[News] Netanyahu: Gaza Aid Scheme Offers Israel Symbolic Cover to Finish the Genocide

Anti-Imperialist News news at freedomarchives.org
Mon May 19 10:37:05 EDT 2025


In order to conquer and seize Gaza, “We need to do it in a way” where 
the world “won’t stop us," Netanyahu says.
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Netanyahu: Gaza Aid Scheme Offers Israel Symbolic Cover to Finish the 
Genocide 
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      In order to conquer and seize Gaza, “We need to do it in a way”
      where the world “won’t stop us," Netanyahu says.

Jeremy Scahill <https://substack.com/@jeremyscahill>

May 19, 2025

	
<https://substack.com/@jeremyscahill>

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/Israel is making a push to complete the genocide in Gaza: escalating 
its aerial bombardment, announcing “extensive” new ground operations, 
and issuing sweeping displacement orders, from the north to the south. 
This comes amid a full spectrum siege Israel has imposed for the past 
two and a half months in a policy of forced starvation./

/In the story below, I explain the genocidal intent behind Israel's 
decision to begin allowing symbolic amounts of aid into the Gaza Strip. 
Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist ally Bezalel Smotrich are not 
making any secret about their intent to use the veneer of 
humanitarianism as a mechanism to advance their war of annihilation./

/We also just published a dispatch 
<https://substack.com/redirect/4acefd0a-3101-4137-a545-6abc5f36271f?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>by 
my colleague Rash Abou Jalal in Gaza City where she describes trying to 
donate blood to help the wounded, only to collapse during the process 
and later find out she was too anemic and malnourished for her blood to 
be fit to donate./

<https://substack.com/redirect/f005bba6-f8de-422c-a305-c38d46f26833?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>President 
Donald Trump meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the 
Oval Office on April 7, 2025. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear: His decision to allow a minuscule 
amount of aid to enter Gaza is a tactical one aimed at quieting 
international condemnation of Israel’s forced starvation of Gaza and to 
clear the path of a final solution imposed on the Palestinians of Gaza.

"We're going to take control of all the Gaza Strip,” Netanyahu vowed 
Monday in a video released by his office announcing that Israel would 
begin delivering “minimal humanitarian aid: food and medicine only.” 
Netanyahu claimed that international pressure, including from pro-Israel 
Republican senators and the White House, required the appearance of 
humanitarian intervention. "Our best friends in the world—senators I 
know as strong supporters of Israel—have warned that they cannot support 
us if images of mass starvation emerge," he said. “They come to me and 
say, ‘We’ll give you all the help you need to win the war… but we can’t 
be receiving pictures of famine,’” Netanyahu added. To continue the war 
of annihilation, he asserted, “We need to do it in a way that they won't 
stop us.”

Netanyahu’s coalitional ally Bezalel Smotrich—an extreme right-wing 
government minister and longtime advocate of starving, mass killing, and 
depopulating Gaza—endorsed Netanyahu’s move. Smotrich said the aid 
scheme would allow “our friends in the world to continue to provide us 
with an international umbrella of protection against the Security 
Council and the Hague Tribunal, and for us to continue to fight, God 
willing, until victory.”

In what he described as an emergency press conference to address 
criticism from his own base, Smotrich laid out the Netanyahu 
government’s genocidal agenda and explained why the appearance of 
allowing aid is necessary on a strategic level. “The [aid] that will 
enter Gaza in the coming days is the tiniest amount. A handful of 
bakeries that will hand out pita bread to people in public kitchens. 
People in Gaza will get a pita and a food plate, and that's it. Exactly 
what we are seeing in the videos: people standing in line and waiting to 
have someone serve them, with some soup plate,” Smotrich said.

“Truth be told, until the last of the hostages returns, we should also 
not let water into the Gaza Strip. But the reality is that if we do 
that, the world will force us to halt the war immediately, and to lose. 
It would be winning the battle, and losing the war. I'm committed to 
winning the war,” Smotrich declared. “We are disassembling Gaza, and 
leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no 
precedent globally. And the world isn't stopping us. There are 
pressures. There are those who attack [us]; they are trying to [make us] 
stop; they are not succeeding. You know why they aren't succeeding? 
Because we are navigating [the campaign] responsibly and wisely, and 
that's how we'll continue to do [it]."

Smotrich said that the Israeli forces are initiating a campaign to force 
Palestinians into the south of Gaza “and from there, God willing, to 
third countries, as part of President Trump's plan. This is a change of 
the course of history—nothing less.”

In recent days, Trump has resumed promoting the threat he first floated 
on February 4 when Netanyahu visited him at the White House: that the 
U.S. would seize Gaza and create a Middle East Riviera. “I think I’d be 
proud to have the United States have it, take it, make it a freedom 
zone,” Trump said Thursday, an assertion he repeated over the weekend in 
an interview with FOX News. “Gaza is a nasty place. It's been that way 
for years. I think it should become a free zone, you know, freedom, I 
call it a freedom zone,” Trump told host Bret Baier.

On Sunday, Netanyahu said that allowing “a basic amount of food” to 
enter Gaza was pursued out of “the operational need to enable the 
expansion of the intense fighting to defeat Hamas.” He said that Israel 
would resume limited aid deliveries on an interim basis starting 
approximately a week ahead of a longer term aid plan that would 
circumvent the UN and other international agencies. The emerging Israeli 
policy offers enough food to Palestinians in Gaza to ward off 
international condemnation that could impact its war, while preparing to 
ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza.

