the only time there were news about hamas having cashflow problems (to pay salaries to fighters) was this summer.
Israel targets 3000+ calories into the area per person. The USA targeted 1500 into Germany, and 1000 for areas where airlifts were used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany
War sucks. It sucks that the government of Gaza chose to start this war with Israel, especially as that government knew that a large amount of their people's food came through Israel and that war would impact those routes. During active ongoing conflict Israel is still providing more calories per person in Gaza than the allies did for years to post war/non-active conflict Germany.
From the article: https://imgur.com/a/rqW5m3w
The CNN article gives the low calorie consumption amount as 1400.
The US, in post war Germany, doing it 'the right way' according to history, targeted (so many received lower) 1500 calories a day. Or 1000 a day when airdropped.
According to the CNN article, Israel's action during an ongoing conflict is about par with how the US did it for years in post war Germany. And remember Germany is much larger than Gaza, so people had much larger distances to cover. Those that couldn't be reached received airlifts that only targeted 1000 calories per day.
War sucks. It sucks that the government of Gaza chose to start a war. What we are seeing is the impacts of that. And it is awful. But it's also in line with the conditions in post WW2 Germany, arguable one of the best historical treatments of an aggressor by victors over it.
Germany isn't referred to as a starvation, but as a successful reconstruction. It is the 'norm' to which people speak when they speak of how to treat an aggressor population when they lose to victors. It is the literal 'norm' that people are calling for in Gaza. I only looked into it because people here were pointing to it as how Israel should be acting in Gaza on last weeks Gaza story. And I was surprised to find that Israel is acting within that established norm.
Secondarily, just because there was a guideline during WW2 that was deemed "the right way", it's the result that counts. Were people starving in Germany post WW2? If so that was wrong then too.
https://emergency.lacity.gov/sites/g/files/wph1791/files/202...
The UN itself has cut food distribution/caloric intake in Kenya (in need in huge part because of war refugees from Sudan) in half, is the UN using food as a weapon? The UN is saying it wants to provide aid at a much higher level to the people of Gaza than it provides to the people in Kenya.
The problem for your argument is that Israeli leaders have publicly said over and over again that they are intentionally starving the Palestinians in Gaza.
> 1400 was a specific time/event and the worst case CNN listed.
Israel let in 0 calories for months on end. They have blocked the UN from providing food aid, and have attempted to completely destroy the main UN agency providing food in Gaza. When Israel does let food in, it is only in response to international pressure. If the Israeli government thought it could get away with killing every last Palestinian in Gaza, it would.
To be fair, Israeli leaders can be quoted saying just about anything, same as in pretty much any democracy. What matters is which leaders are saying what, what authority they have, and what's happening on the ground.
Nobody who has followed the news over the last two years can seriously claim that this isn't Israeli policy. Did Israel block all aid shipments for months earlier this year by accident?
> Nobody who has followed the news over the last two years can seriously claim that this isn't Israeli policy
Eh, it's fair to say there isn't an Israeli policy. Same as there isn't a Palestinian one. We have a black box in Hamas and around Netanyahu.
CNN: "Israel says it will block Gaza humanitarian aid until Hamas agrees to new conditions"[1]. This official announcement came directly from Netanyahu's office. After this announcement, Israel blocked all humanitarian aid to Gaza for nearly 3 months. What's particularly remarkable is that this came after Hamas agreed to a ceasefire and hostage exchange. Netanyahu exchanged the first few batches of hostages, and then refused to continue as previously agreed. He demanded that the entire deal - which both sides had already agreed to - be renegotiated, and blocked humanitarian aid as a means of applying pressure.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalael Smotrich: "No one in the world will allow us to starve 2 million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages."[2]
I could go on, but you get the point. You can't possibly claim that this isn't Israeli government policy or that we have no way of knowing what the top Israeli leaders think about the matter.
0. https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2023/10/9/israeli-d...
1. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/02/middleeast/israel-halts-g...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/08/israel...
And population growth looks the same everywhere in the world: the poorer the country, with less access to health care, less job security, independence and opportunities for women, the higher the birth rate.
Even if they could, they're too malnourished to do so.
2. Even if a country's government starts a war, that doesn't not justify war crimes. This is why they're called war crimes.
3. Pointing to what allies did 70+ years ago doesn't mean anything.
The 1400 calories are the number people are actually consuming, not unavailable. It is the whole point of the article.
> War sucks.
That's an awfully glib way of justifying deliberately starving a civilian population. Saying "war sucks" doesn't make it okay to commit war crimes.
The Allies did not. This is the number for years decided by bureaucrats, not just immediately after surrender. Go read the articles. The Allies decided on a number based on what they felt their home populations were willing to accept not on 'what they could get in'. And the Allies are considered to have been generous and done it the right way even though they made such considerations and limited supplies. It was until a year after the wars end that the allies allowed third party aid agencies for children into Germany. That was limiting aid, by choice. Just as the target calories were limited, by choice not capability/capacity.
All I know is the article's worst calorie number (1400) for a specific month is around the US allocated amount for many Germans during the initial 3-4 years of post war occupation and higher than those in remote areas of Germany.
Instead of being called crimes, what the Allies did is the basis of establishing the norms people here seem to want followed, and considered one of the better cases of treatment/outcomes. But when I point out the actual real 'norms' to have a discussion around I am downvoted, flagged, and attacked.
For 1 we should be looking at results and the situation on the ground, not the guidelines for what's "the proper way to do things". Were people in Germany starving or not, are people in Gaza starving or not? If the answer to either is yes, then it is / was a problem.
Secondly, what we consider ok changes over time. Go back far enough and killing prisoners, taking civilians as slaves etc were all considered ok. We frown on those now.
The Red Cross considers 1500 the floor for the US: https://emergency.lacity.gov/sites/g/files/wph1791/files/202...
not that much to the minimal amount of 1400 the CNN article found occurring. Horrible I agree, but not that far off from the Red Cross floor for aid distribution with the USA.
The UN provides much less calories (currently 552 to refugees from Sudan's war) yet says it can provide more than Israel in aid Gaza. Is the UN anti Sudanese/Kenyans because it claims to have food for 2 million on hand yet won't feed the starving 800,000 in Kenya? If it has food for Gaza's 2 million that is isn't giving out, how can it justify not giving at least part of that to the smaller 800,000 war refugees in Kenya? The UN itself says it's a crime not to give out food in those higher quantities if there are stocks of it. The UN has stocks. The UN does not give those stocks out to those in need, only giving 552 calories.
Kenya has the ability to grow food. Gaza doesn't. Israel has destroyed 100% of the farmland and shoots anyone who walks around freely outside of a tiny fraction of the Gaza Strip.
https://doi.org/10.2307/4588157
Quote:
Our clinical and other observations convinced us that 2,000 calories a day was a bare minimum and sufficed merely to keep the population at a subsistence level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany
The Red Cross has settled on 1500 as the floor in the US.
https://emergency.lacity.gov/sites/g/files/wph1791/files/202...
Of course, if you had read the wikipedia article you would have seen these lines:
The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force initially set the ration scale for Germans at 11,000 kJ (2,600 kcal) per day... Once the occupation of Germany commenced, it proved impossible to deliver the intended levels of food...As a result, once supplies which had been stockpiled by the German government during the war ran out, the ration scales were reduced to 4,200–5,200 kJ (1,000–1,250 kcal) per day.
The LA city (not Red Cross) document is much the same. Again, you've failed to read literally the next line in a document because the Red Cross is cited with the proper figure immediately after the "1500 calorie" figure:
The Red Cross suggests 2,000 to 2,500 calories per person, per day.
And/or the Israel-backed ISIS groups[1][2].
[1]: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sytu2q1mel
[2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-netanyahu-armi...
