israel began to issue statements of concern, calling for an unimpeded flow of aid. Britain and France joined the chorus — the latter taking the additional step of announcing it will recognize a Palestinian state — and even U.S. President Donald Trump has now called out what he described as “real starvation” in Gaza, in a public rebuke of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This past weekend, in the face of growing international pressure, Israel announced several measures ostensibly aimed at allaying the humanitarian crisis it created: a daily 10-hour “tactical pause in military activity” within the 13 percent of Gaza that remains accessible to Palestinians; the opening of “secure routes” to allow more aid trucks to enter the Strip; and the resumption of aid drops from the sky.
Any easing of Israel’s blockade on the enclave is to be welcomed, especially after a week in which scores of Palestinians died of hunger. Yet as a renewed trickle of food is driven and parachuted in for 2 million severely malnourished people, the move appears less a gesture of goodwill by Israel than a strategic recalibration — an effort to deflect mounting international outrage so it can continue annihilating Gaza. This is what Israeli ministers openly admitted in May, when Israel slightly eased the total two-month blockade on the Strip, and they are doing the same now.
The eventual shift in Israeli policy came just hours after the latest round of Israel-Hamas ceasefire negotiations collapsed in Doha. This timing was no coincidence: with no truce in sight and its military campaign intensifying across Gaza, Israel needed to change the conversation. Allowing aid in, however limited, was conceived as a way to project responsibility while continuing to pursue the goal of making the Strip unlivable. Humanitarian relief, in this framing, becomes both a shield against criticism and another lever of domination.
The tragedy is that even the bare minimum now passes for mercy. But when aid is only permitted under siege, when food follows fire and destruction resumes as soon as people have eaten, Israel’s overriding strategy becomes clear: maintain enough control to kill without consequence, and enough relief to look humane while doing it.
‘They let us eat so we don’t starve on camera’
While the resumption of aid was touted as a lifeline, its scope remains grossly insufficient. According to the UN, Gaza needs 600-800 trucks of aid daily to meet basic needs. But yesterday, the first day of the new system, only 73 trucks entered the Strip along with three airdrops whose total payload was equivalent to only two additional trucks. Indeed, while visually striking, airdrops barely scratch the surface of what is required and often land in unsafe or inaccessible areas, even killing Palestinianswhen parachutes failed to deploy successfully.
And while food may have dominated headlines in recent weeks, other fundamental pillars of life in Gaza have collapsed too, often with much less attention. Water scarcity has reached catastrophic levels after Israel put almost all of Gaza’s desalination plants out of service, either by bombing them or restricting the entry of fuel. Groundwater sources have grown increasingly polluted, and hundreds of thousands rely on brackish, bacteria-laden water that poses severe health risks, particularly for children. UN agencies have warned that waterborne diseases are already spreading in overcrowded shelters and displacement camps.
Electricity remains largely nonexistent. The Strip has been plunged into near-total darkness since October 2023, with only sporadic access to solar-powered batteries or fuel-run generators, which are also running dry as a result of the intensified siege. Internet connectivity, meanwhile, has all but vanished: Gaza’s already fragile telecom infrastructure has been decimated by strikes and now sits dormant, isolating people from one another and the outside world. Some Gazans have found limited workarounds — using smuggled E-SIM cards linked to Egyptian or Israeli networks when signal is briefly accessible, or pooling scarce satellite connections through NGOs and press crews. These fleeting signals allow just enough bandwidth to send a voice note, an image, or a short video.
What’s more, as I write this, Israel carries on killing dozens of Palestinians at aid sites in Gaza every day, and Israeli tanks are continuing their incursion into the central parts of Gaza that have until now been spared the worst of the bombardment, squeezing Palestinians into an ever-shrinking sliver of the enclave. Seen in this light, Israel’s apparent about-face on aid changes very little: the aid may arrive, but so will the shells.
For those bearing the brunt of Israel’s onslaught, the resumption of aid has been greeted as merely survival on a leash. “They let us eat so we don’t starve on camera,” Nihal, a mother currently living in Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, who preferred to use only her first name, told me. “We still fall asleep to the sound of drones and wake up to the explosions.”
The use of starvation as a weapon, and now of selective relief as a pressure valve, is central to Israel’s approach. At a time when the world is more horrified than ever at the sight of what it has created in Gaza, Israel is hoping to distance itself from the perception of deliberate cruelty — and perhaps aiming to avert more serious repercussions from the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court — even as it continues to enforce policies that produce mass suffering.
This policy shift may succeed in turning down the volume of global outrage for a little while, as Israel once again allows the world to believe it is doing something to help while ensuring that nothing really changes. But while people may eat today, what’s certain is that the bombs will fall tomorrow.
Thank you Mohammed for this careful reporting. We can feel the pain and fury
despite the measured tone and
“professional” style. In reporting their own genocide, Palestinians are required to appear “measured” and “reasonable” but let us say that their “colonial reason” is detestable in their era of barbarism. It exists for their spaces where people need to be convinced of an obvious truth and of Palestinian humanity. Shame on the producers and consumers of colonial media who claim to have any moral compass. Long live Palestine
We won’t be fooled. At least a whole lot of us aren’t. The ones who are actively involved in raising awareness of the atrocities that are committed from the beginning and we won’t stop sharing them. Although they also try to silence us in all the ways available. They won’t succeed since more and more people are hooking up and the smoke screens become obvious to them too. The intent was clear from the start and slowly the rest of the world becomes aware of that as well. There is no turning back from that. The masks are off for everyone involved and the tactics won’t work anymore although they surely will try. They took it too far.😞