Anonymous wrote:I see that multiple countries are doing or proposing airdrops into Gaza. I’m confused. Doesn’t Israel have ports and trucks? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier if the U.S. and other countries simply ship supplies to Israeli ports and they are the two rifles to Gaza? Can someone explain why expensive airdrops are needed? Israel is not a big country.
Because Israel is actually, you know, vetting humanitarian aid to make sure it actually goes to innocent Palestinian civilians, and there is now pressure from pro-Hamas groups for the US (and other countries) to circumvent this vetting process due to Hamas’ interest in continued access to inverted humanitarian aid.
For decades we have seen the same pattern, where the US (and other companies) fund the UNWRA and other international aid organizations that are heavily connected to Hamas. These aid organizations then turn over a majority of this aid to Hamas (ostensibly because Hamas requires these ‘gifts’ in order to allow the UNWRA/Red Crescent/etc to operate in ‘their’ territory). Hamas then takes this ‘aid’ and sells it to residents at outrageous prices, taking advantage of the desperation of their population in order to fund their goal of eradicating Israel and killing Jews.
So it is a tragic circle where America, often pressured by well meaning people with a limited understanding of the conflict, funds Hamas’ campaign of hate through what is called ‘humanitarian’ aid. Which then leads to increased violence against Jews, which leads to Israel defending itself, which leads to even more ‘humanitarian aid,’ going to Hamas, which leads to…
Shortly after 10/7 Israel decided they needed to end this cycle, and improved systems so that Israel could vet incoming aid and the organizations distributing the aid to Gaza in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of Hamas.
However, bad actors internationally have utilized this new system and protections to carry out a campaign to pressure the US (and other countries) to ignore this system and return to distributing aid through the same channels (with the Hamas connections) as before, or to provide aid via airdrops (which can be easier to intercept by Hamas). This is because Hamas is struggling to maintain their war machine without the ability to basically make money hand over fist by holding the aid captive and stripping Gazans of every last penny in exchange for stale bread. Instead, aid is being provided by Israeli convoys, distributed for free (or for a small fee), often guarded by IDF troops to defend against Hamas raids on supply lines - which is a whole different thing that were regular occurrences.
When you hear how Israel “cut off humanitarian aid,” this is what they are talking about. It is a blatent lie spread by a number of bad faith actors sympathetic with Hamas, and parroted by many well meaning individuals due to their latent anti-Semitic beliefs (“It sounds like something the Jews would do, cheap bastards!”). Israel has never blocked aid to Gaza since the beginning of the war, nor has it ever claimed to want to. It has, however, put protections in place to ensure the aid is actually provided to the Palestinian civilians most desperately in need, and provided for free, rather than to Hamas itself to sell for profit.
Again, this is a great example of how bad actors are praying on people’s lack of understanding about these long-term global affairs to ply a message that is simply not true.
You can disagree with Israel, as a poster who has been regularly called a troll for defending Israel, you have that right. But all anybody is asking is that when you hear someone on TikTok, or Reddit, or here say that “Israel is blocking aid to Israel,” or “Israel wants to force all Gazans into Egypt,” or “Israel is murdering innocent babies and kids,” you also look at Jewish and Israeli voices and sources, and actually evaluate the situation.
This is not saying that every 20-something Tiktoker from Memphis is a Hamas spokesperson, it’s saying that there has been a clear and pervasive effort to reframe the situation utilizing a lot of well meaning people to spread information that, at best, is heavily misleading and at worst are outright lies to play on people’s innate biases against Jewish people.
Again, you can have differing opinions on Israel and the war, it is certainly tragic that it has come to that. I am Jewish, and I have a number of family members in Israel, including several currently serving in the IDF, and we all pray for an end to this war, we all pray for Hamas to put down their weapons, release our hostages, and surrender so we can rebuild, Jew and Palestinian together. But spreading these lies, attacking Israel for defending its people based off a narrative built on TikTok, that will not end the war any faster.
You are full of shit. God what a liar you are.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
Let's hear what's really going on with aid to Gaza, from a longread investigation CNN just completed. For those with only a minute, here's the gist:
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
For months, queues of trucks bound for the enclave have been backed up along the highway leading from the Egyptian town of Arish, a major logistical hub for aid, to the Rafah crossing with Gaza. In a satellite image from February 21, a queue of trucks can be seen stretching out for 4 miles from the crossing.
Most of CNN’s sources requested anonymity for fear, they said, of reprisals and further Israeli restrictions on an already choked aid pipeline.
Several sources said a substantial portion of the donations they handled were either rejected or held up by a long wait for clearance by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, which manages the flow of aid into the strip.
“It is perfectly engineered chaos,” said one CNN source who oversees donations from four different relief organizations at one of the transit routes. Over 15,000 tons of their relief supplies await Israeli approval to enter Gaza, the source said. More than half consists of food items.
“It’s deliberately opaque, deliberately ambiguous,” said another senior humanitarian official. “You can receive clearance from COGAT and arrive to find police or finance and customs officials who will send the truck back.”
In a January 13 press conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about permitting “minimal humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza.
“We provide minimal humanitarian aid,” Netanyahu said. “If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.”
“I’ve never seen a supply chain that ought to be so simple be so complicated,” said Save the Children US president and chief executive Janti Soeripto. “The level of barriers being put in place to hamper humanitarian assistance; we’ve never seen anything like it.”
Soeripto, who visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing with a UN convoy in January, told CNN she saw several items that Israeli inspectors had turned back.
She said toys were rejected because they were in a wooden box rather than a cardboard box, sleeping bags were denied because they had zippers, and sanitary pads were turned back because a nail clipper was included in the hygiene kit.
In January, US Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley saw maternity kits and water filtration systems among the items Israel turned back from its inspection point in Nitzana.
“In no rational world could (these) be deemed dual use or any kind of military threat,” Van Hollen told CNN weeks after his trip to Egypt’s side of the Rafah crossing.
“We learned that when a truck with just one of those items is turned down, the entire truck gets turned around and has to go back to the beginning of the process, which can take weeks,” Van Hollen said.
CNN’s weeks long investigation has documented multiple examples of the erratic process that followed, with officials sometimes falling back on the 2008 guidelines and other times citing them as redundant.
In one instance on February 14, COGAT rejected a truck-load of sleeping bags “because they were the color green, and green means military and according to the 2008 list, military is dual use,” the same humanitarian official told CNN.
Four sources described another incident when Israel rejected a shipment of dates – a rich source of nutrients desperately needed by a hungry population. Two of the sources said it was because the seeds were picked up as a suspicious object in the x-ray inspection imaging.
Donations must pass two COGAT hurdles before entering Gaza. Aid organizations must first get clearance for their shipments from COGAT, then the trucks must clear Israeli inspection points. Items have been rejected at both of those stages, according to CNN’s sources.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
CNN has obtained documents from three major participants in the humanitarian operation that list what they called the “most frequently rejected items.” Among them are essential medical supplies: anesthesia machines and anesthetics, crutches, generators, ventilators, x-ray machines and oxygen cylinders.
For doctors and patients inside Gaza, the implications are excruciating. There are numerous reports of preventable deaths for lack of oxygen and ventilators. Over 1,000 children have undergone leg amputations in Gaza, according to UNICEF, some without anesthesia. That figure was compiled by UNICEF at the end of November and has not been updated since.
Israel’s restrictions have also impacted medicines for the chronically ill. For weeks, COGAT temporarily prevented insulin pens for children with diabetes from entering Gaza, according to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick and one other source.
“On the goods that are being prohibited, it’s a full range,” said McGoldrick in a January 24 press conference. “Some of it is medical material such as basic drugs and material for treating not just trauma but for chronic illnesses.
At one of the waypoints of aid in Jordan, stacked boxes of donations extend for around eight miles, a backlog that would require around a thousand trucks to deliver, Jordan’s charity officials estimate.
I am the PP you are replying to, and calling full of shot.
This is a great example of individuals in the West Deliberately twisting Israel’s security measures into a false reality that tugs at the heartstrings of Westerners with little concept of the situation on the ground and the history of the area. I want to make it clear I do believe your heart is in the right place, so don’t take this as attacking you.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
And the majority of Israelis and Jews do not support protests at checkpoints. Celebrating the current tragedy, by either side, is inarguably wrong. But a small group of traumatized Israelis being radicalized is not an argument against Israel. It should also be noted that such actions have not been sanctioned by the Israeli government, who have been delivering aid despite such actions.
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Logistics takes time. Transportation takes time. Especially when aid convoys require extensive security and coordination due to the fact that Hamas has been targeting aid convoys due to their reliance on aid to fund their ongoing military action. Additionally, finding drivers and other staff willing to operate these convoys has become increasingly difficult due to the risks involved. Struggling to scale up these deliveries does not mean that Israel is refusing to deliver this aid, in fact it demonstrates Israel’s commitment to providing the aid that nobody is denying is neccisary.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
What agencies are these anonymous humanitarian workers representing? Again, Israel is not just handing aid organizations aid so it can get pilfered by Hamas (as is typical), they are leading the charge. So Israel isn’t obstructing aid organizations, they are minimizing their role by design.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
Yes, Israel is worried about aid falling into the hands of Hamas, who have a long history of using ostainably humanitarian aid for military purposes. This goes all the way to digging up water and sewer infrastructure paid for through western and Israeli aid to make missiles.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
All of these are perfectly reasonable to reject. Complex medical equipment (such as ventilators and water filtration systems) are easily broken apart to provide Hamas with vital electronic and other valuable resources. They additionally require specialized experience and qualifications to operate, which is likely not present in Gaza. Certain medicines may be used by Hamas to provide to their soldiers.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
Some of these, as noted in the article, were likely administrative mistakes (I.e. dates). The sleeping bags were explained later as well - they were rejected not because Israel just wants the Palestinians to die of hypothermia, but because the sleeping bags were considered to be of military use under Israeli law due to their color - I.e. if they were bright pink there would not be an issue. Others fall under medical treatments that are not particularly useful due to the collapse of the Gaza medical systems due to Hamas’ actions and had a high probability of being proffered by Hamas to fund their war goals.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. [b]Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
Which is basically what I am saying. Items are denied because they are I currently labeled (by the aid organization, sometimes because of the military implications, and rarely due to administrative failures that are to be expected. Again, the goal is to provide aid to help the Palestinian people, not Hamas.