No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un...
We don't know many of the interceptions Hamas was behind, but that isn't really important.
Sure it is when Israel is funding other groups that are known for stealing aid. It changes the entire narrative.
Israel backs an anti-Hamas armed group known for looting aid in Gaza. Here’s what we know
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-armed-groups-hamas-israel-lo...
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/02/middleeast/israel-halts-gaza-...
Secondly, nobody can tell who intercepted what, it could very well be that the IDF is intercepting them covertly.
> it could very well be that the IDF is intercepting them covertly
This seems like a pretty farfetched conspiracy theory. There are smart phones and other cameras all over Gaza, and zero evidence of this.
No it's not. Driving trucks full of food through hungry crowds will absolutely result in "shrinkage." That doesn't mean they're all Hamas.
I didn't say they're all Hamas; again the relevant thing is that they're being intercepted and not making it to ordinary civilians.
> the relevant thing is that they're being intercepted and not making it to ordinary civilians
Hell of a straw man. People care that the aid is getting to militants. Israel said it was getting to Hamas. That's the justification for limiting aid. If it's not getting to people who are shooting at Israeli troops, then it's not a security risk to provide more aid.
- Groups of men with rifles tend to be belligerents in the conflict, even if we can't say definitively if they're with Hamas, PIJ or some smaller gang. Israel doesn't want an aid program where the bulk of the aid goes to their literal war enemies.
- Even if some of them are "civilian armed gangs" and not actual belligerents, the aid they steal still isn't getting to civilians (except when it's sold at extortionate prices). Hence the shift to GHF which, while it has its own problems, does actually deliver most aid to ordinary civilians for free.
Granted.
> Even if some of them are "civilian armed gangs" and not actual belligerents, the aid they steal still isn't getting to civilians
Sure. Now where is the evidence that most of the aid is being pilfered by armed anyones?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip#Feb...
What is happening though is that the UN is under-reporting the amount of aid for political reasons [4]. The UN is also refusing to cooperate with Israel/US led efforts to provide aid. [5]
This last one from the anti-Israeli side basically accidentally tells the whole story: "The UN and major aid groups have refused to cooperate with the GHF, citing concerns that it prioritises Israeli military objectives over humanitarian needs." which is that the UN is prioritizing it's anti-Israeli agenda over the needs of the Gazans. I.e. if Israel's goals of eliminating Hamas and returning the hostages are in conflict with the Gaza civilian population's needs then the UN will side with Hamas.
I'm also curious if you can give me other examples of countries that enabled wartime supply through their territory if this is so obviously something that should happen. Israel does have a responsibility for sure but the bar you are setting for it is unreasonably high, it's not required to facilitate any country sending whatever aid during a war. Israel's critics (if we can even call this that) are ignoring the ongoing war and the responsibility of Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, to their citizens and their choice to continue the hostilities and continue to hold hostages. They're also ignoring the role of Egypt (as they have been even before this war) in blockading Gaza and not enabling civilian and refugees to escape the war, something that is virtually unprecedented (e.g. in the Syrian civil war Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey all allowed Syrians to leave the war zone) and is purely politically motivated, i.e. they are willing for Gazan civilians to suffer so they don't appear to be helping Israel in any way.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/05/26/g-s1-1069/aid-trucks-begin-en...
[2] https://gaza-aid-data.gov.il/mainhome
[3] https://jordantimes.com/news/local/jordan-sends-over-8600-ai...
[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/cogat-knocks-un...
[5] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/13/united-nations-slam...
You mean the one that Israel was caught on camera using to help carry out a raid (the Nuseirat refugee camp massacre) that killed 276 civilians and injured over 600? And then promptly disintegrated after spending only 20 days distributing 1/5 of the aid actually needed?
How magnanimous of them. Why don't we send them another billion off our paychecks to fund their free healthcare to thank them?
