In a shopping center next to the Israeli city of Ashkelon, a woman rolls down the window when she sees a truck and a caravan of cars, without understanding that it is an initiative (more symbolic than practical) of the Israeli peace NGO Omdim Beyahad (De standing together) to bring supplies into Gaza.
-Why do they demonstrate?
―It’s humanitarian aid.
—“Yes, it’s a shame,” he responds, thinking that this is one of the small but frequent protests in the country to prevent aid from entering the Strip.
-No no. It is humanitarian aid for Gaza.
It happens at the first stop of the caravan between Tel Aviv and its destination, 130 kilometers further south: Kerem Shalom, the only land crossing in Israel through which food and medicine enter the Strip and where all shipments are inspected. It is just a truck loaded with rice, flour and cans (donated by hundreds of Israelis) and about 20 activists’ cars, but the slogan they display in Hebrew and Arabic (“Thou shalt not starve,” in a play on words with the Ten Commandments) clashes with the national mood since the October 7 attack. Its promoters are aware that the police will once again block their way before they arrive, as in the first attempt, last Thursday, but it is above all about passing the message to the social majority opposed to the entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Precisely because this message is experienced as a betrayal, scenes of tension occur at a stop at a gas station next to Kibbutz Magen, in the area close to the Strip attacked on October 7.
—“This store was burned on October 7. You can’t stop here with those ideas. You have to understand that people died here,” says a resident of the kibbutz who everyone knows as Fiko.
—“We only come to pick up people, it is not a provocation,” responds one of the activists.
-I dont believe it. Tell me names. Nobody in this area is going to join you.
Another woman approaches to insult them and asks a border police officer: “Have you seen these shameless people?” “Yes, we just came to fix that, you little scoundrels,” the agent responds.
He is one of those who shortly after, about three kilometers from the crossing, forces the caravan to turn around and chases them out of the area. He also repeatedly threatens to arrest the journalist for being in a “closed military zone” (he is not) when he hears that he is Spanish.
The members of the caravan turn around and park on the shoulder in the other direction. A driver sees the slogan, gets out of a truck and shouts at them to leave immediately. “Is that for them? [los gazatíes] Do you help them? “Aren’t you Jews?” he throws at them.
The reactions show how, five months after the attack in which Hamas killed some 1,200 people and took more than 240 hostages, the entry of humanitarian aid to a Gaza in which – to a greater or lesser extent – everyone is hungry. has become an internal political debate in Israel and a sensitive issue on everyone’s lips. Last month, the think tank The Israel Institute for Democracy asked in a poll: “Do you support or oppose Israel allowing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, with the delivery of food and medicine to international organizations not linked to Hamas or UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestinian refugees)? 68% of the Jewish population declared themselves against it, including 31% of those who define themselves as left-wing. In conversations and debates, attitudes range from blaming Hamas or the UN to seeing today’s Gazan children as the “terrorists of tomorrow.”
The repetition of the idea that Hamas keeps humanitarian aid contributes to this. Up to 60%, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated in a press conference. Also the perception of food as an element of pressure, especially to obtain the surrender of the more than 130 hostages still captive in the Strip. Both in the first ceasefire, in November, and in the second that has been negotiated for weeks, the increase in humanitarian aid is one of the counterparts for the delivery of the hostages.
Collective punishment
Aware of the discourse, activists send messages that can resonate. When one of the leaders of the pacifist collective, Uri Weltmann, criticizes the “collective punishment” and the “policy of starving” the population of Gaza, he is quick to add that limiting food also puts the lives of the hostages at risk. Israelis there. Messages that they convey to those who rebuke them along the way, but it is of little use because today in Israel the emotional takes precedence, empathy is experienced as a zero-sum game and many see all of Gaza as a kind of abstract enemy.
The harshest positions are held by the ultranationalists who have been demonstrating for weeks in the port of Ashdod, one of the main ports in the country, or in Kerem Shalom. They try to prevent the passage of trucks with humanitarian aid. They have managed to stop some, which led last month Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, Israel’s main ally, to remember in Tel Aviv that the Hamas attack “cannot be a license to dehumanize others” and that “the overwhelming majority of people in Gaza” are “mothers, fathers, sons and daughters” who “had nothing to do with it.” At the end of January, the authorities declared the passage a “closed military zone” and the protests – condoned without excesses – have become a kind of cat and mouse game. In one of them, one of the protesters rebuked the Palestinian who was driving one of the trucks with the phrase: “I am the owner of the place; “You are a slave here.”
The port of Ashdod, one of the scenes of the protests, is the natural entry point for humanitarian aid to Gaza, and where it did so before the war. For Israelis there is a difference between seeing humanitarian aid cross their territory or watching it on television fall into Gaza by parachute or onto the ship of the Spanish NGO Open Arms, which inaugurated the maritime route on Tuesday when it left Cyprus. This is about 200 tons of food from the humanitarian organization World Central Kitchen, founded by the Spanish chef José Andrés in the United States.
Until now, almost all the aid enters through Rafah or Kerem Shalom and is distributed in the midst of the chaos generated by the Israeli invasion: the Hamas Government police barely control areas anymore, but Israeli soldiers do not protect the shipments either. There is a lack of trucks, security, and both hungry crowds and armed mafias have attacked them. Israel blames the UN for inefficiency in distribution. The UN insists that the land route is essential to avoid famine, from which more than half a million Gazans are “one step away.” The Ministry of Health of the Hamas Government in the Strip estimates that 27 have died in hospitals due to starvation or malnutrition in recent weeks, 23 of them children.
Faced with growing pressure, the Israeli army announced this Tuesday “a pilot project to prevent Hamas from keeping the aid”: the entry into Gaza of six trucks from the UN World Food Program through a crossing in the north of Gaza, the most malnourished part. It was the first time in three weeks that the program was able to deliver food in the capital, for 24,000 people, it was reported. The UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) claims that Israeli authorities only facilitated 25% of aid missions from the south to northern Gaza planned in February.
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