Israel's Gaza aid cutoff was not only immoral. It was a strategic disaster.

Vox

2 days ago

is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
Palestinians, including children gather with cooking pots to receive hot meals distributed by a charitable organization in the Al-Ansar area of western Gaza City on August 1, 2025. The food distribution comes amid severe hunger and humanitarian crisis caused by ongoing Israeli attacks. Anadolu via Getty Images
Israel's restrictions on humanitarian aid in Gaza are, first and foremost, a moral atrocity. Israeli policies since March, most notably the initial shutdown on aid entering the Strip, were very obviously going to cause a hunger crisis down the line. There can be no defense for intentionally starving children.
But strikingly, the policy has also become a strategic failure for Israel.
Its aid limitations, intended to starve out Hamas, have actually strengthened the group's position and handed it new leverage in ceasefire negotiations. International outrage over the past week has prompted important Israeli partners — France, the UK, and Canada — to announce support for recognizing a Palestinian state. Perhaps most importantly, the suffering in Gaza has done severe damage to Israel's alliance with the United States, alienating masses of Democrats and even some MAGA Republicans.
This is not only my opinion. It is a point of emerging consensus of well-informed analysts across the political spectrum, who see the recent international uproar over starvation in Gaza as a catastrophe for Jerusalem.
'Israel may have massive military superiority in Gaza but as of this week, it has lost the war,' writes Michael Stephens, a Middle East expert at the UK's RUSI think tank.
If the policy is such an obvious disaster, both morally evil and strategically disastrous, then why did Israel do it all?
In some sense, this is the question of the entire war, which Israeli generals concluded over a year ago was no longer improving the country's security. The answer, in both cases, is the same: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depends on Israel's extreme right to stay in office, and they support ever-more-brutal war policies to further their project of Israel reconquering and resettling the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu has, in short, deliberately caused mass suffering and inflicted a strategic disaster on the country he leads — all for the purpose of appeasing a handful of fanatics who hold his future in their hands.
'All the gains on the battlefield jeopardized'
Even before October, Gaza was in poor economic straits — thanks both to Israeli restrictions and Hamas's own poor governance. But the war has destroyed even the limited capacities Gazans had to sustain themselves. Roughly 95 percent of farmland is no longer operational; fishing, a vital activity in the coastal enclave, is now 'virtually impossible' at scale, per a UN report.
So today, Gazans either receive aid or face starvation — a reality that was already obvious back when Israel announced its aid cutoff back in March.
At the time, a statement from the prime minister's office described the policy as punishment for Hamas' refusal to release Israeli hostages during ongoing ceasefire negotiations. This turned into a full-on effort to starve Hamas out.
First, Israel cut off aid entirely from early March through May, blocking assistance from entering at border crossings. It then partnered with the US to support a new entity called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — a parallel aid distribution mechanism alongside traditional UN efforts designed to ensure that Hamas was not, as Israel claimed, stealing supplies. This highly militarized effort did not provide sufficient aid and also led to Israeli soldiers regularly opening fire on crowds of desperate Palestinians trying to get some of the limited supplies.
There was, at no point during any of this, even the slightest bit of evidence that the aid cutoff was weakening Hamas's resolve to fight — no wavering in its negotiating stances or signs of mass defection from its fighters. The people who suffered were not primarily Hamas, but Gazan civilians (and the remaining Israeli hostages).
The Gaza hunger crisis, building for months, came to a head in the past several weeks. At that point, reserve supplies from before the aid cutoff had all but disappeared — and it became obvious that GHF wasn't providing nearly enough food to make up for Israel's other restrictions. By late July, even some UN aid workers couldn't find sufficient food for themselves.
As the reality of starvation on the ground became undeniable to all but the most blinkered Israeli propagandists, the world erupted in outrage. While Israel is used to international criticism, the volume and nature of the outrage was so significant that it was forced to change policy. Israel began airdropping supplies into Gaza, opened up new corridors for UN trucks to provide aid, and unilaterally announced 10-hour daily 'pauses' in its military operations in order to facilitate aid provision.
Whether these policies actually alleviate hunger in Gaza remains to be seen. But the key point, from a military point of view, is that Israel just proved that it cannot leverage suffering in Gaza into gains at the negotiating table. Quite the opposite, in fact: The worse things get, the more Israel feels a need to change course — to slow down its military operations unilaterally, without Hamas having to give up anything in exchange.
