Israel’s total blockade enters 9th week

Relief agencies criticize Israel’s Gaza aid plans as blockade enters 9th week

Relief agencies have criticized Israeli plans to allow aid into Gaza, which they say do not meet humanitarian standards and could facilitate further displacement.

A US report on Friday suggested that Israel could soon start allowing aid to enter Gaza under an agreement with the US, easing starvation conditions in the strip which has been under blockade for almost nine weeks.

But according to reporting from the Financial Times, the plans would see Israel vet who is allowed to receive food, determine where it is distributed, and cut out some of the largest aid groups working on the ground.

“What we’re seeing is an attempt to . . . essentially instrumentalize the delivery of aid to pursue military objectives,” the newspaper quotes the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Gavin Kelleher as saying.

“The suggestion that a party to the conflict can vet the employees or civilians of another party to the conflict . . . is just not something that lines up at all with a principled humanitarian response” (continue reading here).

Israel plans to use US security contractors to control the flow of aid into Gaza, bypassing UN and international NGOs, news reports say.

Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported last week a new plan is in the works in which Gaza aid will soon be distributed by private foreign companies, rather than United Nations agencies, in a new designated “humanitarian zone” in the southern Gaza.

NOTE: Framing the situation in Gaza as two “parties to a conflict” suggests absurdly that the people of Gaza and the government/resistance group that leads them are on roughly equal footing with the Israeli military. This is entirely false.

Palestinians do not have a standing army (by Israeli decree), do not have a navy, an air force, or a powerful ally that provides billions of dollars a year in weapons and aid. This “war on Hamas” is a genocidal attack on all Palestinians, as tens of thousands of women, children, and civilian men have been killed indiscriminately.

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Another Palestinian detainee died in Israeli detention on Sunday, bringing the death toll since October 2023 to 66, prisoners’ affairs groups said.

Muhi al-Din Fahmi Saeed Najm, 60, from the West Bank city of Jenin, died at Soroka Medical Center in southern Israel, the Palestinian Commission of Detainees’ Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner Society said in a joint statement.

Najm, who had been imprisoned since August 2023 without charge or trial under Israel’s notorious policy of administrative detention, had spent nearly 19 years in Israeli prisons over multiple detentions, the statement said.

According to the statement, at least 40 of the 66 known prisoners who have died in custody since October 2023 were from the Gaza Strip, though the rights groups said that the actual number may be higher due to ongoing enforced disappearances.

NOTE: Israel is currently holding over 9,900 Palestinian prisoners in inhumane conditions where many are systematically tortured. Israel has used torture consistently since at least 1968. In the case of Gazan prisoners since October 7th, many were restrained so tightly for so long, that they required amputation of limbs; others were sodomized with burning hot objects.

400 of the current prisoners are children, 27 are women, and 3,500 are administrative detainees – being held without charge or trial. Administrative detention is intended to be used only in “exceptional” circumstances, but Israel uses it widely. Read more here.

The New Arab: Hamas executes looters in Gaza as food crisis worsens under Israeli blockade