The acute hunger crisis in the Strip is part of a deliberate Israeli strategy to cripple Hamas’ governance capabilities and banish humanitarian groups.
For almost a month, not a single drop of humanitarian aid has entered Gaza. Since March 2, when the second phase of the ceasefire was due to commence, only for Israel to renege on its commitment to the deal, Israel has blocked the entry of all food into the Strip, along with fuel, medical equipment, and other essential supplies. The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has warned that Gaza’s flour stores will likely run out completely before the end of this week.
While the current policy is more extreme than anything we’ve seen since October 7, Israel has nonetheless imposed restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza throughout its onslaught. Already in December 2023, Human Rights Watch declared that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. Almost a year later, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, in part on the grounds that they had “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food.”
The surge of humanitarian aid that Israel allowed to enter Gaza during the recent two-month ceasefire only served to underscore the cruel intentionality of the starvation policy. Israel argued for months — including in a year-long case at the High Court of Justice, in response to a petition by five Israeli human rights organizations — that any obstacles to the entry of aid were not its fault, attributing them instead to the inefficiencies of humanitarian agencies or looting by gangs. Yet the data paint a clear picture to the contrary.
While the quality and quantity of available data about the volume and composition of aid entering Gaza have declined significantly since the beginning of the ceasefire in mid-January (the two primary sources of information, the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, have stopped providing detailed dashboard updates), we can still see that the number of aid trucks authorized to enter Gaza increased dramatically, helping to somewhat alleviate the humanitarian crisis in the Strip.
Whereas, according to COGAT, a daily average of 126 aid trucks entered Gaza in the six months leading up to the deal — even despite an ultimatum from the Biden administration in October, demanding the entry of 350 trucks per day — the numbers that entered in the first three days of the ceasefire were 634, 916, and 897 trucks, respectively. The six-week period between the start of the ceasefire on Jan. 19 and Israel’s imposition of a full blockade on March 2 saw the entry of more trucks (25,200) than during the previous six months altogether (21,368).
During the ceasefire, Israel also lifted some of the barriers it had previously imposed on the entry of aid. For example, aid operations within Gaza no longer required coordination with the Israeli army, and it became possible to deliver much larger quantities of supplies to northern Gaza, which had until then been difficult to access. Over 100,000 tents were distributed, and visual evidence showed that heavy equipment, such as bulldozers, was brought in and used to clear roads and remove some of the rubble.
Additionally, the ceasefire allowed Hamas to reassert its governing capabilities in Gaza, which led to a drastic reduction in the looting of aid trucks to the point that the phenomenon became nearly nonexistent. The increased availability of aid also reduced the demand for goods on the black market, further contributing to the decline in looting.
These humanitarian relief measures, however, were not absolute. For example, around 10 percent of the more than half a million residents who returned to their destroyed homes in northern Gaza ended up moving south again, in part because they could not find sufficient means of survival in the devastated north. Moreover, some of the items that Israel was required to allow into Gaza under the terms of the ceasefire, such as mobile homes, appear to have been almost entirely barred from entering.
At the same time, Israel has quietly expanded its use of bureaucracy as a tool for controlling international organizations, tightening restrictions on the entry of aid workers into Gaza. About half of the doctors who received preliminary approval to enter the Strip through the World Health Organization (which requires all details to be submitted a month in advance), later discovered that Israel was denying them entry. Nearly all of these doctors had already entered the enclave since the start of the war, with prior COGAT approval.
A similar decrease in entry permits was observed among humanitarian aid workers. Arwa Damon, a former CNN journalist who founded the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance (INARA), an organization providing medical and psychological assistance to children in Gaza, entered the Strip four times in 2024. In 2025, however, all five of her applications for entry have been denied.
This policy shift, which began in early February, appears to stem from Israel’s decision to impose new regulations on the approval and registration of international organizations. According to these criteria, Israel can deny entry to any organization that promotes BDS, supports international tribunals against Israeli officials or soldiers, or “denies the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
A step toward direct control
Still, what followed at the start of March was a drastic shift. Israel’s decision to halt all humanitarian aid to Gaza as a means of pressuring Hamas to release the remaining hostages without any commitment from Israel to end the war — an action that amounts to the war crime of collective punishment — was widely condemned by international actors.
About a week after Israel sealed off the border crossings, Energy and Infrastructure Minister Eli Cohen additionally ordered a cutoff of the electricity that Israel sells to Gaza, crippling the operation of desalination plants. Senior Israeli officials even indicated plans to shut off water pipelines to Gaza. Unsurprisingly, food prices in the Strip have skyrocketed since the closure of the crossings, with the sharpest increases recorded in fresh produce like fruits and vegetables.
The impact of this intensified blockade is even more devastating than the one Israel imposed at the beginning of the war, after Gallant’s “no electricity, no food, no fuel” order; Gaza’s stockpiles were much higher back then than they are now, and Israel eventually relented to international pressure and allowed some aid in, albeit in much smaller quantities than what was needed. Yet the state’s latest response to the High Court of Justice — that it has no authority to rule on these matters — underscores its newfound confidence in its position, while the weak international pushback highlights the low political cost of employing starvation and deprivation as a form of collective punishment and a weapon of war.
Israel followed the aid ban with a resumption of its assault on Gaza in the early hours of March 18, killing more than 400 Palestinians in surprise attacks in the first few hours, including 178 children. Among the targets of these airstrikes were the civilian leadership of Hamas, specifically senior officials responsible for governance in the Strip. By crippling Hamas’ ability to manage civilian life in Gaza, Israel is intending to enable armed gangs — similar or identical to those that looted humanitarian aid — to take its place.
All the while, Israel has begun laying the groundwork to shift control of humanitarian aid management from international organizations to the Israeli military itself.
At the beginning of the month, COGAT published a report accusing the UN of disseminating biased, incomplete, or incorrect data. Shortly afterward, the new IDF Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, reversed his predecessor’s policy and removed the military’s objection to being the power responsible for distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza. The Israeli government and COGAT simultaneously launched a coordinated campaign — echoed by the prime minister’s supporters — alleging that Hamas steals humanitarian aid from international organizations and uses it to harm Israel, all while claiming that Israel is not supplying Gaza with enough food.
Transferring humanitarian aid management away from international organizations would serve several of Israel’s strategic objectives, aligning with its broader war policy. Direct control over aid would allow Israel to regulate assistance as it sees fit as part of a “carrots and sticks” approach — a policy with clear precedents in the decades preceding the current offensive. Additionally, removing aid organizations from Gaza would significantly reduce the flow of critical information about Israel’s actions in the Strip.
There have been some indications that this policy is having its intended effect. On March 24, the UN decided to “reduce its footprint” in the besieged enclave, partially in response to an attack on international UN personnel the previous week. Around 30 percent of the roughly 100 international UN staff were expected to leave within a week, with others likely to follow suit. An attack on a Red Cross building the same day further demonstrated that Gaza is not safe for international humanitarian workers.
If the army does take over the responsibility for distributing aid, this will increase friction with the local population and almost certainly lead to additional harm to civilians as well as higher casualties among Israeli soldiers. All the while, Israel will be the sole official source of information coming out of Gaza, allowing it to further obscure the reality on the ground from the eyes of the world.