'The world coming down on you…that takes the pressure off Hamas,' says Ilan Goldenberg, the senior vice president at J Street who recently served as a top Israel-Palestine official in the Biden administration. '[The aid cutoff] actually probably causes Hamas to take a harder line in negotiations.'
This should not come as a shock. The October 7 attacks themselves were intended, at least in part, to provoke an Israeli overreaction — something so violent and bloody that Israel would lose the world's post-attack goodwill and even suffer severe political consequences. The more misery Netanyahu's government inflicts on Gazans, the better off Hamas is in the long term.
By cutting off and limiting aid, Israel made a vicious choice that played directly into Hamas's hands.
'Months wasted playing a game the enemy couldn't lose, and if you miscalculate the consequences are justifiably on you — on your head,' Haviv Rettig Gur, a prominent right-leaning Israeli journalist, said on his podcast last week.
Israel's aid policy 'failed so severely,' in Gur's view, 'that Hamas has been propped up at every turn, its resilience assured, and all the gains on the battlefield jeopardized.'
A long-term diplomatic disaster
It is worth dwelling on why Israel cares so much about the current wave of international outrage.
Throughout the Gaza war, Israel has been able to ride out increasingly hostile opinions in most countries thanks to its support among the leaders of Western democracies. The European Union is Israel's trading partner, and the United States its military supplier and diplomatic patron. So long as those relationships are intact, Israel faces few serious threats from global public opinion.
But in the past week, that dam has started to crack — beginning what Michael Koplow, the chief policy officer at the Israel Policy Forum, calls a 'long-predicted diplomatic tsunami.'
It is not that the proposals by countries like Britain, Canada, and France to recognize a Palestinian state mean much in immediate practical terms. It is what they signal as newly possible: a world where countries begin actually treating Israel not as a peer democracy, but as a rogue aggressor more akin to Russia than an EU member state. Just this week, the EU floated a bid to end some research cooperation with Israel — a punishment that, per key member states, will become more and more likely if the humanitarian situation in Gaza doesn't improve.
Yet for all Israel's woes in Europe, it is the United States where it faces the most dangerous long-term threat.
Democrats have been turning from Israel since the Obama presidency, a trend that accelerated sharply and dramatically during the Gaza war. And there are forces on the MAGA right, including some unsavory ones, that have long wanted to sever the Republican party's bond with the Jewish state.
But the past week has been a watershed in US-Israel relations — and not in a good way for Israel. Israel's decision to knowingly induce an acute starvation crisis has played a clear and direct role in weakening its most important strategic relationship.
'The only truly existential strategic threat that Israel faces is loss of support from the United States,' Koplow says. 'As a direct result of [Gaza's starvation], we have now seen lower support among Democrats, measured in every way. [And] anyone can see the trends in MAGA world, which is now the base of the Republican Party.'
Israel has sabotaged itself
So if Israel's starvation policy was so obviously self-defeating — to say nothing of its grotesque immorality — why did it do it in the first place?
The answer has two layers — the first political, the second ideological. Put together, they suggest there's dim hope of positive changes so long as the current government is in power.
Politically, Netanyahu's coalition has exactly half of the seats in Israel's parliament (60 out of 120). Even a single defecting lawmaker could enable a vote in parliament calling for early elections, which polls have long said he would lose.
The math makes Netanyahu unusually dependent on the leaders of two extremist factions — Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir — who have repeatedly threatened to jump ship if Netanyahu compromises on maximalism in Gaza.
For these radicals, the war is part of a broader ideological agenda. They believe that Israel should rightfully control all of the land between the river and the sea, and that pursuit of Israeli control and security justifies seemingly unlimited cruelty towards Palestinians. The aid restrictions reflect these twisted values: Last year, Smotrich gave a speech declaring that it would be 'just and moral' if Israel chose to 'starve and thirst two million [Palestinian] citizens' until the hostages are returned.
But it's not just aid: These lawmakers are the reason why this entire war continues despite the lack of obvious military benefits and widespread domestic support for a ceasefire. Smotrich and Ben Gvir have both said they would abandon Netanyahu if he agrees to stop the fighting indefinitely. These threats do not seem idle; Ben Gvir briefly quit the coalition in January in protest of Netanyahu's accession to a temporary ceasefire.
Netanyahu is so afraid of the consequences of losing office — he's currently on trial for corruption — that he has chosen to outsource portions of his war policy to these fanatics, including the most fundamental choice of whether to continue the war at all.
The Gaza starvation disaster is a direct product of this combination of fanaticism and rank self-interest. There will likely be more so long as this coalition remains in power.