At the Port of Ashdod, some 30 kilometers north of Gaza, Israel has blocked a shipment of United Nations food aid, intended to feed over a million Gazans for a month. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Tuesday, February 13, he had issued a directive blocking the 1,049 containers, which mainly contain flour, but also cooking oil, chickpeas, sugar and rice. The UN was set to distribute these supplies in and around the city of Rafah, where more than half of Gaza's inhabitants are caught between the Egyptian border and Israeli infantry.
These displaced people are virtually the only ones to receive – inadequate – international aid, which is being channeled mainly through Egypt. For weeks now, the UN has been warning of the risk of famine. Most of the people living there have to huddle together in makeshift shelters, while the Israeli air force is stepping up its bombardments in this area, one of the most densely populated on the planet, and the government is announcing an imminent infantry advance towards Rafah.
Smotrich, a representative of the religious far-right, sees this blockade as part of his government's fight against the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), the main aid provider in the Gaza enclave and the one that orchestrated the delivery. "Now the world also knows that UNRWA is a central part of the Nazi Hamas war machine. There is a consensus inside the cabinet of the need to prevent the aid from reaching Hamas and I will use my authority to make sure this is the case," declared Smotrich, who said he was acting in coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In so doing, the minister was maintaining the charges brought by Israel against 12 of the agency's employees, who are suspected of having participated in the attack carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023 in the south of the country. Informed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the agency made these allegations public on January 26, before receiving proof and launching an internal investigation, explained its commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini.
Lazzarini feared that these serious accusations would be used in the battle being waged by the Israeli right to dismantle UNRWA, which was set up in 1950 to help half the population of Palestine who had been driven off their land two years earlier, during the war that accompanied the birth of Israel.
In the wake of these revelations, the United States and 16 other international donors suspended their funding to the agency, jeopardizing UNRWA's operations in the short term, while Israel took retaliatory measures. In early February, Smotrich announced that the agency would be deprived of the tax exemptions it had previously enjoyed in Israel.
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