Hundreds of Gazans carry flour seized from aid trucks that entered Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on Thursday. Photo by Mohammed Al-Amour/UPI | License Photo
Israel Defense Forces are taking new steps to improve the delivery of aid to Gazans, who the IDF says are not subject to famine despite contrary reports.
Aerial aid drops will resume and include seven pallets of flour, sugar and canned food, while pauses in fighting will enable the safe movement of U.N. convoys that contain food and medical supplies, the IDF announced Saturday in a post on X.
Israel also reconnected a power line from Israel to a desalination plant in Gaza that will increase daily water output to nearly 22,000 cubic yards.
“The IDF emphasizes that there is no starvation in Gaza,” the IDF post says. “This is a false campaign promoted by Hamas.”
The U.N. and international aid organizations are responsible for food distribution in Gaza and for ensuring Hamas does not receive any, which the IDF says commonly steals humanitarian aid for personal use and profit.
Hamas accused of attacking aid distribution sites
Hamas has targeted GHF aid distribution sites with deadly violence, including a July 16 incident that killed 19 Gazans at a Khan Younis site and a July 5 grenade attack that injured two U.S. aid workers, according to the non-partisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Such attacks occurred as Hamas struggles to raise funds and is incapable of rebuilding its collapsed tunnels or paying its fighters, former Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer Oded Ailam told The Washington Post on Monday.
Hamas did not prepare for more than a year of war when it attacked Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, and is struggling to provide basic services for Gazans, Gazan analyst Ibrahim Madhoun said.
Hamas previously depended on revenues from taxing commercial shipments and seizing humanitarian goods for funding by deploying plainclothes Hamas personnel to take inventory at crossings into Gaza and warehouses and markets, The Washington Post reported.
U.N. and European Commission officials and others from international organizations say there is no evidence of Hamas stealing aid.
Officials with the U.S. Agency for International Development said they found no evidence of Hamas stealing aid for Gazans, ABC News reported on Saturday.
USAID investigated 150 reported incidents of stolen aid from October 2024 until May and said the perpetrators could not be identified in most cases in which aid was seized.
An unnamed Gazan contractor, though, told The Washington Post that over the past two years he witnessed Hamas charge local merchants about $6,000 each to receive aid or lose their trucks and threatened to kill or condemn those who did not cooperate.
The contractor claims he knew at least two aid truck drivers who Hamas killed for refusing to pay the designated foreign terrorist organization to deliver aid intended for Gazans.
U.N. aid trucks halted inside Gaza
While claims of Hamas intercepting aid deliveries to raise funds are disputed, the United Nations says it has thousands of tons of aid sitting idle.
The United Nations recently halted 950 trucks inside Gaza that holding a combined total of 2,500 tons of food near the Kerem Shalom crossing, Johnnie More, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation executive chairman, opined in The Wall Street Journal on Friday.
“Since we began our operations in May, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has repeatedly called for the U.N. and its affiliate agencies to combine efforts with us to feed the people of Gaza,” Moore said.
“As of Friday morning, hundreds of trucks loaded with food from the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations were sitting idle inside Gaza,” he wrote.
“The food is there, the people are starving, and yet it isn’t moving to them fast enough to meet the need.”
Moore said video footage shows many of the trucks have been looted or abandoned, and their drivers are walking away.
Officials with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency blame the GHF for what UNRWA calls a “constructed and deliberate mass starvation.”
The GHF is incapable of addressing the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza and called air drops the “most expensive and inefficient way to deliver aid” to Gazans, according to UNRWA.
The agency says it has the equivalent of 6,000 trucks of food and medical supplies “Stuck” in Egypt and Jordan.
