The incident surrounding the aid trucks in Gaza city yesterday is a real tragedy. The worst thing anyone could do would be to minimize it. It’s also important that we be mindful of the context.
1) Israel is at war with Gaza. The government of Gaza, Hamas, is still dedicated to the annihilation of every last Jewish civilian living in the nation of Israel. The war will only end when either Hamas has been permanently neutralized, or every last Jewish civilian has been horrifically slaughtered.
As the Palestinian activists like to remind us, the war I’m referring to didn’t begin on October 7th; while Israel has only officially been at war with Gaza since then, various Palestinian militant groups have been at war with Israel continuously since 1948.
2) The details surrounding the incident are unclear. There is lots of video footage of perfectly healthy Palestinian men standing and walking around, shouting about what they saw and how badly they were injured – but the only publicly-available video of the incident is a bit of blurry, aerial footage from an IDF drone, that doesn’t clearly show the exact sequence of events.
3) I’ve been reading news reports claiming that the Health Ministry in Gaza releases reliable numbers. This is absolutely false. It is a matter of public record that the Health Ministry in Gaza routinely inflates civilian casualties. This means that even the 120 number from the shooting that happened yesterday is likely inaccurate.
4) There are conflicting, unreliable accounts:
– Palestinian eye witnesses say that Israel attacked an aid convoy. The IDF is saying that the soldiers were there to protect the convoy.
– Palestinian eye witnesses say that the IDF opened fire on them from the convoy. (Notice that this is already a contradiction – did the IDF attack the convoy? Or did they attack the civilians from the convoy)? IDF soldiers who were present said that they only fired “warning shots,” or that they only “shot them in the legs” (Yeah, right). They are also saying that most of the civilians who died were either hit by the aid trucks as they tried to escape, or were caught up in a stampede.
– English-speaking news outlets painted a picture of docile civilians being viciously attacked without warning while they were patiently waiting for their food. IDF soldiers who were present are saying that the civilians swarmed the aid trucks, putting the drivers and IDF soldiers at risk. Palestinian eye witnesses also admit to this, explaining that they were desperate after weeks of having nothing to eat but pet food.
– The IDF has not released an official statement about what “actually” happened, pending an investigation. Of course, Hamas, which was supposedly not present at the incident, has already released an official statement, without performing any type of investigation.
5) There is a distinct possibility that the IDF did something wrong here. If that’s the case, then everyone involved needs to be held responsible.
6) Do not forget that, in the middle of an on-going war with Gaza, Israel is facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid to the civilian population of a group they are at war against – this particular aid convoy was one among hundreds, which we have heard nothing about until now. (In fact, we have been repeatedly told that Israel is making it impossible for humanitarian aid to be delivered to Gaza).
Many people have compared the incursion into Gaza with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These people will be hard put to find an example of the Russian military delivering humanitarian aid by the hundreds of truckloads to Ukrainian civilians. [I got an email from a reader who is familiar with the situation on the ground in Ukraine, informing me that the Russian military does, in fact, provide humanitarian aid to Ukranian civilians in areas that it has taken control of].
If this war is an attempt by Israel to commit ethnic cleansing, then it is the most inept, half-hearted endeavor the world has ever seen.