In short, this just seems to be a bunch of aid organizations- including the UNRWA, an organization directly complicit in 10/7 - complaining that Israel is actually doing what is in their best interests by vetting aid entering a war zone and cutting out the Hamas middlemen that previously played a leading role in aid shipments. It also ignores the basic fact that far more aid is entering Gaza today then prior to 10/7, which is when all these aid organizations are looking at when complaining. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47828
Civilized people SHOULD be relentlessly up in arms if any of your excuses are used to dismiss the human tragedy happening in Gaza right now - which has been caused by Israel, and Israel alone. But instead you’re defending them …
Can you imagine the horror if the Armenian or Jewish holocausts were occurring today, everybody was fully aware of the extent of the genocidal acts, and someone said “Well, those sleeping bags are the wrong color and those dates have seeds, so we can’t allow those items to aid these victims of human tragedy; plus that medicine and medical equipment might be misappropriated, so that has the be blocked, too”?
Wtf … at this point, the pent up feeling for A LOT of people have that maybe Israel doesn’t actually deserve to exist in its current form are starting to harden hearts - including the hearts of those willing to look the other way at Israeli bad conduct in the past. This is too far.
Anonymous wrote:I see that multiple countries are doing or proposing airdrops into Gaza. I’m confused. Doesn’t Israel have ports and trucks? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier if the U.S. and other countries simply ship supplies to Israeli ports and they are the two rifles to Gaza? Can someone explain why expensive airdrops are needed? Israel is not a big country.
Because Israel is actually, you know, vetting humanitarian aid to make sure it actually goes to innocent Palestinian civilians, and there is now pressure from pro-Hamas groups for the US (and other countries) to circumvent this vetting process due to Hamas’ interest in continued access to inverted humanitarian aid.
For decades we have seen the same pattern, where the US (and other companies) fund the UNWRA and other international aid organizations that are heavily connected to Hamas. These aid organizations then turn over a majority of this aid to Hamas (ostensibly because Hamas requires these ‘gifts’ in order to allow the UNWRA/Red Crescent/etc to operate in ‘their’ territory). Hamas then takes this ‘aid’ and sells it to residents at outrageous prices, taking advantage of the desperation of their population in order to fund their goal of eradicating Israel and killing Jews.
So it is a tragic circle where America, often pressured by well meaning people with a limited understanding of the conflict, funds Hamas’ campaign of hate through what is called ‘humanitarian’ aid. Which then leads to increased violence against Jews, which leads to Israel defending itself, which leads to even more ‘humanitarian aid,’ going to Hamas, which leads to…
Shortly after 10/7 Israel decided they needed to end this cycle, and improved systems so that Israel could vet incoming aid and the organizations distributing the aid to Gaza in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of Hamas.
However, bad actors internationally have utilized this new system and protections to carry out a campaign to pressure the US (and other countries) to ignore this system and return to distributing aid through the same channels (with the Hamas connections) as before, or to provide aid via airdrops (which can be easier to intercept by Hamas). This is because Hamas is struggling to maintain their war machine without the ability to basically make money hand over fist by holding the aid captive and stripping Gazans of every last penny in exchange for stale bread. Instead, aid is being provided by Israeli convoys, distributed for free (or for a small fee), often guarded by IDF troops to defend against Hamas raids on supply lines - which is a whole different thing that were regular occurrences.
When you hear how Israel “cut off humanitarian aid,” this is what they are talking about. It is a blatent lie spread by a number of bad faith actors sympathetic with Hamas, and parroted by many well meaning individuals due to their latent anti-Semitic beliefs (“It sounds like something the Jews would do, cheap bastards!”). Israel has never blocked aid to Gaza since the beginning of the war, nor has it ever claimed to want to. It has, however, put protections in place to ensure the aid is actually provided to the Palestinian civilians most desperately in need, and provided for free, rather than to Hamas itself to sell for profit.
Again, this is a great example of how bad actors are praying on people’s lack of understanding about these long-term global affairs to ply a message that is simply not true.
You can disagree with Israel, as a poster who has been regularly called a troll for defending Israel, you have that right. But all anybody is asking is that when you hear someone on TikTok, or Reddit, or here say that “Israel is blocking aid to Israel,” or “Israel wants to force all Gazans into Egypt,” or “Israel is murdering innocent babies and kids,” you also look at Jewish and Israeli voices and sources, and actually evaluate the situation.
This is not saying that every 20-something Tiktoker from Memphis is a Hamas spokesperson, it’s saying that there has been a clear and pervasive effort to reframe the situation utilizing a lot of well meaning people to spread information that, at best, is heavily misleading and at worst are outright lies to play on people’s innate biases against Jewish people.
Again, you can have differing opinions on Israel and the war, it is certainly tragic that it has come to that. I am Jewish, and I have a number of family members in Israel, including several currently serving in the IDF, and we all pray for an end to this war, we all pray for Hamas to put down their weapons, release our hostages, and surrender so we can rebuild, Jew and Palestinian together. But spreading these lies, attacking Israel for defending its people based off a narrative built on TikTok, that will not end the war any faster.
You are full of shit. God what a liar you are.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
Let's hear what's really going on with aid to Gaza, from a longread investigation CNN just completed. For those with only a minute, here's the gist:
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
For months, queues of trucks bound for the enclave have been backed up along the highway leading from the Egyptian town of Arish, a major logistical hub for aid, to the Rafah crossing with Gaza. In a satellite image from February 21, a queue of trucks can be seen stretching out for 4 miles from the crossing.
Most of CNN’s sources requested anonymity for fear, they said, of reprisals and further Israeli restrictions on an already choked aid pipeline.
Several sources said a substantial portion of the donations they handled were either rejected or held up by a long wait for clearance by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, which manages the flow of aid into the strip.
“It is perfectly engineered chaos,” said one CNN source who oversees donations from four different relief organizations at one of the transit routes. Over 15,000 tons of their relief supplies await Israeli approval to enter Gaza, the source said. More than half consists of food items.
“It’s deliberately opaque, deliberately ambiguous,” said another senior humanitarian official. “You can receive clearance from COGAT and arrive to find police or finance and customs officials who will send the truck back.”
In a January 13 press conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about permitting “minimal humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza.
“We provide minimal humanitarian aid,” Netanyahu said. “If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.”
“I’ve never seen a supply chain that ought to be so simple be so complicated,” said Save the Children US president and chief executive Janti Soeripto. “The level of barriers being put in place to hamper humanitarian assistance; we’ve never seen anything like it.”
Soeripto, who visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing with a UN convoy in January, told CNN she saw several items that Israeli inspectors had turned back.
She said toys were rejected because they were in a wooden box rather than a cardboard box, sleeping bags were denied because they had zippers, and sanitary pads were turned back because a nail clipper was included in the hygiene kit.
In January, US Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley saw maternity kits and water filtration systems among the items Israel turned back from its inspection point in Nitzana.
“In no rational world could (these) be deemed dual use or any kind of military threat,” Van Hollen told CNN weeks after his trip to Egypt’s side of the Rafah crossing.
“We learned that when a truck with just one of those items is turned down, the entire truck gets turned around and has to go back to the beginning of the process, which can take weeks,” Van Hollen said.
CNN’s weeks long investigation has documented multiple examples of the erratic process that followed, with officials sometimes falling back on the 2008 guidelines and other times citing them as redundant.
In one instance on February 14, COGAT rejected a truck-load of sleeping bags “because they were the color green, and green means military and according to the 2008 list, military is dual use,” the same humanitarian official told CNN.
Four sources described another incident when Israel rejected a shipment of dates – a rich source of nutrients desperately needed by a hungry population. Two of the sources said it was because the seeds were picked up as a suspicious object in the x-ray inspection imaging.
Donations must pass two COGAT hurdles before entering Gaza. Aid organizations must first get clearance for their shipments from COGAT, then the trucks must clear Israeli inspection points. Items have been rejected at both of those stages, according to CNN’s sources.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
CNN has obtained documents from three major participants in the humanitarian operation that list what they called the “most frequently rejected items.” Among them are essential medical supplies: anesthesia machines and anesthetics, crutches, generators, ventilators, x-ray machines and oxygen cylinders.
For doctors and patients inside Gaza, the implications are excruciating. There are numerous reports of preventable deaths for lack of oxygen and ventilators. Over 1,000 children have undergone leg amputations in Gaza, according to UNICEF, some without anesthesia. That figure was compiled by UNICEF at the end of November and has not been updated since.
Israel’s restrictions have also impacted medicines for the chronically ill. For weeks, COGAT temporarily prevented insulin pens for children with diabetes from entering Gaza, according to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick and one other source.
“On the goods that are being prohibited, it’s a full range,” said McGoldrick in a January 24 press conference. “Some of it is medical material such as basic drugs and material for treating not just trauma but for chronic illnesses.
At one of the waypoints of aid in Jordan, stacked boxes of donations extend for around eight miles, a backlog that would require around a thousand trucks to deliver, Jordan’s charity officials estimate.
I am the PP you are replying to, and calling full of shot.
This is a great example of individuals in the West Deliberately twisting Israel’s security measures into a false reality that tugs at the heartstrings of Westerners with little concept of the situation on the ground and the history of the area. I want to make it clear I do believe your heart is in the right place, so don’t take this as attacking you.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
And the majority of Israelis and Jews do not support protests at checkpoints. Celebrating the current tragedy, by either side, is inarguably wrong. But a small group of traumatized Israelis being radicalized is not an argument against Israel. It should also be noted that such actions have not been sanctioned by the Israeli government, who have been delivering aid despite such actions.
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Logistics takes time. Transportation takes time. Especially when aid convoys require extensive security and coordination due to the fact that Hamas has been targeting aid convoys due to their reliance on aid to fund their ongoing military action. Additionally, finding drivers and other staff willing to operate these convoys has become increasingly difficult due to the risks involved. Struggling to scale up these deliveries does not mean that Israel is refusing to deliver this aid, in fact it demonstrates Israel’s commitment to providing the aid that nobody is denying is neccisary.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
What agencies are these anonymous humanitarian workers representing? Again, Israel is not just handing aid organizations aid so it can get pilfered by Hamas (as is typical), they are leading the charge. So Israel isn’t obstructing aid organizations, they are minimizing their role by design.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
Yes, Israel is worried about aid falling into the hands of Hamas, who have a long history of using ostainably humanitarian aid for military purposes. This goes all the way to digging up water and sewer infrastructure paid for through western and Israeli aid to make missiles.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
All of these are perfectly reasonable to reject. Complex medical equipment (such as ventilators and water filtration systems) are easily broken apart to provide Hamas with vital electronic and other valuable resources. They additionally require specialized experience and qualifications to operate, which is likely not present in Gaza. Certain medicines may be used by Hamas to provide to their soldiers.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
Some of these, as noted in the article, were likely administrative mistakes (I.e. dates). The sleeping bags were explained later as well - they were rejected not because Israel just wants the Palestinians to die of hypothermia, but because the sleeping bags were considered to be of military use under Israeli law due to their color - I.e. if they were bright pink there would not be an issue. Others fall under medical treatments that are not particularly useful due to the collapse of the Gaza medical systems due to Hamas’ actions and had a high probability of being proffered by Hamas to fund their war goals.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. [b]Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
Which is basically what I am saying. Items are denied because they are I currently labeled (by the aid organization, sometimes because of the military implications, and rarely due to administrative failures that are to be expected. Again, the goal is to provide aid to help the Palestinian people, not Hamas.
