{"id":6254,"date":"2025-05-27T00:05:02","date_gmt":"2025-05-26T22:05:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=6254"},"modified":"2025-05-27T00:05:02","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T22:05:02","slug":"israel-hamas-stealing-aid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2025-05-27\/israel-hamas-stealing-aid\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel’s claim that ‘Hamas is stealing aid’ is patently a lie. Here’s why"},"content":{"rendered":"

Western journalists \u2013 having promoted Israel’s lies for more than a year and half \u2013 have grown entirely insensible to their active collusion in genocide<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\"\"\n

Israel’s claim that Hamas is “stealing aid” is so preposterous no serious journalist or politician ought to give it any kind of airing \u2013 yet there it is continuously cropping up in the coverage of Gaza.<\/p>\n

How do I know Israel\u2019s claim is utterly worthless? For this simple reason:<\/p>\n

Israel has a fleet of surveillance drones constantly hovering over the tiny strip of land that is Gaza, monitoring every inch of the territory. The incessant whine you hear every time you watch someone there being interviewed is from one of those drones. They are Israel’s eyes on the enclave. If you are outside in Gaza, you might as well be living in the Truman Show.<\/p>\n

Were Hamas stealing aid in Gaza, Israel would easily be able to document it. It would have the video footage from its drones. The fact that it has not provided any footage showing Hamas\u2019 theft of aid \u2013 its ransacking of aid trucks, or its fighters smuggling themselves into aid warehouses \u2013 is confirmation enough that Israel has simply invented this claim to rationalise its plans to starve the people of Gaza to death through months of an aid blockade or force them to flee into neighbouring Sinai, whichever comes first.<\/p>\n

Without its disinformation campaign about \u201cHamas stealing aid\u201d, Israel knows popular revulsion at its starvation campaign would grow quickly, and western governments would further struggle to keep opposition in check.<\/p>\n

There are lots of others reasons, of course, to reject Israel\u2019s lies about “Hamas stealing aid”. Not least, because every single charity and aid agency dealing with Gaza says that aid is not being stolen by Hamas.<\/p>\n

But also because, were Hamas fighters doing so, they would be stealing from their own families: from their children and grandparents, who are much more vulnerable to Israel\u2019s starvation campaign than they are. The idea that Hamas is stealing aid makes sense only to a racist, European colonial mindset in which Hamas fighters are viewed as bogeymen figures indifferent to the deaths of their own children, wives and parents.<\/p>\n

What undoubtedly is happening is that Israel is allowing the strongest extended families in Gaza \u2013 often crime families with significant private arsenals \u2013 to loot the aid. That has become a serious problem since Israel killed off Gaza’s civilian police force (in violation of international law), leaving no one to enforce public order.<\/p>\n

When everyone\u2019s starving, the most powerful families mobilise their strength to grab an unfair share of the aid. That was an entirely predictable outcome of Israel\u2019s policy to smash all of Gaza\u2019s institutions, including its hospitals, government offices, and police stations, on the bogus pretext that they were \u201cHamas\u201d.<\/p>\n

Note too that Israel has long cultivated close ties to Palestinian crime families, because they provide a potential alternative, and more co-optable, power base to the Palestinian national movements and are a good source of collaborators.<\/p>\n

The evidence suggests Israel is encouraging these crime families to loot the aid precisely to justify its dismantling of an existing aid system that works remarkably well, given the catastrophic circumstances in Gaza, and replace it with its own militarised, completely inadequate “aid distribution” system, which is designed only to herd Palestinians into the southern-most tip of Gaza, ready to be expelled into Sinai.<\/p>\n

No journalist ought to be repeating Israel\u2019s transparent disinformation. To do so is to collude in the promotion of lies to justify genocide. But the western media class have been doing that now for more than a year and half. They have grown entirely insensible to their own active collusion in the genocide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Western journalists \u2013 having promoted Israel’s lies for more than a year and half \u2013 have grown entirely insensible to their active collusion in genocide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6255,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-6254","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-gaza","9":"tag-media-criticism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6254"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6257,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6254\/revisions\/6257"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}