If Hamas wants to play with the life of hostages, then Israel can play right along with them. For the entirety of the war, the international community has pressured Israel to feed the Gazans that bite them, along with medical aid. Joe Biden in particular demanded Israel ramp up food shipments to Gaza, most if not all of which went into the hands of Hamas to keep their grip on the people there.
Joe Biden's not president any longer. And the aid isn't going to be around either, Israel made clear this weekend:
Israel announced on Sunday it is halting all humanitarian aid and fuel deliveries to Gaza and closing the border crossings between Israel and the enclave.
Why it matters: Israel took the step a day after the ceasefire agreement with Hamas ended.
- An Israeli official told reporters that the food and other supplies that entered Gaza in the last 42 days would be enough for four to six months and the fuel would last several weeks.
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday he made the move because Hamas rejected a U.S. proposal to extend the ceasefire in exchange for the release of more hostages.
Perhaps anticipating the international outrage to come, not to mention from the usual idiots in Academia, Senator Tom Cotton offered a historical comparison:
We didn't provide aid to Nazi Germany during World War II. The idea is preposterous.
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) March 3, 2025
Why should Israel be forced to provide aid to Hamas-run Gaza?
We didn't provide it to Imperial Japan either. Neither country received any aid from combatants until after they had both capitulated and renounced the governments that had launched their wars. In both cases, the capitulation was nearly too late. The Germans faced a significant level of famine after the end of the war in large part because Hitler ordered the Nazis to destroy their own infrastructure, largely to punish Germans for being unworthy of his leadership, as William Shirer outlines in detail in the book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The situation in Japan was just as bad if not worse, Richard Frank reports in Downfall; had the occupation started even just a few weeks later, American aid would not have arrived in time to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation in Japan.
However, someone added a community note to Cotton's tweet to argue that the aid isn't originating with Israel, but with NGOs with Israel's cooperation. Israel isn't halting aid, the argument goes, but is blocking the NGOs from transmitting the aid. That's not entirely accurate either; the aid is mainly coming from NGOs, but the IDF is conducting the transfers, and now the IDF is refusing to do so any more. Cotton's point is still valid, and in fact highlights another aspect of the asymmetry of expectations in this conflict.
The only aid that did get passed in Germany during the war -- if one could call it that -- was POW service conducted by the Red Cross. (Japan barred the Red Cross in World War II.) Hamas has refused to allow Red Cross inspections of the conditions of the hostages. Yet they and their apologists expect the Israelis not just to allow Red Cross access to Palestinian criminals in prison, but also to keep sending food and medicine to Hamas. NGOs didn't cross battle lines to feed entire populations in a country that had launched and waged a genocidal war on its neighbors out of extremist ethno-theocratic supremacy in either Germany or Japan. Only after capitulation did any such aid enter either country.
The hue and cry since October 7 about the amount of aid Israel allows into Gaza reflects the unreality of the Western progressive elite about conflict in general, and this conflict in particular. They want to pretend that the Gazans didn't elect Hamas to wage this very kind of war against Israel so as to insist that they suffer no consequences for that choice. They want to make Israel responsible for Hamas' genocidal launches of war on multiple occasions over the last two decades, without once considering the massively perverse incentives that creates.
The West is burdening Israel with all of the consequences of wars it doesn't start and freeing the terrorists and their supporters from any consequences whatsoever. And they wonder why this conflict is so intractable?
It may not remain intractable for long. Bolstered by support from Donald Trump in this choice as well as the transfer of $3-4 billion in bombs and other materiel held up by Biden, the Israelis warned Hamas that they would not wait long to accept 'no' as an answer:
Israeli officials told The Jerusalem Post Sunday that they are giving Hamas a few days to reach an agreement on the release of additional hostages.
"We are willing to give a chance of a few days, but we won't let it drag on indefinitely," the officials said. "If we see that the negotiations are not being conducted in good faith, we will return to fighting in Gaza."
Hamas will not agree to extend the first phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal as requested by Israel, senior Hamas official Mahmoud Mardawi told Al Jazeera on Sunday in an interview. He added that Hamas would only release the remaining Israeli hostages under the terms of the already agreed-upon phased deal.
Benjamin Netanyahu is walking a political tightrope with these moves. He wants to destroy Hamas, but popular opinion in Israel appears to be leaning toward the three-phase plan that would leave Hamas in place in exchange for the remaining living hostages. Netanyahu is trying to navigate that by offering a sort of Phase 1-B or perhaps Phase 1.5 in which at least 12 living hostages would get traded for more Palestinian prisoners, kicking the other issues down the road for a while longer, a plan floated by the US:
Minutes after midnight and following a four-hour security consultation with top officials, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declared that it was endorsing what it described as a proposal by US President Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, which would see the ceasefire with Hamas extended through Ramadan and Passover, during which all hostages could potentially be released. ...
Minutes after midnight and following a four-hour security consultation with top officials, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declared that it was endorsing what it described as a proposal by US President Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, which would see the ceasefire with Hamas extended through Ramadan and Passover, during which all hostages could potentially be released. ...
The statement claimed that Hamas has so far rejected the US plan, and implied that if this stance isn’t changed, Israel could resume the war against the Palestinian terror group that was sparked by the latter’s October 7, 2023, onslaught and which has been on pause since January 19.
Cutting off all aid at least changes some of the terms on the ground for Hamas. If they can't seize aid, they lose the ability to manipulate Gazans. If the war starts again, the combined effect would make it difficult for Hamas to survive, especially with Israel refusing to leave the Philadelphi Corridor. No doubt Hamas has stocked the previously shipped aid (especially fuel) for a potential return to war, but they are running out of military resources necessary to stand up to an onslaught of combined arms from a first-rate military like the IDF. And if Trump decides to demonstrate his resolve by delivering "all hell" as he warned several times, that will only make survival even more difficult.
But in the end, it may not matter at all. As I wrote this weekend, this is the inevitable impasse that all of the cease-fire talks keep trying to ignore. Hamas wants nothing else than the annihilation of Israel and won't abide by any agreements that allow Israel to survive. Israel won't acquiesce to its own destruction, hostages or no, and now knows it can't allow Hamas to exist on its borders. Either Hamas has to capitulate, or the Gazans have to capitulate and surrender Hamas to the Israelis. Otherwise, the war will come whether it does this week, this month, this year, or in the next few years. And for Israel, the best time for reckoning is right now rather than after Hamas rebuilds.
