Netanyahu falsely says Israel never halted all entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza

In his press conference with Israeli media, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed Israel never halted all humanitarian aid to Gaza, despite his office having announced such a measure earlier this year and despite his government having prevented the entry of all aid into the Strip for almost three months.

Netanyahu was asked whether his March 2 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.

“First of all, we need to understand what actually happened,” he answered. “We never said we were stopping all entry of humanitarian aid. What we said was that, alongside halting the trucks that Hamas was seizing — taking the vast majority of their contents for itself, then selling the scraps at extortionate prices to the Palestinian population — we would act to prevent this theft… Therefore, we wanted to stop this and said that, in parallel, we would establish distribution points using the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) humanitarian mechanism set up by the Americans, so the food could be handed out separately. Our goal was not to block aid — on the contrary, it was to bypass Hamas’s looting and theft.”

“It just didn’t work as intended, because there weren’t enough distribution points, and so on,” he added. “We learned the lesson, stopped that approach, and are now operating differently. Aid is coming in, and we’re doing everything we can to ensure most of it does not reach Hamas, while at the same time significantly increasing the number of distribution points and secure routes.”

However, Netanyahu’s office indeed said on March 2 that all aid was being halted. The Prime Minister’s Office said at the time: “Prime Minister Netanyahu has decided that, as of this morning, all entry of goods and supplies into the Gaza Strip will cease.”

Moreover, the GHF operations didn’t begin in parallel with the March 2 aid halt, but rather on May 26 — almost three months later. A week before GHF started handing out supplies, on May 19, Israel started allowing a trickle of aid, which represented the first aid entering Gaza in 78 days.

Netanyahu made similar claims hours earlier in his press conference with international media, though he didn’t assert on that occasion that aid was never halted.