Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Elder of Ziyon
It seems strange that they would work directly with Israel to import the meat, but I have not heard about any imports from Egypt lately.
In fact, I have not heard of the Iranian Red Crescent in Gaza altogether until this story. A few years ago they made noise about sending an aid ship to Gaza which was scuttled when Egypt didn't allow the ship to dock. During the 2014 war they announced an aid shipment. That's about it.
Based on the photos and the articles I could find, my guess is that this is a new initiative where Iran recruited job-starved Gazans to start a propaganda campaign around support for Gaza.
These photos do not indicate an operation that could feed 25,000 people for three days. It looks like this location was created just for the photo-op, not to give any serious quantities of food to anyone.
I think Iran, alarmed at the possibility of an election (since postponed,) wants to have a more direct line of influence in Gaza than through its usual clients in Islamic Jihad and parts of Hamas. After all, a large part of its strategy is to demonize Israel and the quiet lately has not been in Iran's interests. In a time-honored tradition, they are trying to infiltrate through charity organizations - real or imagined - and getting press coverage about how much they support Gaza and its "resistance."
This is admittedly conjecture, but there is certainly more behind this story than simply Iran giving meat to some Gazans.
