The "humanitarian" fallacy

Pressure on Israel to allow aid into Gaza is pressure to allow aid to Hamas

Hamas fuel tanks, Gaza

Melanie Phillips

MELANIE PHILLIPS 24 DE OUT. DE 2023

The issue of allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza has become yet another stick with which western “liberals” and their media mouthpieces are choosing — sickeningly — to beat up the target of genocidal attack, the State of Israel. 

The premise upon which their criticism is based is, as ever from these usual suspects, ignorant and shallow. By refusing to allow in humanitarian aid, they scold, Israel is in breach of international law.

For a magisterial take-down of this charge, watch this interview with British international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff. With calm politeness, she schooled the BBC’s Katya Adler in what the law actually requires in these circumstances, how Israel is observing this law to the letter and the singular perversity of Adler’s BBC mindset. It was a master class in telling truth to moral idiocy.

In the Wall Street Journal, law professor Eugene Kontorovich similarly pointed out that international law permits a siege as long as it isn’t intended to deny sustenance to the civilian population.  As West Point law professor Sean Watts put it in 2022:

Siege — or encirclement as military doctrine refers to it — is an essential aspect of modern military operations… Only starvation directed specifically at civilians is prohibited.

In a war, care should be taken to avoid civilian casualties as far as possible. But it has never been expected that the fate of civilians should be allowed to undermine and weaken those waging a just war and consequently enable a barbarous tyranny to survive.

“Humanitarian aid” may in fact aid a tyrannical enemy. That’s exactly what happens in Gaza. The notion that, in such a place, the aid sent by a compassionate world relieves the suffering of the civilian population is naive to the point of imbecility. 

Gaza is ruled by Hamas. Hamas is not some benign civil authority. It is despotic, oppressive and corrupt. Nothing happens in Gaza that is not under its tyrannical thumb. That goes for aid supplies. 

Aid lorries are now arriving in Gaza from Egypt as a result of pressure from the Biden administration on Israel to lift its siege and allow those supplies to come in. Those pressing for this aid claim it’s still not enough to stave off the “humanitarian catastrophe” they say is now under way. The Guardian reported: 

The shipment of 20 trucks bringing medical supplies, however, offered very limited relief to Gaza’s 2.3 million population, under fire and with barely anything to eat or drink.

But most of this aid doesn’t even get to the civilians of Gaza. Hamas take it for themselves to replenish and augment their armoury of mass murder.

Early last week, there were reports emanating from the UN Works and Relief Agency (UNWRA) that Hamas had stolen fuel and medical equipment from its compound in Gaza City. The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) said the amount of fuel that had been stolen was enough to power Gaza’s water desalination facilities for six days.

Today, as Times of Israel reported, the IDF issued photographs that it said showed fuel tanks near the Rafah crossing in the south of Gaza, stating it had information that large amounts of fuel were being kept there by Hamas. The photos were shared by the IDF’s Arabic-language account on X, formerly Twitter. “This is what over half a million litres of diesel looks like,” wrote IDF Arabic spokesman Avichay Adraee, “while Hamas keeps claiming it does not have enough fuel to support hospitals and bakeries.”

There are also numerous reports that, as it has done many times before, Hamas has been appropriating food and other aid packages and selling them at hugely inflated prices on the black market so it can buy more weapons with the profits.

And reports of power supplies running out at Gaza hospitals have been followed by video footage of these hospitals fully lit and operating as normal.

Clearly, Hamas routinely exaggerates and lies about the plight of the civilians. Equally, war must inescapably mean privation and worse for ordinary Gazans. But the evidence suggests that Hamas has been stockpiling supplies of fuel, food and water for its own use at the expense of the civilian population, from whom it further steals essential aid supplies. 

The suffering of the Gazan civilians is entirely due to the activities of Hamas who, treating them as little more than human shields and canon fodder, have brought catastrophe upon them by waging a genocidal war and then by stealing the aid intended for them — thefts carried out in order to amass more weapons to further that genocidal agenda. 

With the Biden administration insisting that aid must be supplied to Gaza, the Biden administration has been insisting in reality that assistance must be supplied to the genocidists of Hamas.

With the BBC and other media outlets demanding to know why Israel isn’t allowing more aid into Gaza, the BBC and other media are in reality demanding to know why Israel isn’t providing assistance to Hamas. 

With Hamas still committing war crimes daily by firing barrages of rockets to murder Israeli civilians, the Biden administration, the BBC and others demanding that Israel continue to provide aid to Gaza are in reality demanding that Israel continue to provide assistance to Hamas so that it can continue to commit such war crimes. 

And of course, once again it is only Israel whose defence against barbarism and annihilation western liberals feel an overwhelming need to undermine.