Thank you for contacting me about the food situation in Gaza and allegations that Israel is deliberately denying food to the civilian population.
Data provided by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Office shows that significant amounts of aid have been delivered to Gaza, contradicting claims that Israel is impeding the supply of aid and causing a famine.
The types of aid that have been delivered between October 7, 2023, and April 7, 2024, are as follows:
279,789 tons of food transported by 13,200 trucks.
45,300 tons of shelter transported by 3,156 trucks.
20,710 tons of medical supplies transported by 1,787 trucks.
29,440 tons of water transported by 1,476 trucks.
223 tanks of fuel and 437 tanks of cooking gas.
23,300 tons of other aid transported by 1,600 trucks.
Meanwhile, most of the sources of information about the health situation in Gaza comes from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, which has been providing unreliable information about the number of casualties, claiming that only civilians have died and reluctantly acknowledging any Hamas combatants have been killed. The strategic goal is to gain sympathy and create international pressure on Israel to its counter-offensive against Hamas. Hamas’s standing policy on reporting casualties was revealed during the 2014 Hamas-Israel war when Hamas instructed social media influencers: “Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza.”
Another major source of this disinformation is “UN experts.” On March 5 a group of such experts issued a statement accusing Israel of a “campaign of starvation” in Gaza. These “experts,” however, have a long track record of anti-Israel bias. One in particular, Francesca Albanese, wrote an overtly antisemitic rant on her Facebook account: “America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust.”
Major news organizations do not have their own reporters inside Gaza and rely on local sources, many of which are associated with Hamas, raising questions about the accuracy of their reporting, their ideological motivations, and the extent to which they are monitored by Hamas, an organisation which has a documented history of imprisoning, torturing and murdering anyone who does not toe its line.
Hamas and other Gaza gunmen stop convoys and steal food, some for themselves and some to sell on the black market as a “shadowy wartime economy has emerged in Gaza.”
Thank you again for taking the time to contact me.
Craig Whittaker MP
April 2024