In short, this just seems to be a bunch of aid organizations- including the UNRWA, an organization directly complicit in 10/7 - complaining that Israel is actually doing what is in their best interests by vetting aid entering a war zone and cutting out the Hamas middlemen that previously played a leading role in aid shipments. It also ignores the basic fact that far more aid is entering Gaza today then prior to 10/7, which is when all these aid organizations are looking at when complaining. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47828
How does it feel trying to justify a strategy of intentional starvation?
Smotrich has been very open about what he has been doing.
I’m curious that the pro-Israel supporters are claiming that Hamas is grabbing all the humanitarian aid and that is why Israel is stopping the aid from reaching Gaza and mass starvation is an unfortunate byproduct.
Are you implying that with months of bombing and destruction by Israel, Hamas is still strong enough in Gaza to be controlling logistics in the open in broad daylight? Is IDF completely incompetent? What has months of relentless destruction achieved then if Hamas is still running everything? Or has IDF just been killing innocent civilians and has barely weakened Hamas?
Anonymous wrote:I’m curious that the pro-Israel supporters are claiming that Hamas is grabbing all the humanitarian aid and that is why Israel is stopping the aid from reaching Gaza and mass starvation is an unfortunate byproduct.
Are you implying that with months of bombing and destruction by Israel, Hamas is still strong enough in Gaza to be controlling logistics in the open in broad daylight? Is IDF completely incompetent? What has months of relentless destruction achieved then if Hamas is still running everything? Or has IDF just been killing innocent civilians and has barely weakened Hamas?
Anonymous wrote:I see that multiple countries are doing or proposing airdrops into Gaza. I’m confused. Doesn’t Israel have ports and trucks? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier if the U.S. and other countries simply ship supplies to Israeli ports and they are the two rifles to Gaza? Can someone explain why expensive airdrops are needed? Israel is not a big country.
Because Israel is actually, you know, vetting humanitarian aid to make sure it actually goes to innocent Palestinian civilians, and there is now pressure from pro-Hamas groups for the US (and other countries) to circumvent this vetting process due to Hamas’ interest in continued access to inverted humanitarian aid.
For decades we have seen the same pattern, where the US (and other companies) fund the UNWRA and other international aid organizations that are heavily connected to Hamas. These aid organizations then turn over a majority of this aid to Hamas (ostensibly because Hamas requires these ‘gifts’ in order to allow the UNWRA/Red Crescent/etc to operate in ‘their’ territory). Hamas then takes this ‘aid’ and sells it to residents at outrageous prices, taking advantage of the desperation of their population in order to fund their goal of eradicating Israel and killing Jews.
So it is a tragic circle where America, often pressured by well meaning people with a limited understanding of the conflict, funds Hamas’ campaign of hate through what is called ‘humanitarian’ aid. Which then leads to increased violence against Jews, which leads to Israel defending itself, which leads to even more ‘humanitarian aid,’ going to Hamas, which leads to…
Shortly after 10/7 Israel decided they needed to end this cycle, and improved systems so that Israel could vet incoming aid and the organizations distributing the aid to Gaza in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of Hamas.
However, bad actors internationally have utilized this new system and protections to carry out a campaign to pressure the US (and other countries) to ignore this system and return to distributing aid through the same channels (with the Hamas connections) as before, or to provide aid via airdrops (which can be easier to intercept by Hamas). This is because Hamas is struggling to maintain their war machine without the ability to basically make money hand over fist by holding the aid captive and stripping Gazans of every last penny in exchange for stale bread. Instead, aid is being provided by Israeli convoys, distributed for free (or for a small fee), often guarded by IDF troops to defend against Hamas raids on supply lines - which is a whole different thing that were regular occurrences.
When you hear how Israel “cut off humanitarian aid,” this is what they are talking about. It is a blatent lie spread by a number of bad faith actors sympathetic with Hamas, and parroted by many well meaning individuals due to their latent anti-Semitic beliefs (“It sounds like something the Jews would do, cheap bastards!”). Israel has never blocked aid to Gaza since the beginning of the war, nor has it ever claimed to want to. It has, however, put protections in place to ensure the aid is actually provided to the Palestinian civilians most desperately in need, and provided for free, rather than to Hamas itself to sell for profit.
Again, this is a great example of how bad actors are praying on people’s lack of understanding about these long-term global affairs to ply a message that is simply not true.
You can disagree with Israel, as a poster who has been regularly called a troll for defending Israel, you have that right. But all anybody is asking is that when you hear someone on TikTok, or Reddit, or here say that “Israel is blocking aid to Israel,” or “Israel wants to force all Gazans into Egypt,” or “Israel is murdering innocent babies and kids,” you also look at Jewish and Israeli voices and sources, and actually evaluate the situation.
This is not saying that every 20-something Tiktoker from Memphis is a Hamas spokesperson, it’s saying that there has been a clear and pervasive effort to reframe the situation utilizing a lot of well meaning people to spread information that, at best, is heavily misleading and at worst are outright lies to play on people’s innate biases against Jewish people.
Again, you can have differing opinions on Israel and the war, it is certainly tragic that it has come to that. I am Jewish, and I have a number of family members in Israel, including several currently serving in the IDF, and we all pray for an end to this war, we all pray for Hamas to put down their weapons, release our hostages, and surrender so we can rebuild, Jew and Palestinian together. But spreading these lies, attacking Israel for defending its people based off a narrative built on TikTok, that will not end the war any faster.
You are full of shit. God what a liar you are.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
Let's hear what's really going on with aid to Gaza, from a longread investigation CNN just completed. For those with only a minute, here's the gist:
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
For months, queues of trucks bound for the enclave have been backed up along the highway leading from the Egyptian town of Arish, a major logistical hub for aid, to the Rafah crossing with Gaza. In a satellite image from February 21, a queue of trucks can be seen stretching out for 4 miles from the crossing.
Most of CNN’s sources requested anonymity for fear, they said, of reprisals and further Israeli restrictions on an already choked aid pipeline.
Several sources said a substantial portion of the donations they handled were either rejected or held up by a long wait for clearance by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, which manages the flow of aid into the strip.
“It is perfectly engineered chaos,” said one CNN source who oversees donations from four different relief organizations at one of the transit routes. Over 15,000 tons of their relief supplies await Israeli approval to enter Gaza, the source said. More than half consists of food items.
“It’s deliberately opaque, deliberately ambiguous,” said another senior humanitarian official. “You can receive clearance from COGAT and arrive to find police or finance and customs officials who will send the truck back.”
In a January 13 press conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about permitting “minimal humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza.
“We provide minimal humanitarian aid,” Netanyahu said. “If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.”
“I’ve never seen a supply chain that ought to be so simple be so complicated,” said Save the Children US president and chief executive Janti Soeripto. “The level of barriers being put in place to hamper humanitarian assistance; we’ve never seen anything like it.”
Soeripto, who visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing with a UN convoy in January, told CNN she saw several items that Israeli inspectors had turned back.
She said toys were rejected because they were in a wooden box rather than a cardboard box, sleeping bags were denied because they had zippers, and sanitary pads were turned back because a nail clipper was included in the hygiene kit.
In January, US Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley saw maternity kits and water filtration systems among the items Israel turned back from its inspection point in Nitzana.
“In no rational world could (these) be deemed dual use or any kind of military threat,” Van Hollen told CNN weeks after his trip to Egypt’s side of the Rafah crossing.
“We learned that when a truck with just one of those items is turned down, the entire truck gets turned around and has to go back to the beginning of the process, which can take weeks,” Van Hollen said.
CNN’s weeks long investigation has documented multiple examples of the erratic process that followed, with officials sometimes falling back on the 2008 guidelines and other times citing them as redundant.
In one instance on February 14, COGAT rejected a truck-load of sleeping bags “because they were the color green, and green means military and according to the 2008 list, military is dual use,” the same humanitarian official told CNN.
Four sources described another incident when Israel rejected a shipment of dates – a rich source of nutrients desperately needed by a hungry population. Two of the sources said it was because the seeds were picked up as a suspicious object in the x-ray inspection imaging.
Donations must pass two COGAT hurdles before entering Gaza. Aid organizations must first get clearance for their shipments from COGAT, then the trucks must clear Israeli inspection points. Items have been rejected at both of those stages, according to CNN’s sources.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
CNN has obtained documents from three major participants in the humanitarian operation that list what they called the “most frequently rejected items.” Among them are essential medical supplies: anesthesia machines and anesthetics, crutches, generators, ventilators, x-ray machines and oxygen cylinders.
For doctors and patients inside Gaza, the implications are excruciating. There are numerous reports of preventable deaths for lack of oxygen and ventilators. Over 1,000 children have undergone leg amputations in Gaza, according to UNICEF, some without anesthesia. That figure was compiled by UNICEF at the end of November and has not been updated since.
Israel’s restrictions have also impacted medicines for the chronically ill. For weeks, COGAT temporarily prevented insulin pens for children with diabetes from entering Gaza, according to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick and one other source.
“On the goods that are being prohibited, it’s a full range,” said McGoldrick in a January 24 press conference. “Some of it is medical material such as basic drugs and material for treating not just trauma but for chronic illnesses.
At one of the waypoints of aid in Jordan, stacked boxes of donations extend for around eight miles, a backlog that would require around a thousand trucks to deliver, Jordan’s charity officials estimate.
I am the PP you are replying to, and calling full of shot.
This is a great example of individuals in the West Deliberately twisting Israel’s security measures into a false reality that tugs at the heartstrings of Westerners with little concept of the situation on the ground and the history of the area. I want to make it clear I do believe your heart is in the right place, so don’t take this as attacking you.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
And the majority of Israelis and Jews do not support protests at checkpoints. Celebrating the current tragedy, by either side, is inarguably wrong. But a small group of traumatized Israelis being radicalized is not an argument against Israel. It should also be noted that such actions have not been sanctioned by the Israeli government, who have been delivering aid despite such actions.
