Tel Aviv — Over the past year, hungry Gazans have waited desperately for more food from Israel to enter the besieged territory. After humanitarian trucks were allowed in, episodes of looting took place.
But now, armed criminal gangs are intercepting entire convoys.
Truck driver Abu Ahmad suffered the worst incident on record when more than 100 trucks were attacked on Saturday. The gangs fired through the windows of his truck, he told CBS News, saying they would kill any driver who didn’t stop.
Ahmad said Israeli tanks were nearby and an Israeli drone watched the entire attack unfold.
However, the Israeli military claims that it is not responsible for protecting humanitarian convoys, an assumption with which former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert disagrees.
“The Israeli government doesn’t want this to happen. They want to punish the Palestinians, because the basic principle is that all Palestinians in Gaza support the terrorists and therefore they should all be punished,” Olmert told CBS News , adding that if the Israeli military is able to build roads in Gaza, it should be “able to make the necessary logistical arrangements” to provide humanitarian aid to the people living there.
Amir Lévy / Getty Images
On Thursday, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Mohammed Deif, a Hamas leader who Israel says was killed in an airstrike in July. The charges included “crimes against humanity” and the use of “starvation as a method of warfare.”
Netanyahu called the allegations “anti-Semitic” and the White House said it “fundamentally rejected” the decision.
Already, Gaza’s poorest residents are scavenging for food from landfills while pitifully little aid crosses the Israeli border. Much of what reaches Gaza is stolen at gunpoint, worsening the territory’s humanitarian crisis.
It is clear who should resolve the problem, according to Juliette Touma, spokesperson for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza.
“It is up to the State of Israel to ensure that aid reaches people in need,” Touma said. “They are the occupying power.”
Local Gaza police protected the convoys in Gaza, but since February, Israeli soldiers have targeted them, accusing them of links to Hamas.
Meanwhile, nearly two million Gazans struggle to survive.
“But wanting to starve hundreds of thousands of people, to prevent them from having the food, the water that they need to survive, is atrocious, unacceptable and I think the Israeli government is creating something that could come back to haunt us in a very, very painful way,” Olmert said.
Elizabeth Palmer
