Blocking humanitarian aid cannot be justified: we must feed Gaza now

It is approaching three months since the Gaza Strip was sealed – once more during this conflict – to food and aid. The dire consequences are obvious to all but the most cynical denialist, and represent the starkest possible reminder that every instance of a starving child is the result of callous political choice. Not fate, and not cruel happenstance, but choice.

Last week, Netanyahu announced a very partial lifting of the siege. We must hope that there is no such thing as too late with a situation as catastrophic as this. But the meagre allowance is certainly too little, and the predictions of humanitarian experts remain justifiably apocalyptic.”

Nor should the fate of hungry children hinge on the whims and political calculations of American senators, whose belated qualms were Bibi’s seeming motivation for the measure. Even the meagre flow of aid which has now resumed was too much for Ben Gvir, for whom, apparently, only the death of every last Gazan will be enough.

Warfare must not target civilians. This ought-to-be-obvious moral imperative underpins international humanitarian law. Where civilian harm is an assured or likely consequence of military action, the advantage to be gained must be proportionate to the harm inflicted. This, too, is axiomatic. The denial of food and other resources vital to life to an entire population can, by definition, make no distinction between the combatant and the civilian. Nor can the guaranteed impact on an entire population possibly align with any sane definition of proportionality. It is thus definitionally illegal. It is also utterly unconscionable.

The slow and painful development of international humanitarian law was one of the great achievements of the bloody 20^th century. It recognised that modern societies were predisposed to wage mass-casualty conflict, and that advances in military technology enabled them to do so with exponentially increased speed and on an ever-wider scale.

Though it may aspire to a world free of war, international humanitarian law does not pretend that such a utopia exists in the unhappy present. Nor does it seek to deny states the right to wage war in their own defence. It recognises that the horror of war is inevitable but demands, modestly but essentially, that this horror be mitigated, via the codifying of its conduct in a mechanism backed by the power of sanction.

It is true, certainly, that there were those who rejected a priori Israel’s right to respond militarily to the massacres of October 7^th – evil outrages far too many of them celebrated or excused. To such fools and knaves, anything Israel does is doctrinally invalid.

But there are others of us who, while defending the obligation to respond in necessary self-defence, have nonetheless opposed the conduct of the war, almost from its inception. We hold that the laws of war apply even if the battle is existential, that they have been breached repeatedly and with devastating consequence, and that it is lazy campist thinking to reduce this human tragedy to a binary by which one must either be with the leftist-reactionary Hamasniks or with the war.

We have lost count of the number of WW1-style “big pushes” in Gaza – each the one that will complete the job. The latest is now under way. As with those earlier benighted grand plans, their principal achievement has been the accumulation of more and more dead people, including children in vast number. Which, for some, it is ever clearer, is the real purpose.

There have been, from its outset, three denialist responses to the humanitarian catastrophe, especially regarding the aid and supply deficit: 1) it is exaggerated; 2) it is not at all of Israel’s making; 3) the Gazans deserve it.

The first response is an outright lie of a particularly vicious kind. It is bad enough for someone to starve; still worse to tell them, in their hellish misery, that their bellies are actually full.

The second response is a factually untenable evasion masquerading as a defence. Hamas’s considerable culpability – both in starting the war and in the ongoing suffering of its own people – is mitigation, not exoneration. I have heard the various international law defences offered by the siege policy’s advocates, and have yet to encounter one that was not a sophist’s reading of articles 55-59 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Even if one allows that Israel is not an occupying power in the sense generally understood by international jurisprudence – and this is far from certain – its responsibilities as a besieging power cannot be evaded. And recent legal interpretations have gone far further than in previous eras in stressing the inadmissibility of restrictions on essential aid beyond the needs of temporary security consideration. Perfectly correctly, in my view.

The third response is an uncomplicated moral disgrace.

The three denialist rationalisations are by no means unique to this conflict, or to Israelis and pro-Israelis. They are, lamentably, common to most instances of prolonged and brutal war. Note also, the hypocrisy and illogic by which all three of the mutually incompatible defences are often employed by the very same people. If there is no starvation, then how can the Gazans deserve it? And if the situation is not at all of Israel’s making, and it can be blamed solely on Hamas, then why deny it?

