Israel will be forced to allow aid to enter the Gaza Strip; if it does not, the manufactured famine will blow up in Benjamin Netanyahu’s face.
Over the past week or so, the European leaderships have seemingly shifted their attitudes towards Israel. This rift between Tel Aviv and its partners on the European continent also appears to have taken hold in the corporate media, too. But why now, and will this end up reflecting positive changes on the ground in Gaza?
On Monday, the foreign ministers of 22 nations, including Germany, France, the UK, Canada, and Japan, all signed onto a joint statement urging Israel to allow the full resumption of aid to the Gaza Strip.
This came after moves such as Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, had previously called Israel a “genocidal state” and France’s Emmanuel Macron was accused of supporting terrorism for condemning Israel’s “unacceptable” behaviour.
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France, Canada, and the UK even threatened “targeted sanctions” after Israel launched a renewed ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, to which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by accusing the three nations’ leaderships of offering a reward for terrorism.
On Tuesday morning, a flood of updates then poured in. The United Kingdom announced it would be suspending its Free Trade Deal talks, summoning the Israeli ambassador to London and applying sanctions to Israeli settler extremists in the West Bank, including the “godmother of the settlement movement,” Daniella Weiss.
Then, the European Union would go on to announce a review of Israel’s trade ties over the Gaza blockade, an effort spearheaded by the Netherlands, which also threatened possible sanctions.
France’s Le Monde news reported this Tuesday that the UK and Canada had joined its initiative to recognise a Palestinian State. Later the same day, the Spanish parliament unanimously voted to pass a motion calling for a weapons embargo on the Israelis.
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Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, later released an article in which it quoted an Israeli Foreign Ministry official as calling the European moves a “diplomatic tsunami”. The source qualified this with the following analysis:
“Since November 2023, the world has only seen images of dead Palestinian children and destroyed homes… and it’s tired of it. Israel offers no solution, no plan for the day after, no hope, just death and destruction. The silent boycott has existed before and will only increase. This should not be underestimated, because no one will want to be associated with Israel.”
Speculated earlier this week has it that the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has ruled that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, will officially rule on this in early 2026, although these reports are early assessments.
Why is This Finally Happening?
As we veer closer to the two-year mark of the Gaza war, labelled by UN experts, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Israel’s own top rights group B’Tselem as Genocide, the European nations and in fact, the majority of the collective West, have started to shift their position.
There is likely to be a range of different motivating factors behind the move, but the key ones are as follows:
- The deprivation of all aid.
- The impact that the Israeli agenda will have on regional actors.
- The US position on this issue.
The first issue at hand is the Israeli total blockade imposed on the people of Gaza, which has lasted over 80 days at this point. Although a trickle of aid was allowed to enter earlier this week, it was roughly 1% of the daily number of trucks needed to properly support the besieged population. We are only around a week away from the food aid completely diminishing in some areas of Gaza, which will begin to inflict mass famine on a horrifying level.
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Already, images and videos of babies and children who have died due to malnutrition have begun to go viral on social media. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, stressed that 14,000 babies in Gaza could die within the next 48 hours if there is no sudden influx of aid into the Gaza Strip.
A minimum of 53,500 Palestinians have been murdered directly as a result of Israel’s assault on Gaza since October 7, 2023, with another 14,000 missing and presumed dead under the rubble. For some 18 months, the majority of the Western World’s leadership sat by and supported what they called Israel’s “right to defend itself”. However, at this point, the starvation policy provides them no room for plausible deniability; this is manufactured famine and extermination.
The problem for the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is that he decided the blocking of aid into Gaza would be the right-wing hill to die on. Thus, his right-wing base internalised this, which even led to Israeli soldiers currently in Gaza recording videos of themselves protesting 5 aid trucks entering the territory. This, as far-right Religious Zionism alliance officials in Netanyahu’s government had threatened to collapse the coalition if humanitarian aid entered the besieged coastal enclave.
Therefore, pressure needed to be applied to Israel in order to force the entrance of aid into the Gaza Strip. Now, there are two ways of looking at this pressure. Either it is a genuine reaction to Israel’s appalling crimes, or, it is at least partly performative in order to demonstrate to the Israelis that they will have to concede on the issue of withholding aid. Some may say that so far, the actions of the Europeans will have no tangible impact, only symbolic, if Tel Aviv caves under the pressure.
It is very likely that Netanyahu’s new military operation, “Gideon’s Chariots,” is in large part a political offensive, as it appears to have no real goals or strategy. The aims of the operation are still speculated upon in the Hebrew press day after day, as broad statements from Israeli officials indicate it is about “crushing Hamas” and returning the soldiers held in Gaza.
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There are also statements about the occupation of Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of its people, and the usual genocidal rhetoric, except it’s on steroids right now. Moshe Flieglin, a former Israeli Knesset member, even told Israel’s Channel 14 this week that “every child and infant in Gaza is an enemy. We are at war with the terrorist entity of Gaza. Every child you give milk to now will slaughter your child in 15 years. Gaza needs occupation and settlement.”
This leads us to the second motivating factor behind the actions of the European nations, which is the potential impacts of Israel’s new offensive on surrounding nations. In reality, Israel does not have the ground force capable of fully occupying Gaza, yet it clearly seeks to carry out ethnic cleansing.
If the Israeli military seeks to try and ethnically cleanse Gaza, it will have to be coupled with the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. Even then, Egypt is not likely to open its border, and no regional country will take in over a million Palestinian refugees.
This move by Israel would destabilise multiple nations and likely lead to the collapse of Israeli relations with Egypt and Jordan, not as a morale gesture, but as a regime-saving measure.
The next reason to consider is the actual position of the Trump administration, which has found itself in this current position with the Israelis, due in large part to their own diplomatic failures. It is likely that Washington could be influencing their Western allies into assuming a more adversarial position towards Israel, as a means of pressure itself.
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Famine is not a good look for the United States, which is seeking to transform the region and doesn’t look to dismantle Israel’s relations with its neighbours, but rather to expand upon them. It has even influenced Syria to sit down for normalisation talks, while pressuring Saudi Arabia to do the same, despite Riyadh’s refusal to publicly entertain this idea and recent hardened stance on demanding a Palestinian State.
Furthermore, the US is being forced to adopt a strategy that could end up closing the “7-front war” that the Israeli PM is constantly pledging he will win. This means controlling any confrontation with the Iranians when the time comes, or perhaps preventing this altogether, despite how unlikely that seems as of now. The Gaza Strip is only one front in a wider regional war, yet it is this conflict’s heart.
Multiple fronts are still open in this war, the most concerning of all for the US and Israel is the Lebanese front. Hezbollah is far from over, despite the statements from Western think tanks and leaders claiming otherwise, which is why the US is constantly monitoring Lebanon. This Lebanese front threatens to blow up in Israel’s face in a very dramatic way, and the veracity of the war will in many ways be dictated by the predicament of the Gaza Strip.
Israel will be forced to allow aid to enter the Gaza Strip; if it does not, the manufactured famine will blow up in Benjamin Netanyahu’s face.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
There is no rift as long as they are sending weapons and other militairy aid. it is all about the “looks”. Maybe they think it is too late to salvage Gaza anyway, so now they can afford some “humanitarian” stuff, nothing serious of course, and make themselves look better to the world without offending the zionists too much.
Too little, too late to save the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians already slaughtered by a government of war criminals using ordnance supplied by Western governments.