Framed as an Israeli failure, regardless of the facts

Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator – Where is the outrage over the aid trucks hijacked in Gaza?

Unicef has confirmed it in black and white: armed men in Gaza hijacked aid trucks at gunpoint, stealing ready-to-use therapeutic food meant for thousands of severely malnourished infants. According to the UN, at least 2,700 children have been deprived of life-saving nutrition as a result. And yet, the world barely blinked.

When Israel takes military action, the scrutiny is immediate and unforgiving. When images of hungry children emerge from Gaza, they are broadcast with relentless urgency, almost always with the implicit or explicit framing that Israel is to blame. But when terrorists intercept UN aid trucks, seizing food for their own infants in need, that story scarcely registers.

That's the line the media have been pushing – and they're sticking with it. It was the same before October 7th, but it's become increasingly strident since: the little state of Israel, surrounded by Muslim states who wish only for its destruction, are really the colonisers, the oppressors, the villains. The brave Palestinian resistance are the freedom fighters – the Vietcong for the new generation of young westerners, who know nothing of history and chant the cliches of "settler colonialism" to the original inhabitants of the land of Israel.

This pattern is not unique to the UK; it reflects a broader international consensus that has become ideologically and diplomatically entrenched: humanitarian suffering in Gaza is to be framed as an Israeli failure, regardless of the facts. Any Palestinian terrorists deliberately causing suffering to their own are to be ignored at all costs.

But the facts are stubborn. This latest incident is not a deviation. On Saturday, reports confirmed by Cogat, Israel’s military coordination body for the territories, described another deliberate sabotage of aid efforts: Hamas terrorists are said to have fired at UN teams working to open a new humanitarian corridor in southern Gaza. Armed men seized UN vehicles and reportedly used them to blockade roads meant to carry food and medicine. It is all part of a deliberate strategy to obstruct aid distribution in order to engineer a crisis and externalise blame.

If Israel were truly trying to starve Gaza, why would it coordinate with the UN to open new routes for food and shelter supplies? Why would it allow in therapeutic nutrition and medical equipment that is then stolen or intercepted en route by Palestinian terrorists? The uncomfortable truth is that Israel’s logistical and military apparatus has, despite the war, continued to facilitate aid, often at the expense of its own operational freedom, in a desperate attempt to separate civilians from combatants. It is the terror groups embedded within the civilian population who blur that line.

There is a deeper rot exposed here: the moral degradation of the aid discourse itself. Humanitarian law is predicated on neutrality and civilian protection. But in Gaza, that framework is regularly distorted by a UN system unwilling to hold Palestinian actors accountable, either out of fear, political alignment, or institutional corruption. The result is grotesque: children are being deprived of food by the very actors who claim to be their protectors, shielded from scrutiny by a media and diplomatic class that prefers to heap condemnation on the democratic, free nation acting to remove that very evil which threatens both Israelis and its own population.

The UN – notably the UNRWA – are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Meanwhile, Britain, France and others press forward with plans to ‘recognise’ an imaginary Palestinian state – an impossible and undesirable entity that in its current form exists only as an idea, not as a functioning polity. And what is the fantasy state they are recognising? One in which a terror group starves the country’s children for political point-scoring? That obstructs aid corridors with armed force? That creates and exploits its own population’s misery as a weapon of diplomacy? To recognise this as a state is to recognise the strategy of hostage governance. It is to endorse a political culture in which children’s hunger is not a crisis to be solved, but a tool to be cynically and ruthlessly engineered and leveraged.

If that is the foundation upon which Europe intends to recognise statehood, then it is not recognising a future of peace and sovereignty, but entrenching a system of impunity, cruelty, and permanent conflict.