The Hunger Games

Where does basic morality enter into the equation? And why was it so grossly overlooked when the Americans bombed Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and massacred 504 civilians in My Lai?

On Sunday, Israel began allowing truckload upon truckload of food into Gaza and began implementing an aid airdrop. It also began opening humanitarian corridors in Al Mawasi, Deir al-Balah and Gaza City daily from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. to facilitate the distribution of food and water.

On Friday, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom assailed Israel to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid, saying that it is now unacceptable. Also on July 22^nd,  the ministers of 28 countries including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK, issued a joint statement saying that “the war must end now” and condemning “the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food”.

The ramifications of these allegations are vast, devastating, and horrific, spreading around the globe like an unchecked, virulent cancer, creating an even more heightened wave of antisemitism.

Last week, over 50 French-Jewish children were pulled off a Spanish Vueling Airlines flight after singing Jewish songs. In a viral video, one sees a 21-year-old camp counselor thrown to the floor and handcuffed, after objecting to demands that the children surrender their phones.

On June 28, 2025, at Glastonbury Music Festival, the punk rapper, Bob Vylan led thousands of attendees in a chant of “Death, death to the IDF”, and “From the River to the Sea Palestine must be, will be inshallah free”, basically declaring the death to every Jew living in Israel. Shortly after, the Irish band “Kneecap”, wore a keffiyah and made absolutely revolting remarks against the IDF, to adoring hordes of people waving Palestinian flags.

The complexity of such crises reverberates both on the ground and in international discourse, where the tension between the legitimate right of a nation for their people’s self-defense and humanitarian concern is palpable. Aid convoys have been lined up, until now, on the border of Gaza, because of difficulties with the United Nations distribution and the attempted, and often realized, violence of Hamas to disrupt the distribution. Israel finds itself in a “lose-lose situation.” As I write this, the international community is complaining that distribution from the air is “not an effective means.”

We all know that for almost two years now, Hamas has been commandeering the aid off of the trucks. We have seen photos of members of Hamas in tunnels, well fed, devouring aid that is meant for the civilians of Gaza. We know that Hamas has sold the food at exorbitant prices.

We also know that Hamas wins twice: denying the aid to starving civilians and enjoying the public relations victory when tiny, malnourished bodies are flashed across television screens; and syphoning off the aid, which goes to Hamas, enabling them to sell it at exorbitant prices, enrich themselves and prolong the war.

The aid delivery moves under the scrutiny of cameras and the shadow of suspicion—every action dissected from a Zionist motive and consequence by the international community.

The situation on the ground is tangled in layers of accusation, grief, and political maneuvering. As humanitarian organizations grapple with the logistics of aid under the constant shadow of threat, civilians are caught in an impossible bind—caught between the intractable hostilities and the desperate scramble for survival. The world watches, polarized, while each fresh report of deprivation or atrocity fuels another round of condemnation or justification, depending on the observer’s perspective.

International debate has become a cacophony of voices, each demanding action, each questioning the sufficiency or sincerity of what is being done. Is the delivery of aid a genuine attempt to alleviate suffering, or is it, as some assert, a reluctant gesture made under duress and scrutiny, and a mere public relations move? Meanwhile, suffering persists, the lines of morality blur, and the urgency only grows more acute.

The world watches, divided between calls for uncompromising security and urgent pleas for compassion. For Israel, and for any nation in a similar position, the calculus is fraught: how to respond to external condemnation, how to balance the absolute right to protect its citizens with the undeniable suffering of innocents on the other side of the border.

Those of us who watch Israeli news have seen, just past the Israeli border, vast acres of truckload upon truckload of food, rotting in the Gazan sun. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the United Nations have not figured out the kinks of how to distribute the aid without a significant provocation from Hamas.

As Amit Segal has written in “The Free Press”, the price of flour in September 2023, sold in 25 kilogram sacks, was approximately 47.5 shekels, or 14 US dollars. In January 2025, it climbed to 500 shekels, or $149.22 US dollars, an 80 per cent increase.

Continues Amit, “the closer Gazans are to real hunger, the better it is for Hamas, and the less likely the group is to cave in ceasefire negotiations. After all, its logic is simple: If our people are actually starving, Israel will be forced to end the war anyway—and without us having to agree to a deal we don’t particularly like.

Hence Hamas’s gleeful hoarding of food in its warehouses, keeping it far away from Gazan civilians and driving up the prices of basic goods—without which the strip would not be facing the current food shortage.

For both Israelis and the ordinary Gazans caught in the crossfire, the result is brutal: When starvation becomes a strategy, peace moves further out of reach.”

For aid workers, the challenge is existential—how to deliver sustenance without inadvertently fueling the very machinery of suffering they seek to alleviate. For the families waiting behind battered doors, every rumor of a new shipment brings a flicker of hope, quickly dimmed by the knowledge that hope, too, can be rationed and stolen.

The story of aid in Gaza is not one of simple charity, but of a world order struggling with its own limitations. The crisis exposes unresolved questions about sovereignty, collective responsibility, and the real value of human life amid protracted conflict. In the swirl of headlines and televised debates, it is easy to forget that, beyond the abstractions of policy, real people endure—with hunger gnawing at their bodies and uncertainty clouding their every tomorrow.

Each plan is a difficult compromise between idealism and reality, hampered by generations of distrust and fear that the relief of hunger will be weaponized by Hamas, or worse—altogether denied to starving children.

Sarah N. Stern is Founder and President of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, EMET.