Last week, Amnesty International's Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy & Campaigns Erika Guevara Rosas tweeted, and Amnesty reweeted:
Older people in Gaza are facing a brutal, overlooked health crisis amid Israel’s ongoing genocide. A new joint investigation by @Amnesty and @HelpAge reveals how Israel’s continued blockade of aid and essential medicines is causing a devastating collapse in older people’s physical and mental health.
The HelpAge report says none of that.
The report was a limited humanitarian survey of older people in Gaza, a needs assessment of 416 older individuals. It relies heavily on self-reported information. It acknowledges methodological limitations. It was designed to understand how older people are coping with displacement, chronic illness, food insecurity, and disrupted services.
At no point does this survey claim that there are any restrictions of aid into Gaza. It was not designed to evaluate border policy. It was not designed to assess whether medicines are being systematically denied entry. It contains no shipment data, no border denial logs, no inspection statistics, no inflow-versus-need calculations, no comparative pre- and post-ceasefire import figures. It does not even attempt to quantify total aid entering the territory.
In other words, it is taking individual interviews about the very real challenges older people have in the wake of a devastating war and claiming that it proves an "illegal blockade" that is part of an "ongoing genocide."
In reality, aid has been pouring into Gaza. Thousands of trucks of aid, including over 600 trucks filled with medical aid, have entered since the ceasefire, as COGAT shows.
Even during the war there were no restrictions on medicines or on medical aid that could not be repurposed for weapons.
The problems have been in distribution, which is the purpose of the NGOs in Gaza, Israel coordinates closely with them to ensure that Gazans, including the elderly, can get the aid they need without compromising on security needs.
Which is more than any other country at war has ever done.
What the report does document is hardship. Older people report difficulty obtaining medicines. Many report interrupted treatment for chronic disease. Many report weight loss, displacement, and overcrowded shelters. None of this is surprising after a war that devastated infrastructure and displaced the vast majority of the population. No serious observer believes that life in Gaza instantly became normal the moment hostilities paused.
What Amnesty has done is take those documented hardships and present them as proof of an ongoing genocidal policy driven by a blockade of aid and medicines. That is simply a lie.
War destroys systems. Infrastructure does not rebuild overnight. Chronic disease management does not resume instantly. Supply chains remain fragile. Distribution networks require stabilization. These explanations are mundane, structural, and tragically common in post-conflict settings. They do not require a theory of ongoing genocide to make sense of observed conditions.
Amnesty has shown yet again that it is more interested in making unfounded and slanderous accusations against Israel than in actually helping the people of Gaza. At least in the Middle East, it is not a human rights organization: it is an antisemitic political organization that hides its hate of Jews in Israel behind human rights.
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