All of you guys out there in the Middle East are out of the same melting pot. And you're all as crazy as a butterfly on absinthe. I don't know whether you're all Canaanites at the base, or you're all Jews at the base, or out of the Land of Nod, or whatever the hell you were at the get-go, "semites" or whatnot. But you've been fighting it out for something like eight thousand years! And you've never had five minutes of quiet and peace! You're forever killing each other, and sticking knives in each other, and burning babies - and the world has had to suffer with this.
Great things have come out of the Middle East - great things like the *Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam* - but *stupidity* seems to be your chief export! Stupidity, and violence, are your cash crops. All you.Literally doesn't matter. Dead people don't get a vote on where who can live. The people alive today live where they do and will fight to keep from getting displaced. The sooner folks can understand that the sooner we might see peace.
Who people?
Remember, there have been several two state solution offers in the past. None were accepted by the Islamic Arabs who now call themselves “Palestinian”. Because they aren’t content with coexisting. They want to eliminate Israel and take over the entire region of historical Palestine. That’s what “from the river to the sea” means.
Great question because Hamas was funded by Benjamin Netanyahu in the 90s because he feared the peaceful PLO would become too powerful and result in a two state solution.
Knowing this does this change your position or have you decided on a viewpoint that you will push regardless.
If what I just said was true (and it is) Benjamin Netanyahu put them in power. Doesn't that change everything for you?
Debating that two state solutions were offered and other Arab states not supporting a two state solution because they wanted everything restored to before the world wars victors carved up the world and took away their piece is worth debating. But that's not why Hamas exists.
Benjamin Netanyahu disparate needed an enemy a group violent and extreme. Benjamin Netanyahu setup a strawman.
Hitler's Nazi party in the begining use to send men in to attack an area create chaos then use that justification to take over that area to protect them. Scared people obey.
Hamas changed their charter in 2017 and supported the 1967 borders. Israel does not.
This entire situation has been engineered from the start by Zionists to take over and ethnically cleanse the area. This plan goes back to Ben Gurion.
That's an unverified quote which Netanyahu denied saying.
> Hamas changed their charter in 2017 and supported the 1967 borders.
First it's only certain Westerns who like to frame it as a new charter, while Hamas never used such language and never recanted their original charter.
More to the point, Hamas' 2017 document accepts the concept of a state along 1967 borders, presumably as a stepping stone, "without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity", i.e. while still demanding "the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea".
> Israel does not.
There's nothing sacred about the 1967 armistice line in particular, but the 2ss offers Israel made in 2000 and 2008 would have been pretty close.
You need to hear “it”, again because “it” is the foundation of civilized coexistence.
No it didn't. The hostages are leverage only for Hamas, not the Palestinians. Unilaterally cede the hostages and Israel would be put into a really tough spot.
Just pointed it out for the normal folks here. Israelis are pretty radicalized.
> if you could press a button that would return all hostages but at the cost of 276 Palestinian civilians per hostage recovered, you would do it.
If your daughter was held captive by Gazans, would you not sacrifice 276 of those who vow to eradicate you, in order to save your own daughter?
Remember that the editor of Der Sturmer was hanged at the Hague!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/02/middleeast/israel-halts-gaza-...
And it's true, Israel is not required to accept aid from other countries for Gaza. They could instead provide the full required resources for civilians in the occupied areas themselves.
"allowed"
The pier was never going to work. Israel should just allow aid in via the normal ways. Notice that Israel controls all the borders of Gaza and they're the ones preventing food from coming in. Not to mention destroying all the farmland in Gaza too.
There's a report by forensic-architecture on that: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/ecocide-in-g...
Aid can be used to pay fighters. That doesn't justify blocking aid. Just that there are military reasons to be careful about how it's distributed.
It's not like the Gazans have any money to speak of.
> (or is irrelevant)?
If the way to prevent starvation is to flood the zone with food shipments, it's a moral imperative to do that. That it will also help keep the enemy fed is entirely beside the point, since causing starvation is not a legal or ethical form of warfare.