Netanyahu’s announcement comes amid renewed talks over a possible Gaza 
ceasefire and exchange of captives deal. Netanyahu has insisted he will 
not make any agreement that ends the war without the total elimination 
of Hamas and the demilitarization of the entire Gaza Strip. Hamas has 
said it will not release any more Israeli captives held in Gaza unless 
an internationally certified deal is reached that includes the total 
withdrawal of Israeli forces and a long-term truce.

“We are ready to release the prisoners in one batch, provided the 
occupation commits to an internationally guaranteed ceasefire,” said 
Sami Abu Zuhri, head of Hamas’s Political Bureau Abroad, on Sunday. He 
told Al Jazeera Mubashar, “We will not hand over our prisoners to the 
occupation as long as it continues to insist on continuing its 
aggression against Gaza indefinitely.”


      *Strategies of Conquest*

The Trump administration has publicly continued to fully back Netanyahu 
as the Israeli army intensifies its campaign of terror bombings and 
forced displacement across Gaza. The White House has offered no public 
criticism of Netanyahu’s operation, called “Gideon’s Chariot,” aimed at 
seizing control of all of Gaza in what officials have described as a 
“conquest.”

Before Trump set off on his Middle East tour, during which he notably 
did not stop in Israel, Netanyahu announced this new phase to his war of 
annihilation in Gaza. If Hamas did not surrender and agree to release 
all Israeli captives by the time Trump returned to Washington, D.C., 
Israel would initiate a large-scale ground invasion and occupation of 
the entire Gaza Strip.

Over the weekend, Israeli forces began intensifying ground operations 
and expanded its relentless campaign of bombings and air strikes. 
Israeli forces attacked several hospitals and camps for displaced people 
in operations that killed more than 500 Palestinians in just a few days. 
Missile strikes rained down on the southern city of Khan Younis 
accompanied by helicopter gunship attacks and artillery shelling. On 
Monday, Israel issued sweeping forced evacuation orders in the south, 
including the entire governorate of Khan Younis, that forced panicked 
residents to grab what they could and flee to sites Israel has 
previously designated as safe zones, including Al-Mawasi, which the 
Israeli military then later attacked.

Trump has pursued an increasingly close alliance with Arab Gulf leaders, 
who represent massive business opportunities for both his political and 
personal agenda. Trump’s deal-making has created some technical hurdles 
for Netanyahu’s murderous agenda. While the rulers of these states did 
not publicly demand that Trump impose a ceasefire or intervene to halt 
Netanyahu’s genocidal march, reports indicate that they did privately 
urge him to act swiftly to resume aid shipments to Gaza and to utilize 
U.S. influence to compel Netanyahu to halt the genocide.

During his recent tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab 
Emirates, Trump said little about Gaza, but he did pledge to confront 
the humanitarian crisis and said that aid delivery would resume. “Look, 
people are starving,” Trump said Saturday in an interview on FOX News. 
“I’ve already started working on that.” Israeli officials have said that 
the White House had begun pressuring Netanyahu to allow a partial 
lifting of the blockade.

“I don’t think there’s any daylight between President Trump’s position 
and Prime Minister Netanyahu's position,” said Steve Witkoff, Trump’s 
special envoy, on Sunday in an interview with ABC News. “Everyone is 
concerned about the humanitarian conditions in Gaza,” he added. “We do 
not want to see a humanitarian crisis, and we will not allow it to occur 
on President Trump’s watch.”

As Drop Site reported on Friday 
<https://substack.com/redirect/16aa80b0-874a-489b-b294-565538b6c1cb?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM>, 
Hamas said its decision to release U.S. citizen and Israeli soldier Edan 
Alexander last Monday was the result of a direct commitment from 
Witkoff. According to Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, 
Witkoff made a direct commitment that, two days after Alexander’s 
release, the Trump administration would compel Israel to lift the Gaza 
blockade and allow humanitarian aid to immediately enter the territory. 
Witkoff, Naim said, also promised that Trump would make a public call 
for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for negotiations aimed at 
achieving a “permanent ceasefire.” Naim said the U.S. “threw [the deal] 
in the trash.”

Both Israel and the U.S. have been promoting plans to deliver aid to 
Gaza that would circumvent a ceasefire deal, which the United Nations 
and all aid groups operating in Gaza have said would be necessary in 
order to address the acute humanitarian crisis. Instead, the U.S. and 
Israel have concocted a scheme involving a newly established 
“non-governmental” foundation run by a former U.S. marine to take 
official charge of establishing zones, mostly in southern Gaza, to 
distribute a limited number of rations.

Palestinians wishing to receive aid would have to go through an Israeli 
security vetting process and subject themselves to checkpoints and 
facial recognition technology as a condition for receiving food. On 
Monday, Netanyahu said the sites would be located in “a sterile area 
controlled entirely by the IDF.”

The UN and over 200 non-governmental aid organizations have denounced 
the plan, saying it is unworkable and weaponizes aid as a tool of war. 
The main UN humanitarian organization operating in the Occupied 
Palestinian Territories said the plan was aimed at dismantling the 
international infrastructure built over several decades and further 
enforcing Israeli dominance over access to basic life sustaining food 
and supplies for Palestinians in Gaza.

“It contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed 
to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic – 
as part of a military strategy,” asserted the country team of the UN 
Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory on May 
5. “It is dangerous, driving civilians into militarized zones to collect 
rations, threatening lives, including those of humanitarian workers, 
while further entrenching forced displacement.”

**


	
	

	
	

	


	

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