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Logistics takes time. Transportation takes time. Especially when aid convoys require extensive security and coordination due to the fact that Hamas has been targeting aid convoys due to their reliance on aid to fund their ongoing military action. Additionally, finding drivers and other staff willing to operate these convoys has become increasingly difficult due to the risks involved. Struggling to scale up these deliveries does not mean that Israel is refusing to deliver this aid, in fact it demonstrates Israel’s commitment to providing the aid that nobody is denying is neccisary.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
What agencies are these anonymous humanitarian workers representing? Again, Israel is not just handing aid organizations aid so it can get pilfered by Hamas (as is typical), they are leading the charge. So Israel isn’t obstructing aid organizations, they are minimizing their role by design.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
Yes, Israel is worried about aid falling into the hands of Hamas, who have a long history of using ostainably humanitarian aid for military purposes. This goes all the way to digging up water and sewer infrastructure paid for through western and Israeli aid to make missiles.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
All of these are perfectly reasonable to reject. Complex medical equipment (such as ventilators and water filtration systems) are easily broken apart to provide Hamas with vital electronic and other valuable resources. They additionally require specialized experience and qualifications to operate, which is likely not present in Gaza. Certain medicines may be used by Hamas to provide to their soldiers.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
Some of these, as noted in the article, were likely administrative mistakes (I.e. dates). The sleeping bags were explained later as well - they were rejected not because Israel just wants the Palestinians to die of hypothermia, but because the sleeping bags were considered to be of military use under Israeli law due to their color - I.e. if they were bright pink there would not be an issue. Others fall under medical treatments that are not particularly useful due to the collapse of the Gaza medical systems due to Hamas’ actions and had a high probability of being proffered by Hamas to fund their war goals.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. [b]Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
Which is basically what I am saying. Items are denied because they are I currently labeled (by the aid organization, sometimes because of the military implications, and rarely due to administrative failures that are to be expected. Again, the goal is to provide aid to help the Palestinian people, not Hamas.
In short, this just seems to be a bunch of aid organizations- including the UNRWA, an organization directly complicit in 10/7 - complaining that Israel is actually doing what is in their best interests by vetting aid entering a war zone and cutting out the Hamas middlemen that previously played a leading role in aid shipments. It also ignores the basic fact that far more aid is entering Gaza today then prior to 10/7, which is when all these aid organizations are looking at when complaining. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47828
Oh my stars. Can some pro Israel Jewish American on this thread please step in and tell me that this person is not representative of the community? Because this level of normalization of clearly problematic behavior is scary if it’s widespread.
Anonymous wrote:I’m curious that the pro-Israel supporters are claiming that Hamas is grabbing all the humanitarian aid and that is why Israel is stopping the aid from reaching Gaza and mass starvation is an unfortunate byproduct.
Are you implying that with months of bombing and destruction by Israel, Hamas is still strong enough in Gaza to be controlling logistics in the open in broad daylight? Is IDF completely incompetent? What has months of relentless destruction achieved then if Hamas is still running everything? Or has IDF just been killing innocent civilians and has barely weakened Hamas?
Bibi and his entire IDF entourage are incompetent thugs but unfortunately the US is blindly supporting them. This will not end well for anyone including the Israelis and Biden’s failure of leadership will be noted in the history books
Anonymous wrote:I see that multiple countries are doing or proposing airdrops into Gaza. I’m confused. Doesn’t Israel have ports and trucks? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier if the U.S. and other countries simply ship supplies to Israeli ports and they are the two rifles to Gaza? Can someone explain why expensive airdrops are needed? Israel is not a big country.
Because Israel is actually, you know, vetting humanitarian aid to make sure it actually goes to innocent Palestinian civilians, and there is now pressure from pro-Hamas groups for the US (and other countries) to circumvent this vetting process due to Hamas’ interest in continued access to inverted humanitarian aid.
For decades we have seen the same pattern, where the US (and other companies) fund the UNWRA and other international aid organizations that are heavily connected to Hamas. These aid organizations then turn over a majority of this aid to Hamas (ostensibly because Hamas requires these ‘gifts’ in order to allow the UNWRA/Red Crescent/etc to operate in ‘their’ territory). Hamas then takes this ‘aid’ and sells it to residents at outrageous prices, taking advantage of the desperation of their population in order to fund their goal of eradicating Israel and killing Jews.
So it is a tragic circle where America, often pressured by well meaning people with a limited understanding of the conflict, funds Hamas’ campaign of hate through what is called ‘humanitarian’ aid. Which then leads to increased violence against Jews, which leads to Israel defending itself, which leads to even more ‘humanitarian aid,’ going to Hamas, which leads to…
Shortly after 10/7 Israel decided they needed to end this cycle, and improved systems so that Israel could vet incoming aid and the organizations distributing the aid to Gaza in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of Hamas.
However, bad actors internationally have utilized this new system and protections to carry out a campaign to pressure the US (and other countries) to ignore this system and return to distributing aid through the same channels (with the Hamas connections) as before, or to provide aid via airdrops (which can be easier to intercept by Hamas). This is because Hamas is struggling to maintain their war machine without the ability to basically make money hand over fist by holding the aid captive and stripping Gazans of every last penny in exchange for stale bread. Instead, aid is being provided by Israeli convoys, distributed for free (or for a small fee), often guarded by IDF troops to defend against Hamas raids on supply lines - which is a whole different thing that were regular occurrences.
When you hear how Israel “cut off humanitarian aid,” this is what they are talking about. It is a blatent lie spread by a number of bad faith actors sympathetic with Hamas, and parroted by many well meaning individuals due to their latent anti-Semitic beliefs (“It sounds like something the Jews would do, cheap bastards!”). Israel has never blocked aid to Gaza since the beginning of the war, nor has it ever claimed to want to. It has, however, put protections in place to ensure the aid is actually provided to the Palestinian civilians most desperately in need, and provided for free, rather than to Hamas itself to sell for profit.
Again, this is a great example of how bad actors are praying on people’s lack of understanding about these long-term global affairs to ply a message that is simply not true.
You can disagree with Israel, as a poster who has been regularly called a troll for defending Israel, you have that right. But all anybody is asking is that when you hear someone on TikTok, or Reddit, or here say that “Israel is blocking aid to Israel,” or “Israel wants to force all Gazans into Egypt,” or “Israel is murdering innocent babies and kids,” you also look at Jewish and Israeli voices and sources, and actually evaluate the situation.
This is not saying that every 20-something Tiktoker from Memphis is a Hamas spokesperson, it’s saying that there has been a clear and pervasive effort to reframe the situation utilizing a lot of well meaning people to spread information that, at best, is heavily misleading and at worst are outright lies to play on people’s innate biases against Jewish people.
Again, you can have differing opinions on Israel and the war, it is certainly tragic that it has come to that. I am Jewish, and I have a number of family members in Israel, including several currently serving in the IDF, and we all pray for an end to this war, we all pray for Hamas to put down their weapons, release our hostages, and surrender so we can rebuild, Jew and Palestinian together. But spreading these lies, attacking Israel for defending its people based off a narrative built on TikTok, that will not end the war any faster.
You are full of shit. God what a liar you are.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
Let's hear what's really going on with aid to Gaza, from a longread investigation CNN just completed. For those with only a minute, here's the gist:
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
For months, queues of trucks bound for the enclave have been backed up along the highway leading from the Egyptian town of Arish, a major logistical hub for aid, to the Rafah crossing with Gaza. In a satellite image from February 21, a queue of trucks can be seen stretching out for 4 miles from the crossing.
Most of CNN’s sources requested anonymity for fear, they said, of reprisals and further Israeli restrictions on an already choked aid pipeline.
Several sources said a substantial portion of the donations they handled were either rejected or held up by a long wait for clearance by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, which manages the flow of aid into the strip.
“It is perfectly engineered chaos,” said one CNN source who oversees donations from four different relief organizations at one of the transit routes. Over 15,000 tons of their relief supplies await Israeli approval to enter Gaza, the source said. More than half consists of food items.
“It’s deliberately opaque, deliberately ambiguous,” said another senior humanitarian official. “You can receive clearance from COGAT and arrive to find police or finance and customs officials who will send the truck back.”
In a January 13 press conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about permitting “minimal humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza.
“We provide minimal humanitarian aid,” Netanyahu said. “If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.”
“I’ve never seen a supply chain that ought to be so simple be so complicated,” said Save the Children US president and chief executive Janti Soeripto. “The level of barriers being put in place to hamper humanitarian assistance; we’ve never seen anything like it.”
Soeripto, who visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing with a UN convoy in January, told CNN she saw several items that Israeli inspectors had turned back.
She said toys were rejected because they were in a wooden box rather than a cardboard box, sleeping bags were denied because they had zippers, and sanitary pads were turned back because a nail clipper was included in the hygiene kit.
In January, US Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley saw maternity kits and water filtration systems among the items Israel turned back from its inspection point in Nitzana.
“In no rational world could (these) be deemed dual use or any kind of military threat,” Van Hollen told CNN weeks after his trip to Egypt’s side of the Rafah crossing.
“We learned that when a truck with just one of those items is turned down, the entire truck gets turned around and has to go back to the beginning of the process, which can take weeks,” Van Hollen said.
CNN’s weeks long investigation has documented multiple examples of the erratic process that followed, with officials sometimes falling back on the 2008 guidelines and other times citing them as redundant.
In one instance on February 14, COGAT rejected a truck-load of sleeping bags “because they were the color green, and green means military and according to the 2008 list, military is dual use,” the same humanitarian official told CNN.
Four sources described another incident when Israel rejected a shipment of dates – a rich source of nutrients desperately needed by a hungry population. Two of the sources said it was because the seeds were picked up as a suspicious object in the x-ray inspection imaging.
Donations must pass two COGAT hurdles before entering Gaza. Aid organizations must first get clearance for their shipments from COGAT, then the trucks must clear Israeli inspection points. Items have been rejected at both of those stages, according to CNN’s sources.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
CNN has obtained documents from three major participants in the humanitarian operation that list what they called the “most frequently rejected items.” Among them are essential medical supplies: anesthesia machines and anesthetics, crutches, generators, ventilators, x-ray machines and oxygen cylinders.
For doctors and patients inside Gaza, the implications are excruciating. There are numerous reports of preventable deaths for lack of oxygen and ventilators. Over 1,000 children have undergone leg amputations in Gaza, according to UNICEF, some without anesthesia. That figure was compiled by UNICEF at the end of November and has not been updated since.
Israel’s restrictions have also impacted medicines for the chronically ill. For weeks, COGAT temporarily prevented insulin pens for children with diabetes from entering Gaza, according to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick and one other source.
