Gaza City op won’t interfere with flow of humanitarian aid to enclave, Netanyahu says

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that, in coordination with the United States, Israel decided to ensure that the recently approved military campaign to capture Gaza City does not halt efforts surrounding the transfer of humanitarian aid.

“We did… make a decision together with our American friends to separate the military operation we decided on [so as not to disrupt] the transfer of humanitarian aid,” Netanyahu says at a press conference for Israeli media.

He says that throughout the war, he has argued that if Israel stops allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza, “we will not be able to continue the war. There will be massive international pressure on us, not only from our enemies, but also from our friends,” and that Israel “does not want to use hunger as a tool of war.”

Asked whether his March decision to halt humanitarian aid — a move he reversed 11 weeks later only after heavy pressure from international allies — was a failed strategy to defeat Hamas, Netanyahu insists the policy was never intended to coerce Hamas into surrender. Rather, he says, it was aimed solely at preventing Hamas from seizing the aid and using it to recruit and control Gaza’s population.

“Hamas used [stolen aid] as a recruitment tool for new terrorists, telling a Palestinian woman, ‘You want this flour? Give me your 15-year-old son.’ That’s how they sustain their war machine,” he says.

“We didn’t want to cause hunger; the opposite, we want to get around the looting and robbery of Hamas,” he continues, pointing to Israel’s support for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), though he presents the latter’s establishment as one that came “in parallel” to the halt of aid, ignoring the three-month period between the March 2 halt to all aid and the start of GHF’s operations on May 26.

“But it didn’t work as we wanted it to,” Netanyahu acknowledges. “It didn’t work because there weren’t enough distribution points, et cetera. We learned the lesson. We stopped it, and now we’re operating in a different way. Aid is going in. We are doing our best to ensure that most won’t reach the hands of Hamas. And in parallel, we are indeed increasing the number of distribution points, the secure roads, and the air drops, which usually don’t reach Hamas.”

“There wasn’t starvation,” Netanyahu says. “There was a shortage; there certainly wasn’t a policy of starvation.”

Netnayhu offers some criticism of the policy he and his government chose, saying: “We can argue about whether [changing the policy] was too late, but we certainly shouldn’t have let ourselves be caught in that situation.”

Netanyahu argues that a sign of leadership is the ability to change direction if a policy is proven wrong, adding that he decided not to let the “campaign of starvation” defeat Israel, and that “It will take time until we are out of this, I also know the international problems.”

The premier adds that Israel “won’t commit suicide” by failing to defeat Hamas due to pressure from European countries over the humanitarian situation, saying their leaders “lack the ability to stand up to hostile media and radical minorities, Islamists, that are pressuring [them] in [their] countries.”

“We will win the war, we will eliminate Hamas, and these things will sort themselves out,” he says.