Beyond the hideous cruelty of its conception, it ought to trouble those propounding it that the third plank of denial – that Gazans deserve what they are getting – bears a dishonourably uncanny resemblance to the justifications and celebrations of October 7^th displayed by sections of the western far left.

Their disgrace on that evil day – there were many, but this was the meta-disgrace – lay in their total dehumanisation of Israelis. It was not merely that Israelis were lesser people, and thus undeserving of the rights to life and safety that this same far left would uphold for literally all other people. This would have been bad enough. But no, it was even worse. Israelis were possessed, by dint of birth, of a uniquely diabolic evil. It was thus not only permissible to slaughter them in their own homes, but a moral imperative. Such distorted, mutilated morality is both chillingly fascist and unmistakably Soviet.

Yes, the great far leftist sin was to strip Israelis – children and babies included – of the sanctity which is their birthright as human beings. To reduce an entire mass of varied humanity to a faceless swamp of evil. To endow their cruel murder not only with the stamp of permissibility but the stamp of righteousness. It was, and is, a disgusting sight. As it is when Gazan civilians, rightfully possessed of the same sanctity, are treated with similarly distorted cruelty. We ought not to need law to remind us of this, but it reminds us nonetheless: civilians are sacrosanct; collective guilt is not moral; and collective punishment not legal.

I write, I hope, with requisite humility. I count myself fortunate that I remain ignorant of how it must feel to be a Gazan and to watch my child writhe agonised with hunger, knowing that such a fate is the political choice of both my own governing authority and that of its mortal enemy. Fortunate too, that I don’t know how it feels to be the bereaved of October 7, or the loved one of any of the remaining hostages. To have to wake, for approaching the six hundredth time, to wonder to what sufferings they have been exposed by their depraved captors; to know that my own government prizes their return so little; and to know that if they held an American passport rather than only an Israeli one, they would be home by now.

Nonetheless, such necessary humility must not produce a moral-relativist inertia. There is neither justification nor forgiveness, under any circumstances, for the starving of children. It is an affront to decency and every civilised human value. If I believed in God, I hope I would think it an affront to her too.

Any politics not now committed to producing fewer dead children – Israeli AND Palestinian – is by definition a bad politics. Any ink not in some way spilled in pursuit of producing fewer dead children is ink wasted.

Despairingly, however, we are reminded on a weekly basis that we live in an era of truly obscene politics.

A politics in which, until his family courageously put a stop to it, Edan Alexander was to be made to jet to Doha to show appropriate gratitude for his recent release to the good offices of Qatar. The same good offices, that is, who helped finance his own abduction and incarceration.

A politics by which a western far left continues to champion Hamas as an agent of “resistance”, in the face of an explicitly genocidal intent towards Israelis and the glaringly obvious contempt in which it holds its own Gazan population – a population that same far left purports to defend.

And a politics in which a genocidally racist, Kahanist far-right has gone from being Zionism’s embarrassing but practically impotent drunken uncle to holding a commanding position in the family firm.

If, for reasons passing understanding, readers are not moved by the moral necessity of feeding Gazans, then deploy the pragmatic impulse instead. The governments of the United Kingdom, France, and Canada this week threatened Israel with ‘concrete actions’ should the ‘wholly disproportionate’ action in Gaza, including the ‘unacceptable… denial of essential humanitarian assistance’, continue. The alienation of Israel from its democratic allies over the course of this war has been substantial, and ought to be of profound concern to Israelis and their friends. If you doubt it, then ask: which of Netanyahu’s carefully-cultivated authoritarian allies – whether in New Delhi, Moscow, or Beijing – translated this seduction into practical solidarity after October 7, or when their pals in Tehran launched their missiles last Spring?

End the war; bring them home; flood the Strip with aid. These are the immediate priorities of a decent politics, and there is literally no time to waste.

The author is grateful to both Andrew Apostolou and Marc Caplan for their feedback on earlier drafts of the article.