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“The point of this is to lure Palestinians as though they’re animals going into a cage, lure them with the bait of promise of aid, and then entrap them in the south of Gaza.” As starving Palestinians in Gaza compete for the limited trickle of supplies admitted into the enclave by a new U.S.- and Israeli-backed humanitarian aid scheme, journalist Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News says the sparse aid is actually another Israeli military tactic “meant to serve as part of Netanyahu’s war of annihilation. … They’re using food as a weapon of war in an effort to further dehumanize Palestinians.”
Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And Israeli-U.S. plan to sideline the United Nations aid delivery system is continuing to cause chaos in Gaza. At least 10 Palestinians have been shot dead as Israeli troops have repeatedly opened fire at newly established aid distribution sites.
The aid is being distributed by a shadow U.S. group registered in Delaware called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. A separate U.S. company called Safe Reach Solutions is helping to provide security. The New York Times reports that firm is run by a former senior CIA officer named Philip Reilly, who reportedly helped train the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
The U.N. and international aid groups have condemned the new Israeli-U.S. plan. This is UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.
PHILIPPE LAZZARINI: The model of aid distribution proposed by Israel does not align with core humanitarian principle. It will deprive a large part of Gaza, the highly vulnerable people, of desperately needed assistance.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of Drop Site News, recently wrote an article headlined “Netanyahu: Gaza Aid Scheme Offers Israel Symbolic Cover to Finish the Genocide.” Jeremy Scahill has also been reporting on proposals for a new ceasefire in Gaza.
We’ll get to that in a minute, Jeremy. But why don’t you lay out what is going on? This shadowy group that has moved in, condemned by humanitarian aid organizations, by the United Nations, talk about who they are and what’s happening.
JEREMY SCAHILL: I mean, first of all, Amy, we should be very clear that this cutout of a company — you know, “cutout” is a term of espionage — it was established by people with ties to the CIA and Israeli intelligence, was meant to serve as part of Netanyahu’s war of annihilation. Netanyahu himself said the quiet part out loud in a recent speech, when he said that he was getting some pressure even from his most passionate backers in the Republicans in the Senate. And he said, you know, that they didn’t want the optics of starving Palestinians, and that this could hinder the ability of the United States to continue arming and supporting Netanyahu, and so they wanted to give the veneer of some form of aid.
And Netanyahu and Israel have been at war against UNRWA, the U.N. agency that was established in the aftermath of the Nakba in the late 1940s, when the state of Israel was imposed on Palestine as a European colonial-settler state. And so, this serves two purposes. It allowed Netanyahu to say, “Look, we’re letting aid in, and we’re doing it so that Hamas can’t steal it” — which, by the way, was a lie. And even Biden’s top humanitarian official, David Satterfield, said this week that there was no evidence ever presented by Israel that Hamas was stealing or hoarding the aid. So, part of it was just was to give the veneer of we’re doing something humanitarian. The other part of it was to continue the war against UNRWA, to destroy the premier aid organization serving Palestinian refugees, forcibly displaced people. And UNRWA, its very existence, Netanyahu and Israel hate, because it recognizes the international laws that say that the Palestinians have a right to return to their land that they started to be — to lose in 1947, 1948, when the Nakba began.
So, they created this shell company, with ties to American intelligence officers, as a way of further destroying UNRWA, but also serving Netanyahu’s agenda. They then bring in an American mercenary company that — you know, Blackwater-style guys that you saw in Iraq and Afghanistan throughout the so-called war on terror. And then they created what international aid officials have said are concentration camp or internment camp-like conditions. Others have likened it to ghetto-style conditions, where Palestinians are going to be forced to stand out in the heat all day in barbed-wire fence enclosures, looking like a cage, and then they get a box with a paltry amount of food aid in it. There’s no medicine. There’s no infant formula. This is all just trickery that is being used to further the genocide.
And, Amy, I’ve been talking to people. A personal friend of mine whose family is from Khan Younis, four members of his family were shot sniper style yesterday by the Israeli military when they went to pick up these aid boxes at one of the two sites, the one near Rafah.
What is happening is that the Israelis are also using this as an intelligence operation. They’ve snatched, kidnapped a number of Palestinians. They’ve interrogated them. When they don’t get the answers they want, they’ve disappeared them.
They haven’t given any mechanism for how people are supposed to line up or know where to go. What we’re hearing from sources on the ground is that word just spreads via WhatsApp and text messages. “Oh, there’s going to be aid delivered in this place.” People go there, and it’s just pure chaos.
So, none of this is by accident. This is by design. And you have, on the one hand, a pittance of aid that is being actually distributed, relative to what is needed just to have — just to address the basic starvation factor in Gaza right now. And on the other hand, Israel is using this and the desperation of people to further dehumanize Palestinians. And when they go to try to desperately grab whatever aid they can, as we saw happen at a U.N. warehouse, then they say, “Well, Hamas is shooting starving people trying to get food.” No, Israel has intentionally starved the population of Gaza now for three months. They have continued the campaign of dehumanization, and they’re using food as a weapon of war in an effort to further dehumanize Palestinians.
And the last thing I’ll say about this is Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, who’s in the war cabinet, both said that the point of this is to lure Palestinians, as though they’re animals going into a cage, lure them with the bait of promise of aid, and then entrap them in the south of Gaza, where they can either kill them in an increasingly shrinking killing cage or lock that cage and ship them off to another country. They call it Trump’s plan, but actually it’s been Netanyahu life’s work to try to erase Palestinians as a people and as a territory.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, on Wednesday, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation posted a video online showing Palestinians lined up, cheering at a new aid distribution site. The post includes this message: “Humanity shines as thousands cheer the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, heralding a new era of hope and compassion.”
MASKED MAN: Isn’t this crazy? Look at that.
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