“On the goods that are being prohibited, it’s a full range,” said McGoldrick in a January 24 press conference. “Some of it is medical material such as basic drugs and material for treating not just trauma but for chronic illnesses.
At one of the waypoints of aid in Jordan, stacked boxes of donations extend for around eight miles, a backlog that would require around a thousand trucks to deliver, Jordan’s charity officials estimate.
I am the PP you are replying to, and calling full of shot.
This is a great example of individuals in the West Deliberately twisting Israel’s security measures into a false reality that tugs at the heartstrings of Westerners with little concept of the situation on the ground and the history of the area. I want to make it clear I do believe your heart is in the right place, so don’t take this as attacking you.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
And the majority of Israelis and Jews do not support protests at checkpoints. Celebrating the current tragedy, by either side, is inarguably wrong. But a small group of traumatized Israelis being radicalized is not an argument against Israel. It should also be noted that such actions have not been sanctioned by the Israeli government, who have been delivering aid despite such actions.
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Logistics takes time. Transportation takes time. Especially when aid convoys require extensive security and coordination due to the fact that Hamas has been targeting aid convoys due to their reliance on aid to fund their ongoing military action. Additionally, finding drivers and other staff willing to operate these convoys has become increasingly difficult due to the risks involved. Struggling to scale up these deliveries does not mean that Israel is refusing to deliver this aid, in fact it demonstrates Israel’s commitment to providing the aid that nobody is denying is neccisary.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
What agencies are these anonymous humanitarian workers representing? Again, Israel is not just handing aid organizations aid so it can get pilfered by Hamas (as is typical), they are leading the charge. So Israel isn’t obstructing aid organizations, they are minimizing their role by design.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
Yes, Israel is worried about aid falling into the hands of Hamas, who have a long history of using ostainably humanitarian aid for military purposes. This goes all the way to digging up water and sewer infrastructure paid for through western and Israeli aid to make missiles.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
All of these are perfectly reasonable to reject. Complex medical equipment (such as ventilators and water filtration systems) are easily broken apart to provide Hamas with vital electronic and other valuable resources. They additionally require specialized experience and qualifications to operate, which is likely not present in Gaza. Certain medicines may be used by Hamas to provide to their soldiers.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
Some of these, as noted in the article, were likely administrative mistakes (I.e. dates). The sleeping bags were explained later as well - they were rejected not because Israel just wants the Palestinians to die of hypothermia, but because the sleeping bags were considered to be of military use under Israeli law due to their color - I.e. if they were bright pink there would not be an issue. Others fall under medical treatments that are not particularly useful due to the collapse of the Gaza medical systems due to Hamas’ actions and had a high probability of being proffered by Hamas to fund their war goals.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. [b]Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
Which is basically what I am saying. Items are denied because they are I currently labeled (by the aid organization, sometimes because of the military implications, and rarely due to administrative failures that are to be expected. Again, the goal is to provide aid to help the Palestinian people, not Hamas.
In short, this just seems to be a bunch of aid organizations- including the UNRWA, an organization directly complicit in 10/7 - complaining that Israel is actually doing what is in their best interests by vetting aid entering a war zone and cutting out the Hamas middlemen that previously played a leading role in aid shipments. It also ignores the basic fact that far more aid is entering Gaza today then prior to 10/7, which is when all these aid organizations are looking at when complaining. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47828
Oh my stars. Can some pro Israel Jewish American on this thread please step in and tell me that this person is not representative of the community? Because this level of normalization of clearly problematic behavior is scary if it’s widespread.
Agreed. The mental gymnastics to justify everything that Israel does is scary.
Anonymous wrote:I’m curious that the pro-Israel supporters are claiming that Hamas is grabbing all the humanitarian aid and that is why Israel is stopping the aid from reaching Gaza and mass starvation is an unfortunate byproduct.
Are you implying that with months of bombing and destruction by Israel, Hamas is still strong enough in Gaza to be controlling logistics in the open in broad daylight? Is IDF completely incompetent? What has months of relentless destruction achieved then if Hamas is still running everything? Or has IDF just been killing innocent civilians and has barely weakened Hamas?
I personally do not know if Hamas is strong enough to follow through any more. You are right, Israel’s mission has been very successful.
All anyone can say is the established facts, and that is that Hamas has utilized humanitarian aid for decades to fund their genocidal plans against Israel and further cement their power, and that the traditional aid organizations (UNWRA/Red Crescent/etc) have typically facilitated this cycle, typically due to misguided altruism believing that dealing with Hamas is necessary to do “the greater good.”
Israel is tired of Western dollars being used to kill their residents and prolong their suffering.
Anonymous wrote:I see that multiple countries are doing or proposing airdrops into Gaza. I’m confused. Doesn’t Israel have ports and trucks? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier if the U.S. and other countries simply ship supplies to Israeli ports and they are the two rifles to Gaza? Can someone explain why expensive airdrops are needed? Israel is not a big country.
Because Israel is actually, you know, vetting humanitarian aid to make sure it actually goes to innocent Palestinian civilians, and there is now pressure from pro-Hamas groups for the US (and other countries) to circumvent this vetting process due to Hamas’ interest in continued access to inverted humanitarian aid.
For decades we have seen the same pattern, where the US (and other companies) fund the UNWRA and other international aid organizations that are heavily connected to Hamas. These aid organizations then turn over a majority of this aid to Hamas (ostensibly because Hamas requires these ‘gifts’ in order to allow the UNWRA/Red Crescent/etc to operate in ‘their’ territory). Hamas then takes this ‘aid’ and sells it to residents at outrageous prices, taking advantage of the desperation of their population in order to fund their goal of eradicating Israel and killing Jews.
So it is a tragic circle where America, often pressured by well meaning people with a limited understanding of the conflict, funds Hamas’ campaign of hate through what is called ‘humanitarian’ aid. Which then leads to increased violence against Jews, which leads to Israel defending itself, which leads to even more ‘humanitarian aid,’ going to Hamas, which leads to…
Shortly after 10/7 Israel decided they needed to end this cycle, and improved systems so that Israel could vet incoming aid and the organizations distributing the aid to Gaza in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of Hamas.
However, bad actors internationally have utilized this new system and protections to carry out a campaign to pressure the US (and other countries) to ignore this system and return to distributing aid through the same channels (with the Hamas connections) as before, or to provide aid via airdrops (which can be easier to intercept by Hamas). This is because Hamas is struggling to maintain their war machine without the ability to basically make money hand over fist by holding the aid captive and stripping Gazans of every last penny in exchange for stale bread. Instead, aid is being provided by Israeli convoys, distributed for free (or for a small fee), often guarded by IDF troops to defend against Hamas raids on supply lines - which is a whole different thing that were regular occurrences.
When you hear how Israel “cut off humanitarian aid,” this is what they are talking about. It is a blatent lie spread by a number of bad faith actors sympathetic with Hamas, and parroted by many well meaning individuals due to their latent anti-Semitic beliefs (“It sounds like something the Jews would do, cheap bastards!”). Israel has never blocked aid to Gaza since the beginning of the war, nor has it ever claimed to want to. It has, however, put protections in place to ensure the aid is actually provided to the Palestinian civilians most desperately in need, and provided for free, rather than to Hamas itself to sell for profit.
Again, this is a great example of how bad actors are praying on people’s lack of understanding about these long-term global affairs to ply a message that is simply not true.
You can disagree with Israel, as a poster who has been regularly called a troll for defending Israel, you have that right. But all anybody is asking is that when you hear someone on TikTok, or Reddit, or here say that “Israel is blocking aid to Israel,” or “Israel wants to force all Gazans into Egypt,” or “Israel is murdering innocent babies and kids,” you also look at Jewish and Israeli voices and sources, and actually evaluate the situation.
This is not saying that every 20-something Tiktoker from Memphis is a Hamas spokesperson, it’s saying that there has been a clear and pervasive effort to reframe the situation utilizing a lot of well meaning people to spread information that, at best, is heavily misleading and at worst are outright lies to play on people’s innate biases against Jewish people.
Again, you can have differing opinions on Israel and the war, it is certainly tragic that it has come to that. I am Jewish, and I have a number of family members in Israel, including several currently serving in the IDF, and we all pray for an end to this war, we all pray for Hamas to put down their weapons, release our hostages, and surrender so we can rebuild, Jew and Palestinian together. But spreading these lies, attacking Israel for defending its people based off a narrative built on TikTok, that will not end the war any faster.
You are full of shit. God what a liar you are.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
Let's hear what's really going on with aid to Gaza, from a longread investigation CNN just completed. For those with only a minute, here's the gist:
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
For months, queues of trucks bound for the enclave have been backed up along the highway leading from the Egyptian town of Arish, a major logistical hub for aid, to the Rafah crossing with Gaza. In a satellite image from February 21, a queue of trucks can be seen stretching out for 4 miles from the crossing.
Most of CNN’s sources requested anonymity for fear, they said, of reprisals and further Israeli restrictions on an already choked aid pipeline.
Several sources said a substantial portion of the donations they handled were either rejected or held up by a long wait for clearance by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, which manages the flow of aid into the strip.
“It is perfectly engineered chaos,” said one CNN source who oversees donations from four different relief organizations at one of the transit routes. Over 15,000 tons of their relief supplies await Israeli approval to enter Gaza, the source said. More than half consists of food items.
“It’s deliberately opaque, deliberately ambiguous,” said another senior humanitarian official. “You can receive clearance from COGAT and arrive to find police or finance and customs officials who will send the truck back.”
In a January 13 press conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about permitting “minimal humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza.
“We provide minimal humanitarian aid,” Netanyahu said. “If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.”
“I’ve never seen a supply chain that ought to be so simple be so complicated,” said Save the Children US president and chief executive Janti Soeripto. “The level of barriers being put in place to hamper humanitarian assistance; we’ve never seen anything like it.”
Soeripto, who visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing with a UN convoy in January, told CNN she saw several items that Israeli inspectors had turned back.
She said toys were rejected because they were in a wooden box rather than a cardboard box, sleeping bags were denied because they had zippers, and sanitary pads were turned back because a nail clipper was included in the hygiene kit.
In January, US Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley saw maternity kits and water filtration systems among the items Israel turned back from its inspection point in Nitzana.
“In no rational world could (these) be deemed dual use or any kind of military threat,” Van Hollen told CNN weeks after his trip to Egypt’s side of the Rafah crossing.
“We learned that when a truck with just one of those items is turned down, the entire truck gets turned around and has to go back to the beginning of the process, which can take weeks,” Van Hollen said.
