What help is 20 truckloads of aid to Gaza?

At the beginning of the brutal Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that his government would cut Gaza’s electricity, water and food.

The next day, his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant issued orders to the different sides to implement the decision of his prime minister. In addition, they asked Egypt to close the Rafah Crossing and ordered all commercial materials heading to Gaza to return; otherwise, they would have been bombed.

To stop the passage of people, the Israeli occupation bombed the Rafah Crossing. Then, the Egyptians built a concrete barrier to make the passage of people impossible. Of course, Egypt claimed that it closed the crossing due to Israeli threats and to protect its staff.

As the brutal Israeli attacks continued, and the burden on the Gaza residents became heavier as their basic resources started to run out, the need for reopening the Rafah Crossing became urgent.

The situation in the hospitals across Gaza, where most of the medical equipment and medicines have been exhausted due to the increasing number of Israeli war casualties, made reopening the Rafah Crossing more urgent.

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Israeli occupation does not care about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, nor the genocides being committed there by the Israeli occupation against civilians.

The massacre inside Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in the centre of Gaza City, where more than 500 women and children were killed and a similar number wounded, did not shake their conscience. Most official regimes and corporate mass media even acquitted the Israeli occupation of bearing the responsibility for it.

They don’t care about the closure of Rafah Crossing or the needs of the Palestinian civilians enduring the brutal war crimes committed by the most savage occupation in history.

US President Joe Biden declared several times his approval of the Israeli ethnic cleansing and declared his full support. He has not been reluctant to tell the world that his country sends all the weapons needed to the Israeli occupation to perish the Palestinians, as it is acting in self-defence.

All hypocritical Western leaders justified the Israeli massacres. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that Israel “is a nation in grief”, despite the fact it had killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children, when Sunak delivered his remarks. He repeated Israeli propaganda and ignored the killing of civilians in Gaza.

Amidst this dire situation in Gaza, world leaders wonder whether the Rafah Crossing should be reopened and humanitarian aid be allowed in for the people being slaughtered in the largest open-air prison in the world.

Now, as tens of truckloads of humanitarian aid are queuing on the Egyptian side of the Rafah Crossing, Biden and others started to speak about the entry of 20 truckloads of aid into Gaza, reflecting the sentiment that this aid is more than enough for the Palestinians in Gaza.

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Some people linked the entry of aid to the release of the American woman and her daughter by the Palestinian resistance on Friday, but no official sources, including the resistance, have mentioned this.

In fact, aid came just to fuel the Western propaganda, which has been promoting the Israeli onslaught in Gaza as a freedom battle against the largest and most heavily equipped army.

At the time, the world leaders “did their best” to let 20 truckloads of aid to Gaza. They are sending the most developed arms and destructive weapons to the Israeli occupation and sending large amounts of financial assistance.

Biden alone has allocated $14 billion to the Israeli occupation in addition to food, fruits and vegetables to cover the deficit in the Israeli market resulting from the lack of workers in the agricultural sector.

The permission of this very little amount of aid to Gaza is aimed at telling the world that Gaza is receiving assistance under Israeli occupation.

However, it is very little, but this aid is aimed at promoting the Israeli plan to force the Palestinians out of Gaza as it is restricted to the people in the south of the Gaza Strip and to be distributed to an Israeli-American-Egyptian committee to ensure that it does not go anywhere except serving this goal.

Supposedly, the aid is useful and helpful, but what does it mean for 2.3 million people without food, fuel, electricity and water for 15 executive days? At least half of them are internally displaced, and thousands had their homes destroyed by the Israeli military, losing all their belongings.

What would it do if such aid entered without Israeli war compared to 500 truckloads of materials used to enter Gaza before the war that were insufficient for about half of Gaza’s needs?

If any party wants to help Gaza, it must push the Israeli occupation to cease fire, stop targeting civilians and help lift the 17-year-old strict Israeli siege.

Even 100 truckloads of medical aid would be insufficient to aid Gaza, let alone 20.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.