This is more of an argument in favor of the other side. It immediately becomes clear why they don't have the money.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100612001046/http://www.mcclat...
https://ghf.org/press-briefing-ghf-addresses-personnel-matte...
The only material evidence GHF has shown are small chunks of SMS conversations that are perfectly compatible with the "Aguilar was trying to convince GHF leadership to change policies" hypothesis, and WhatsApp broadcast of Aguilar telling his staff they were doing a great job.
Meanwhile, Aguilar has multiple photos and videos showing the conditions aid was distributed in which you can see right now on Youtube, testimony of seeing the GHF security contractors firing into crowds (to which the GHF replied by saying its contractors only fired above crowds, still a Geneva Convention violation), statistics that showed that people got shot during every single GHF distribution, matching testimony from Palestinian doctors and journalists and IDF whistleblowers, etc.
The evidence is overwhelming unless your curiosity cuts off as soon as you read the GHF damage control statements.
given that there is "statistics" (comfortable provided by hamas) of people getting shot during every single distribution, do you find it strange that there is not even 1 video of people actually getting shot en masse ? surely someone would have thought that it will be amazing video evidence that will be easy to make, as it happens daily, and a way to make israel look real bad, yet - nothing. the only video that comes close to it is when bullets very precisely hitting absolutely nothing few meters away from people.
with regards to " IDF whistleblowers", in case you missed the memo, the famous haaretz article with whistleblowers was mistranslated from hebrew. in hebew was used expression with meaning of "shooting at air/ground to prevent advancement". it was translated to english as "shooting at people". haaretz got it's 13 pieces for this
Yeah, guess what, that's still a breach of Geneva Conventions.
(Also basic common sense. The golden rule of gun safety is "Never point the gun at anything unless you intend to kill it", there isn't a "but shooting just over their heads is perfectly okay".)
First, Israel has consistently denied journalists access to those distribution sites, so the only video evidence we should expect to find are from civilians. Civilians who are in the middle of a stampede and getting shot at do not, as a general rule, stop to bring their smartphone out and film whoever is shooting at them (usually footage of shootings is filmed by people in buildings, obviously doesn't apply here).
The best video I could find is this one, showing people cowering and shots landing between them: https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2025/7/15/video-sho...
That's a really tight crowd, and bullets are clearly landing very close to them. Even if we assume nobody was hit by a stray bullet (which I find very improbable), that's still an egregious breach of the Geneva Conventions. Also, it seems similar to a pattern Aguilar described: IDF soldiers shooting at sand mounds, not realizing/caring that their bullets had enough penetration to go out the other side and kill people.
As for non video evidence, we have: photos of wounded people being taken away from GHF sites, testimonies of Gazan doctors who treated people of all ages wounded/killed by 7.62mm M80 bullets, testimonies of international doctors saying the same thing, a video published by Aguilar where we hear a SRS contractor bragging about hitting someone during a distribution, whistleblower testimonies, Gaza Health Ministries statistics (which the IDF treats as reliable, according to IDF leaks), UN statistics, and a mountain of testimonies from Gazan residents.
But if the only "actual" evidence you accept is video evidence in an area where the IDF is forbidding journalists, then the best I can give you is the link above.
Also, I'm stopping this discussion here, because the bullshit asymmetry principle is at play here: it took you 10 seconds to write your "there's no evidence because I say so" comment, and it took me one hour to sift through the media reports to write this rebuttal.
(Though for what it's worth, I do wish the evidence was better collected, and not scattered across MSM reports. In particular, I wish Aguilar had published a full dump of all the photos and videos he took.)
EDIT: This site aggregates social media reports related to the Gaza war. Some of them include footage of dead people near GHF sites, though none I could find that included the moment the person got shot.
Seems to me, if the claim is true, Israel is trying to give Hamas more power, not less.
If they flooded Gaza with food then Hamas would benefit less from the supposed stealing/reselling.