CNN’s weeks long investigation has documented multiple examples of the erratic process that followed, with officials sometimes falling back on the 2008 guidelines and other times citing them as redundant.
In one instance on February 14, COGAT rejected a truck-load of sleeping bags “because they were the color green, and green means military and according to the 2008 list, military is dual use,” the same humanitarian official told CNN.
Four sources described another incident when Israel rejected a shipment of dates – a rich source of nutrients desperately needed by a hungry population. Two of the sources said it was because the seeds were picked up as a suspicious object in the x-ray inspection imaging.
Donations must pass two COGAT hurdles before entering Gaza. Aid organizations must first get clearance for their shipments from COGAT, then the trucks must clear Israeli inspection points. Items have been rejected at both of those stages, according to CNN’s sources.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
CNN has obtained documents from three major participants in the humanitarian operation that list what they called the “most frequently rejected items.” Among them are essential medical supplies: anesthesia machines and anesthetics, crutches, generators, ventilators, x-ray machines and oxygen cylinders.
For doctors and patients inside Gaza, the implications are excruciating. There are numerous reports of preventable deaths for lack of oxygen and ventilators. Over 1,000 children have undergone leg amputations in Gaza, according to UNICEF, some without anesthesia. That figure was compiled by UNICEF at the end of November and has not been updated since.
Israel’s restrictions have also impacted medicines for the chronically ill. For weeks, COGAT temporarily prevented insulin pens for children with diabetes from entering Gaza, according to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick and one other source.
“On the goods that are being prohibited, it’s a full range,” said McGoldrick in a January 24 press conference. “Some of it is medical material such as basic drugs and material for treating not just trauma but for chronic illnesses.
At one of the waypoints of aid in Jordan, stacked boxes of donations extend for around eight miles, a backlog that would require around a thousand trucks to deliver, Jordan’s charity officials estimate.
I am the PP you are replying to, and calling full of shot.
This is a great example of individuals in the West Deliberately twisting Israel’s security measures into a false reality that tugs at the heartstrings of Westerners with little concept of the situation on the ground and the history of the area. I want to make it clear I do believe your heart is in the right place, so don’t take this as attacking you.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
And the majority of Israelis and Jews do not support protests at checkpoints. Celebrating the current tragedy, by either side, is inarguably wrong. But a small group of traumatized Israelis being radicalized is not an argument against Israel. It should also be noted that such actions have not been sanctioned by the Israeli government, who have been delivering aid despite such actions.
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Logistics takes time. Transportation takes time. Especially when aid convoys require extensive security and coordination due to the fact that Hamas has been targeting aid convoys due to their reliance on aid to fund their ongoing military action. Additionally, finding drivers and other staff willing to operate these convoys has become increasingly difficult due to the risks involved. Struggling to scale up these deliveries does not mean that Israel is refusing to deliver this aid, in fact it demonstrates Israel’s commitment to providing the aid that nobody is denying is neccisary.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
What agencies are these anonymous humanitarian workers representing? Again, Israel is not just handing aid organizations aid so it can get pilfered by Hamas (as is typical), they are leading the charge. So Israel isn’t obstructing aid organizations, they are minimizing their role by design.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
Yes, Israel is worried about aid falling into the hands of Hamas, who have a long history of using ostainably humanitarian aid for military purposes. This goes all the way to digging up water and sewer infrastructure paid for through western and Israeli aid to make missiles.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
All of these are perfectly reasonable to reject. Complex medical equipment (such as ventilators and water filtration systems) are easily broken apart to provide Hamas with vital electronic and other valuable resources. They additionally require specialized experience and qualifications to operate, which is likely not present in Gaza. Certain medicines may be used by Hamas to provide to their soldiers.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
Some of these, as noted in the article, were likely administrative mistakes (I.e. dates). The sleeping bags were explained later as well - they were rejected not because Israel just wants the Palestinians to die of hypothermia, but because the sleeping bags were considered to be of military use under Israeli law due to their color - I.e. if they were bright pink there would not be an issue. Others fall under medical treatments that are not particularly useful due to the collapse of the Gaza medical systems due to Hamas’ actions and had a high probability of being proffered by Hamas to fund their war goals.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. [b]Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
Which is basically what I am saying. Items are denied because they are I currently labeled (by the aid organization, sometimes because of the military implications, and rarely due to administrative failures that are to be expected. Again, the goal is to provide aid to help the Palestinian people, not Hamas.
In short, this just seems to be a bunch of aid organizations- including the UNRWA, an organization directly complicit in 10/7 - complaining that Israel is actually doing what is in their best interests by vetting aid entering a war zone and cutting out the Hamas middlemen that previously played a leading role in aid shipments. It also ignores the basic fact that far more aid is entering Gaza today then prior to 10/7, which is when all these aid organizations are looking at when complaining. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47828
Civilized people SHOULD be relentlessly up in arms if any of your excuses are used to dismiss the human tragedy happening in Gaza right now - which has been caused by Israel, and Israel alone. But instead you’re defending them …
Can you imagine the horror if the Armenian or Jewish holocausts were occurring today, everybody was fully aware of the extent of the genocidal acts, and someone said “Well, those sleeping bags are the wrong color and those dates have seeds, so we can’t allow those items to aid these victims of human tragedy; plus that medicine and medical equipment might be misappropriated, so that has the be blocked, too”?
Wtf … at this point, the pent up feeling for A LOT of people have that maybe Israel doesn’t actually deserve to exist in its current form are starting to harden hearts - including the hearts of those willing to look the other way at Israeli bad conduct in the past. This is too far.
Thankful to say the Israelis are NOT committing genocide and if you actually knew anything about the Holocaust and spoken to any survivors—like my parents—you would know the difference.
Anonymous wrote:I’m curious that the pro-Israel supporters are claiming that Hamas is grabbing all the humanitarian aid and that is why Israel is stopping the aid from reaching Gaza and mass starvation is an unfortunate byproduct.
Are you implying that with months of bombing and destruction by Israel, Hamas is still strong enough in Gaza to be controlling logistics in the open in broad daylight? Is IDF completely incompetent? What has months of relentless destruction achieved then if Hamas is still running everything? Or has IDF just been killing innocent civilians and has barely weakened Hamas?
I personally do not know if Hamas is strong enough to follow through any more. You are right, Israel’s mission has been very successful.
All anyone can say is the established facts, and that is that Hamas has utilized humanitarian aid for decades to fund their genocidal plans against Israel and further cement their power, and that the traditional aid organizations (UNWRA/Red Crescent/etc) have typically facilitated this cycle, typically due to misguided altruism believing that dealing with Hamas is necessary to do “the greater good.”
Israel is tired of Western dollars being used to kill their residents and prolong their suffering.
Anonymous wrote:I’m curious that the pro-Israel supporters are claiming that Hamas is grabbing all the humanitarian aid and that is why Israel is stopping the aid from reaching Gaza and mass starvation is an unfortunate byproduct.
Are you implying that with months of bombing and destruction by Israel, Hamas is still strong enough in Gaza to be controlling logistics in the open in broad daylight? Is IDF completely incompetent? What has months of relentless destruction achieved then if Hamas is still running everything? Or has IDF just been killing innocent civilians and has barely weakened Hamas?
I personally do not know if Hamas is strong enough to follow through any more. You are right, Israel’s mission has been very successful.
All anyone can say is the established facts, and that is that Hamas has utilized humanitarian aid for decades to fund their genocidal plans against Israel and further cement their power, and that the traditional aid organizations (UNWRA/Red Crescent/etc) have typically facilitated this cycle, typically due to misguided altruism believing that dealing with Hamas is necessary to do “the greater good.”
Israel is tired of Western dollars being used to kill their residents and prolong their suffering.
Anonymous wrote:I see that multiple countries are doing or proposing airdrops into Gaza. I’m confused. Doesn’t Israel have ports and trucks? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier if the U.S. and other countries simply ship supplies to Israeli ports and they are the two rifles to Gaza? Can someone explain why expensive airdrops are needed? Israel is not a big country.
Because Israel is actually, you know, vetting humanitarian aid to make sure it actually goes to innocent Palestinian civilians, and there is now pressure from pro-Hamas groups for the US (and other countries) to circumvent this vetting process due to Hamas’ interest in continued access to inverted humanitarian aid.
For decades we have seen the same pattern, where the US (and other companies) fund the UNWRA and other international aid organizations that are heavily connected to Hamas. These aid organizations then turn over a majority of this aid to Hamas (ostensibly because Hamas requires these ‘gifts’ in order to allow the UNWRA/Red Crescent/etc to operate in ‘their’ territory). Hamas then takes this ‘aid’ and sells it to residents at outrageous prices, taking advantage of the desperation of their population in order to fund their goal of eradicating Israel and killing Jews.
So it is a tragic circle where America, often pressured by well meaning people with a limited understanding of the conflict, funds Hamas’ campaign of hate through what is called ‘humanitarian’ aid. Which then leads to increased violence against Jews, which leads to Israel defending itself, which leads to even more ‘humanitarian aid,’ going to Hamas, which leads to…
Shortly after 10/7 Israel decided they needed to end this cycle, and improved systems so that Israel could vet incoming aid and the organizations distributing the aid to Gaza in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of Hamas.
However, bad actors internationally have utilized this new system and protections to carry out a campaign to pressure the US (and other countries) to ignore this system and return to distributing aid through the same channels (with the Hamas connections) as before, or to provide aid via airdrops (which can be easier to intercept by Hamas). This is because Hamas is struggling to maintain their war machine without the ability to basically make money hand over fist by holding the aid captive and stripping Gazans of every last penny in exchange for stale bread. Instead, aid is being provided by Israeli convoys, distributed for free (or for a small fee), often guarded by IDF troops to defend against Hamas raids on supply lines - which is a whole different thing that were regular occurrences.
When you hear how Israel “cut off humanitarian aid,” this is what they are talking about. It is a blatent lie spread by a number of bad faith actors sympathetic with Hamas, and parroted by many well meaning individuals due to their latent anti-Semitic beliefs (“It sounds like something the Jews would do, cheap bastards!”). Israel has never blocked aid to Gaza since the beginning of the war, nor has it ever claimed to want to. It has, however, put protections in place to ensure the aid is actually provided to the Palestinian civilians most desperately in need, and provided for free, rather than to Hamas itself to sell for profit.
Again, this is a great example of how bad actors are praying on people’s lack of understanding about these long-term global affairs to ply a message that is simply not true.
You can disagree with Israel, as a poster who has been regularly called a troll for defending Israel, you have that right. But all anybody is asking is that when you hear someone on TikTok, or Reddit, or here say that “Israel is blocking aid to Israel,” or “Israel wants to force all Gazans into Egypt,” or “Israel is murdering innocent babies and kids,” you also look at Jewish and Israeli voices and sources, and actually evaluate the situation.
