“A criminal’s speech filled with lies and a mockery of the [people’s] intelligence,” was how Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to US Congress was described by a member of Hamas’ political bureau.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s speech was rife with false claims regarding the Israeli war on Gaza, and also featured several jabs at the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had requested the issuance of arrest warrants against him and his Security Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes in the Strip.
Among Netanyahu’s claims concerned food aid deliveries to Gaza, the protection of Palestinian civilians, and the mediated negotiations with the Palestinian Resistance, all of which Al Mayadeen has compared with information and testimonies currently available to the public.
Food aid deliveries to Gaza
Netanyahu slammed the ICC for “shamefully” accusing “Israel” of deliberately starving the people of Gaza, saying it was “complete nonsense” and a “complete fabrication,” and claiming that the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) allowed over 40,000 aid trucks, the equivalent of half a million tons of food, into the Gaza Strip.
He failed to mention, however, how the IOF deliberately blocks aid deliveries into the Gaza Strip, or how they deliberately damage the goods.
According to the UN, 28,018 food trucks entered Gaza throughout the 10 months of the war. “Israel” then seized the Rafah crossing, through which most food deliveries enter Gaza, leaving the Palestinian population reliant solely on the Karem Abu Salem crossing, which exponentially reduced the number of food trucks allowed to enter the Strip.
In February, five months into the war, UNRWA revealed that “Israel” blocked a food shipment meant for 1.1 million people in Gaza.
“A food shipment for 1.1 million people is stuck at an Israeli port due to recent restrictions from Israeli authorities. 1,049 containers of rice, flour, chickpeas, sugar & cooking oil are stuck as families in Gaza face hunger and starvation,” the organization wrote in a post on social media.
In April, the World Food Programme (WFP) revealed that throughout the month, only 392 food trucks were allowed to enter Gaza, debunking Israeli claims of allowing increased humanitarian aid (300 on average per day) as the war prolongs further.
In May, less than a month after the seizure of the Rafah Crossing, a backlog of aid accumulated on the road between the Egyptian side of the border and the town of al-Arish, which is roughly 45 kilometers (28 miles) west of Rafah and serves as an entry point for foreign humanitarian deliveries.
A truck driver told Reuters that his products had been on his truck for a month, slowly rotting in the heat. “Apples, bananas, chicken and cheese, a lot of things have gone rotten, some stuff has been returned and is being sold for a quarter of its price,” he added.
“I’m sorry to say that the onions we’re carrying will at best be eaten by animals because of the worms in them.”
Most recently, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society affirmed that 96% of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip live in extreme food insecurity.
Though the UN and humanitarian organizations have said that a minimum of 500 trucks of humanitarian aid are needed daily to avert a famine in Gaza, even according to Netanyahu’s number of 40,000, a measly 137 trucks would have entered every day since the war began.
Protecting Palestinian civilians
“The ICC prosecutor accuses Israel of deliberately targeting civilians. What in God’s green earth is he talking about? The IDF just dropped millions of flyers, sent millions of text messages, made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to get Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way,” Netanyahu audaciously cried before Congress.
While the IOF does send text messages and drop flyers above Gazan towns and neighborhoods, Palestinians have been repeatedly displaced, since the war began, and have run out of places to hide, especially amid the unrelenting bombings of alleged safe zones.
Moreover, in some documented instances, the supposed messages and flyers came only moments before Israeli bombardment.
Even Israeli-flagged “safe zones” were relentlessly bombed just as displaced civilians arrived and set up their makeshift tents. In May, the IOF committed a massacre against dozens of displaced persons by bombing their tents set up in UNRWA warehouses in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, an alleged safe zone.
The Government Media Office reported that the Israeli occupation committed a horrific massacre through the concentrated and deliberate bombing of a center for the forcibly displaced, established in UNRWA barracks in the northwest of Rafah Governorate. The center was bombed with more than seven missiles and large bombs, each weighing more than 1 ton.
The myth of safe zones has been flagged since the beginning of the war. The UN has warned multiple times of the absence of safe zones across the Gaza Strip,
In May, UNRWA Chief Philippe Lazzarini dismissed “Israel’s” assertion regarding the establishment of purported “safe zones” for forcibly displaced Palestinians as “false and misleading” via a post on X.
Source: AlMayadeen
