Flooding Gaza with aid will not solve the problem - and it will strengthen Hamas ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, August 15, 2025

Flooding Gaza with aid will not solve the problem - and it will strengthen Hamas

Yesterday I posted a secret memo of a meeting that most Gaza humanitarian NGOs attended in New York, including the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and excluding UNRWA.

The memo included:

All agreed that flooding the zone would have multiple benefits - most importantly to those in need, as well as to reduce the desperation and chaos at GHF sites and UN convoys, and to diminish the value aid and the risk of diversion to Hamas.

We agreed further conversations on diversion, how to flood the zone, how working in a complementary way might work, and connecting country-level teams. These issues will be managed at the technical level.

One would expect that increasing aid would hurt the black market, so it seems to make some sense. But that is a poor solution.

We know that the percentage of aid that is diverted in Gaza is an astonishing 95% in recent weeks. This would mean that to get the proper amount to Gazans the NGOs would need to increase the number of trucks by a factor of twenty - from, say, 200 trucks a day to 4,000 - to ensure that the proper amount of food gets to the people.

That is logistically impossible.

It also doesn't stop the Hamas diversion problem. Hamas has many ways to make money off of aid, including taxes, skimming, directly giving aid to its militants in lieu of salaries, Hamas took 25% of the aid before the war. Chances are that more aid would help Hamas far more than it would hurt it.

And just as a reminder, international law says that a party to a conflict can choose not to bring in any aid when there is credible fear that their enemy will use it for its own economic or military advantage. Not to sound immoral, but if Israel would really have imposed a true siege according to the laws of war in October 2023 and held to it, Hamas would have been out of business long ago and the people in Gaza would be rebuilding today with plenty of food.

It isn't the law that stops Israel from doing the right thing. It is politics.

The only solution for the short term is to increase security for the aid. GHF offered to do just that with the UN, and the UN refused. Israel has tried to work with NGOs to help get more aid safely to its destination, and too many of the NGOs don't want to cooperate with Israel because of fears of looking like collaborators or fears of Hamas retribution.

Maybe more aid needs to get into areas of Gaza, but the major problem isn't the number of trucks but the security and distribution of the aid. As long as Hamas isn't defeated, it regards aid as its lifeline and it will continue to foment chaos, theft and murder to ensure that it benefits from aid before the people do.

Which means the truly best, most efficient method to help Gaza is to allow Israel to defeat Hamas militarily.