This is not saying that every 20-something Tiktoker from Memphis is a Hamas spokesperson, it’s saying that there has been a clear and pervasive effort to reframe the situation utilizing a lot of well meaning people to spread information that, at best, is heavily misleading and at worst are outright lies to play on people’s innate biases against Jewish people.
Again, you can have differing opinions on Israel and the war, it is certainly tragic that it has come to that. I am Jewish, and I have a number of family members in Israel, including several currently serving in the IDF, and we all pray for an end to this war, we all pray for Hamas to put down their weapons, release our hostages, and surrender so we can rebuild, Jew and Palestinian together. But spreading these lies, attacking Israel for defending its people based off a narrative built on TikTok, that will not end the war any faster.
You are full of shit. God what a liar you are.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
Let's hear what's really going on with aid to Gaza, from a longread investigation CNN just completed. For those with only a minute, here's the gist:
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
For months, queues of trucks bound for the enclave have been backed up along the highway leading from the Egyptian town of Arish, a major logistical hub for aid, to the Rafah crossing with Gaza. In a satellite image from February 21, a queue of trucks can be seen stretching out for 4 miles from the crossing.
Most of CNN’s sources requested anonymity for fear, they said, of reprisals and further Israeli restrictions on an already choked aid pipeline.
Several sources said a substantial portion of the donations they handled were either rejected or held up by a long wait for clearance by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, which manages the flow of aid into the strip.
“It is perfectly engineered chaos,” said one CNN source who oversees donations from four different relief organizations at one of the transit routes. Over 15,000 tons of their relief supplies await Israeli approval to enter Gaza, the source said. More than half consists of food items.
“It’s deliberately opaque, deliberately ambiguous,” said another senior humanitarian official. “You can receive clearance from COGAT and arrive to find police or finance and customs officials who will send the truck back.”
In a January 13 press conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about permitting “minimal humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza.
“We provide minimal humanitarian aid,” Netanyahu said. “If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.”
“I’ve never seen a supply chain that ought to be so simple be so complicated,” said Save the Children US president and chief executive Janti Soeripto. “The level of barriers being put in place to hamper humanitarian assistance; we’ve never seen anything like it.”
Soeripto, who visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing with a UN convoy in January, told CNN she saw several items that Israeli inspectors had turned back.
She said toys were rejected because they were in a wooden box rather than a cardboard box, sleeping bags were denied because they had zippers, and sanitary pads were turned back because a nail clipper was included in the hygiene kit.
In January, US Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley saw maternity kits and water filtration systems among the items Israel turned back from its inspection point in Nitzana.
“In no rational world could (these) be deemed dual use or any kind of military threat,” Van Hollen told CNN weeks after his trip to Egypt’s side of the Rafah crossing.
“We learned that when a truck with just one of those items is turned down, the entire truck gets turned around and has to go back to the beginning of the process, which can take weeks,” Van Hollen said.
CNN’s weeks long investigation has documented multiple examples of the erratic process that followed, with officials sometimes falling back on the 2008 guidelines and other times citing them as redundant.
In one instance on February 14, COGAT rejected a truck-load of sleeping bags “because they were the color green, and green means military and according to the 2008 list, military is dual use,” the same humanitarian official told CNN.
Four sources described another incident when Israel rejected a shipment of dates – a rich source of nutrients desperately needed by a hungry population. Two of the sources said it was because the seeds were picked up as a suspicious object in the x-ray inspection imaging.
Donations must pass two COGAT hurdles before entering Gaza. Aid organizations must first get clearance for their shipments from COGAT, then the trucks must clear Israeli inspection points. Items have been rejected at both of those stages, according to CNN’s sources.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
CNN has obtained documents from three major participants in the humanitarian operation that list what they called the “most frequently rejected items.” Among them are essential medical supplies: anesthesia machines and anesthetics, crutches, generators, ventilators, x-ray machines and oxygen cylinders.
For doctors and patients inside Gaza, the implications are excruciating. There are numerous reports of preventable deaths for lack of oxygen and ventilators. Over 1,000 children have undergone leg amputations in Gaza, according to UNICEF, some without anesthesia. That figure was compiled by UNICEF at the end of November and has not been updated since.
Israel’s restrictions have also impacted medicines for the chronically ill. For weeks, COGAT temporarily prevented insulin pens for children with diabetes from entering Gaza, according to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick and one other source.
“On the goods that are being prohibited, it’s a full range,” said McGoldrick in a January 24 press conference. “Some of it is medical material such as basic drugs and material for treating not just trauma but for chronic illnesses.
At one of the waypoints of aid in Jordan, stacked boxes of donations extend for around eight miles, a backlog that would require around a thousand trucks to deliver, Jordan’s charity officials estimate.
I am the PP you are replying to, and calling full of shot.
This is a great example of individuals in the West Deliberately twisting Israel’s security measures into a false reality that tugs at the heartstrings of Westerners with little concept of the situation on the ground and the history of the area. I want to make it clear I do believe your heart is in the right place, so don’t take this as attacking you.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
And the majority of Israelis and Jews do not support protests at checkpoints. Celebrating the current tragedy, by either side, is inarguably wrong. But a small group of traumatized Israelis being radicalized is not an argument against Israel. It should also be noted that such actions have not been sanctioned by the Israeli government, who have been delivering aid despite such actions.
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Logistics takes time. Transportation takes time. Especially when aid convoys require extensive security and coordination due to the fact that Hamas has been targeting aid convoys due to their reliance on aid to fund their ongoing military action. Additionally, finding drivers and other staff willing to operate these convoys has become increasingly difficult due to the risks involved. Struggling to scale up these deliveries does not mean that Israel is refusing to deliver this aid, in fact it demonstrates Israel’s commitment to providing the aid that nobody is denying is neccisary.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
What agencies are these anonymous humanitarian workers representing? Again, Israel is not just handing aid organizations aid so it can get pilfered by Hamas (as is typical), they are leading the charge. So Israel isn’t obstructing aid organizations, they are minimizing their role by design.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
Yes, Israel is worried about aid falling into the hands of Hamas, who have a long history of using ostainably humanitarian aid for military purposes. This goes all the way to digging up water and sewer infrastructure paid for through western and Israeli aid to make missiles.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
All of these are perfectly reasonable to reject. Complex medical equipment (such as ventilators and water filtration systems) are easily broken apart to provide Hamas with vital electronic and other valuable resources. They additionally require specialized experience and qualifications to operate, which is likely not present in Gaza. Certain medicines may be used by Hamas to provide to their soldiers.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
Some of these, as noted in the article, were likely administrative mistakes (I.e. dates). The sleeping bags were explained later as well - they were rejected not because Israel just wants the Palestinians to die of hypothermia, but because the sleeping bags were considered to be of military use under Israeli law due to their color - I.e. if they were bright pink there would not be an issue. Others fall under medical treatments that are not particularly useful due to the collapse of the Gaza medical systems due to Hamas’ actions and had a high probability of being proffered by Hamas to fund their war goals.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. [b]Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
Which is basically what I am saying. Items are denied because they are I currently labeled (by the aid organization, sometimes because of the military implications, and rarely due to administrative failures that are to be expected. Again, the goal is to provide aid to help the Palestinian people, not Hamas.
In short, this just seems to be a bunch of aid organizations- including the UNRWA, an organization directly complicit in 10/7 - complaining that Israel is actually doing what is in their best interests by vetting aid entering a war zone and cutting out the Hamas middlemen that previously played a leading role in aid shipments. It also ignores the basic fact that far more aid is entering Gaza today then prior to 10/7, which is when all these aid organizations are looking at when complaining. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47828
Civilized people SHOULD be relentlessly up in arms if any of your excuses are used to dismiss the human tragedy happening in Gaza right now - which has been caused by Israel, and Israel alone. But instead you’re defending them …
Can you imagine the horror if the Armenian or Jewish holocausts were occurring today, everybody was fully aware of the extent of the genocidal acts, and someone said “Well, those sleeping bags are the wrong color and those dates have seeds, so we can’t allow those items to aid these victims of human tragedy; plus that medicine and medical equipment might be misappropriated, so that has the be blocked, too”?
Wtf … at this point, the pent up feeling for A LOT of people have that maybe Israel doesn’t actually deserve to exist in its current form are starting to harden hearts - including the hearts of those willing to look the other way at Israeli bad conduct in the past. This is too far.
Thankful to say the Israelis are NOT committing genocide and if you actually knew anything about the Holocaust and spoken to any survivors—like my parents—you would know the difference.
If you were in Gaza right now, you might understand the similarities.
Anonymous wrote:I see that multiple countries are doing or proposing airdrops into Gaza. I’m confused. Doesn’t Israel have ports and trucks? Wouldn’t it be cheaper and easier if the U.S. and other countries simply ship supplies to Israeli ports and they are the two rifles to Gaza? Can someone explain why expensive airdrops are needed? Israel is not a big country.
Because Israel is actually, you know, vetting humanitarian aid to make sure it actually goes to innocent Palestinian civilians, and there is now pressure from pro-Hamas groups for the US (and other countries) to circumvent this vetting process due to Hamas’ interest in continued access to inverted humanitarian aid.
For decades we have seen the same pattern, where the US (and other companies) fund the UNWRA and other international aid organizations that are heavily connected to Hamas. These aid organizations then turn over a majority of this aid to Hamas (ostensibly because Hamas requires these ‘gifts’ in order to allow the UNWRA/Red Crescent/etc to operate in ‘their’ territory). Hamas then takes this ‘aid’ and sells it to residents at outrageous prices, taking advantage of the desperation of their population in order to fund their goal of eradicating Israel and killing Jews.
So it is a tragic circle where America, often pressured by well meaning people with a limited understanding of the conflict, funds Hamas’ campaign of hate through what is called ‘humanitarian’ aid. Which then leads to increased violence against Jews, which leads to Israel defending itself, which leads to even more ‘humanitarian aid,’ going to Hamas, which leads to…
Shortly after 10/7 Israel decided they needed to end this cycle, and improved systems so that Israel could vet incoming aid and the organizations distributing the aid to Gaza in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of Hamas.
However, bad actors internationally have utilized this new system and protections to carry out a campaign to pressure the US (and other countries) to ignore this system and return to distributing aid through the same channels (with the Hamas connections) as before, or to provide aid via airdrops (which can be easier to intercept by Hamas). This is because Hamas is struggling to maintain their war machine without the ability to basically make money hand over fist by holding the aid captive and stripping Gazans of every last penny in exchange for stale bread. Instead, aid is being provided by Israeli convoys, distributed for free (or for a small fee), often guarded by IDF troops to defend against Hamas raids on supply lines - which is a whole different thing that were regular occurrences.
When you hear how Israel “cut off humanitarian aid,” this is what they are talking about. It is a blatent lie spread by a number of bad faith actors sympathetic with Hamas, and parroted by many well meaning individuals due to their latent anti-Semitic beliefs (“It sounds like something the Jews would do, cheap bastards!”). Israel has never blocked aid to Gaza since the beginning of the war, nor has it ever claimed to want to. It has, however, put protections in place to ensure the aid is actually provided to the Palestinian civilians most desperately in need, and provided for free, rather than to Hamas itself to sell for profit.
Again, this is a great example of how bad actors are praying on people’s lack of understanding about these long-term global affairs to ply a message that is simply not true.
You can disagree with Israel, as a poster who has been regularly called a troll for defending Israel, you have that right. But all anybody is asking is that when you hear someone on TikTok, or Reddit, or here say that “Israel is blocking aid to Israel,” or “Israel wants to force all Gazans into Egypt,” or “Israel is murdering innocent babies and kids,” you also look at Jewish and Israeli voices and sources, and actually evaluate the situation.
This is not saying that every 20-something Tiktoker from Memphis is a Hamas spokesperson, it’s saying that there has been a clear and pervasive effort to reframe the situation utilizing a lot of well meaning people to spread information that, at best, is heavily misleading and at worst are outright lies to play on people’s innate biases against Jewish people.
Again, you can have differing opinions on Israel and the war, it is certainly tragic that it has come to that. I am Jewish, and I have a number of family members in Israel, including several currently serving in the IDF, and we all pray for an end to this war, we all pray for Hamas to put down their weapons, release our hostages, and surrender so we can rebuild, Jew and Palestinian together. But spreading these lies, attacking Israel for defending its people based off a narrative built on TikTok, that will not end the war any faster.
You are full of shit. God what a liar you are.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
Let's hear what's really going on with aid to Gaza, from a longread investigation CNN just completed. For those with only a minute, here's the gist:
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
For months, queues of trucks bound for the enclave have been backed up along the highway leading from the Egyptian town of Arish, a major logistical hub for aid, to the Rafah crossing with Gaza. In a satellite image from February 21, a queue of trucks can be seen stretching out for 4 miles from the crossing.
Most of CNN’s sources requested anonymity for fear, they said, of reprisals and further Israeli restrictions on an already choked aid pipeline.
Several sources said a substantial portion of the donations they handled were either rejected or held up by a long wait for clearance by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, which manages the flow of aid into the strip.
“It is perfectly engineered chaos,” said one CNN source who oversees donations from four different relief organizations at one of the transit routes. Over 15,000 tons of their relief supplies await Israeli approval to enter Gaza, the source said. More than half consists of food items.
“It’s deliberately opaque, deliberately ambiguous,” said another senior humanitarian official. “You can receive clearance from COGAT and arrive to find police or finance and customs officials who will send the truck back.”
In a January 13 press conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted about permitting “minimal humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza.
“We provide minimal humanitarian aid,” Netanyahu said. “If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.”
“I’ve never seen a supply chain that ought to be so simple be so complicated,” said Save the Children US president and chief executive Janti Soeripto. “The level of barriers being put in place to hamper humanitarian assistance; we’ve never seen anything like it.”
Soeripto, who visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing with a UN convoy in January, told CNN she saw several items that Israeli inspectors had turned back.
She said toys were rejected because they were in a wooden box rather than a cardboard box, sleeping bags were denied because they had zippers, and sanitary pads were turned back because a nail clipper was included in the hygiene kit.
In January, US Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley saw maternity kits and water filtration systems among the items Israel turned back from its inspection point in Nitzana.
“In no rational world could (these) be deemed dual use or any kind of military threat,” Van Hollen told CNN weeks after his trip to Egypt’s side of the Rafah crossing.
“We learned that when a truck with just one of those items is turned down, the entire truck gets turned around and has to go back to the beginning of the process, which can take weeks,” Van Hollen said.
CNN’s weeks long investigation has documented multiple examples of the erratic process that followed, with officials sometimes falling back on the 2008 guidelines and other times citing them as redundant.
In one instance on February 14, COGAT rejected a truck-load of sleeping bags “because they were the color green, and green means military and according to the 2008 list, military is dual use,” the same humanitarian official told CNN.
Four sources described another incident when Israel rejected a shipment of dates – a rich source of nutrients desperately needed by a hungry population. Two of the sources said it was because the seeds were picked up as a suspicious object in the x-ray inspection imaging.
Donations must pass two COGAT hurdles before entering Gaza. Aid organizations must first get clearance for their shipments from COGAT, then the trucks must clear Israeli inspection points. Items have been rejected at both of those stages, according to CNN’s sources.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
CNN has obtained documents from three major participants in the humanitarian operation that list what they called the “most frequently rejected items.” Among them are essential medical supplies: anesthesia machines and anesthetics, crutches, generators, ventilators, x-ray machines and oxygen cylinders.
For doctors and patients inside Gaza, the implications are excruciating. There are numerous reports of preventable deaths for lack of oxygen and ventilators. Over 1,000 children have undergone leg amputations in Gaza, according to UNICEF, some without anesthesia. That figure was compiled by UNICEF at the end of November and has not been updated since.
Israel’s restrictions have also impacted medicines for the chronically ill. For weeks, COGAT temporarily prevented insulin pens for children with diabetes from entering Gaza, according to the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Palestine Jamie McGoldrick and one other source.
“On the goods that are being prohibited, it’s a full range,” said McGoldrick in a January 24 press conference. “Some of it is medical material such as basic drugs and material for treating not just trauma but for chronic illnesses.
At one of the waypoints of aid in Jordan, stacked boxes of donations extend for around eight miles, a backlog that would require around a thousand trucks to deliver, Jordan’s charity officials estimate.
I am the PP you are replying to, and calling full of shot.
This is a great example of individuals in the West Deliberately twisting Israel’s security measures into a false reality that tugs at the heartstrings of Westerners with little concept of the situation on the ground and the history of the area. I want to make it clear I do believe your heart is in the right place, so don’t take this as attacking you.
Israel's crazy settlers are physically blocking the arrival of aid. With their bodies. Also, with inflatables and "plushies" and candy cotton for their children while Gazan children less than ten miles away are dying from eating animal fodder and drinking dirty puddle water.
And the majority of Israelis and Jews do not support protests at checkpoints. Celebrating the current tragedy, by either side, is inarguably wrong. But a small group of traumatized Israelis being radicalized is not an argument against Israel. It should also be noted that such actions have not been sanctioned by the Israeli government, who have been delivering aid despite such actions.
There are millions of tons of food, medical supplies, vital medications, clean water and essential supplies waiting on the border with Egypt and Jordan, stretching many miles. On the other side of the border, mere miles away from these trucks, Gazans are starving, eating grass, feeding children animal fodder, drinking dirty water, getting surgeries without anesthesia, crawling on the ground post-amputation without crutches, and sleeping on bare ground. Because Israel isn't letting supplies in.
Logistics takes time. Transportation takes time. Especially when aid convoys require extensive security and coordination due to the fact that Hamas has been targeting aid convoys due to their reliance on aid to fund their ongoing military action. Additionally, finding drivers and other staff willing to operate these convoys has become increasingly difficult due to the risks involved. Struggling to scale up these deliveries does not mean that Israel is refusing to deliver this aid, in fact it demonstrates Israel’s commitment to providing the aid that nobody is denying is neccisary.
Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction, as disease and near-famine grip parts of the besieged enclave.
What agencies are these anonymous humanitarian workers representing? Again, Israel is not just handing aid organizations aid so it can get pilfered by Hamas (as is typical), they are leading the charge. So Israel isn’t obstructing aid organizations, they are minimizing their role by design.
The Israeli agency that controls access to Gaza for the multi-billion-dollar aid effort has imposed arbitrary and contradictory criteria, according to more than two dozen humanitarian and government officials interviewed by CNN.
Yes, Israel is worried about aid falling into the hands of Hamas, who have a long history of using ostainably humanitarian aid for military purposes. This goes all the way to digging up water and sewer infrastructure paid for through western and Israeli aid to make missiles.
CNN has also reviewed documents compiled by major participants in the humanitarian operation that list the items most frequently rejected by the Israelis. These include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and water filtration systems.
All of these are perfectly reasonable to reject. Complex medical equipment (such as ventilators and water filtration systems) are easily broken apart to provide Hamas with vital electronic and other valuable resources. They additionally require specialized experience and qualifications to operate, which is likely not present in Gaza. Certain medicines may be used by Hamas to provide to their soldiers.
Other items that have ended up in bureaucratic limbo include dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets and maternity kits.
Some of these, as noted in the article, were likely administrative mistakes (I.e. dates). The sleeping bags were explained later as well - they were rejected not because Israel just wants the Palestinians to die of hypothermia, but because the sleeping bags were considered to be of military use under Israeli law due to their color - I.e. if they were bright pink there would not be an issue. Others fall under medical treatments that are not particularly useful due to the collapse of the Gaza medical systems due to Hamas’ actions and had a high probability of being proffered by Hamas to fund their war goals.
COGAT provides a range of reasons for these denials. [b]Sometimes it cites bureaucratic issues, such as an incorrect manifest, other times the items are in whole or in part deemed to be dual use, sources said. Some of the reasons provided to humanitarian organizations appeared to be expressly political. Most of the time, COGAT doesn’t provide a reason for the rejections at all.
Which is basically what I am saying. Items are denied because they are I currently labeled (by the aid organization, sometimes because of the military implications, and rarely due to administrative failures that are to be expected. Again, the goal is to provide aid to help the Palestinian people, not Hamas.
In short, this just seems to be a bunch of aid organizations- including the UNRWA, an organization directly complicit in 10/7 - complaining that Israel is actually doing what is in their best interests by vetting aid entering a war zone and cutting out the Hamas middlemen that previously played a leading role in aid shipments. It also ignores the basic fact that far more aid is entering Gaza today then prior to 10/7, which is when all these aid organizations are looking at when complaining. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47828
Sorry the bolded just doesn’t fly. Israel
Has calculated down to the calorie how much food needs to get into Gaza daily. It’s published.
They knew they were cutting off food and water before they started bombing and did it anyway: they absolutely do not get to say after the fact oh shucks look at those starving children! Logistics are hard! If they can’t manage the logistics they have no business carrying out a military operation on top of civilians.
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