by Lila Li
On Sunday, March 2nd, Israel blocked the entry of all humanitarian aid into Gaza. A week later, energy minister Eli Cohen announced his decision to shut down Gaza’s electricity supply. Without true leadership, external support, and now essential supplies, the people of Gaza have been left completely abandoned after a fifteen-month genocidal siege of their homeland, whose future remains contingent on the status of yet-unresolved negotiations with the world’s most dominant colonial powers.
This blockade of humanitarian aid will have wide-reaching and devastating effects on the lives of Palestinians in Gaza. The prices of essential goods have immediately skyrocketed; Rosalia Bollen, a spokesperson for the UN’s children’s agency, said the impact on the provision of vaccines and ventilators for preterm babies will be “devastating,” while the World Food Programme claimed it only had food supplies to keep public kitchens and bakeries open for less than two weeks. Recent progress in sexual and reproductive healthcare, infrastructure rehabilitation, and nutrition diversification is also being reversed.
The decision to shut down Gaza’s electricity supply primarily affects a desalination plant providing clean drinking water to the people of Gaza, who are already experiencing a severe water and sanitation crisis. As of December 2024, Palestinians living in Gaza received only 2-9 liters of water per person per day (LPPD)—an infinitesimal amount compared to the World Health Organization’s set minimum at 50-100 LPPD, and Israelis’ 2020 average of 247 LPPD. When combined with American and Israeli attempts to shut down humanitarian and foreign aid services like UNRWA and USAID, this unprecedented isolation and deprivation of Palestinians in Gaza will prove ruinous.
Even before the war, Palestinians have been living under Israeli-induced deprivation—Amnesty International has labeled its 18-year-old air, land, and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip as collective punishment. Conditions have grown immeasurably more extreme since the start of the war, when then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza, calling for the shutdown of electricity and the blocking of the entry of food, water, and fuel. During the war, fewer than a hundred trucks of aid entered the territory each day, far below the U.S.-imposed minimum of 350. The ceasefire reached on January 19 ordered an increase in humanitarian aid to 600 trucks per day, but soon fell below that quota; Israeli delays of aid including tents and blankets resulted in the deaths of several people, including six newborns, from severe cold weather.
These most recent efforts are part of a new Israeli attempt to pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages and agree to a U.S.-proposed ceasefire plan with new conditions, requiring Hamas to release half its remaining hostages at the start of the plan in exchange for an extension of the ceasefire and a promise to negotiate a lasting truce. The previous ceasefire agreement had included negotiations for the return of the hostages in exchange for the further release of Palestinian prisoners, as well as plans for a full Israeli withdrawal, a lasting ceasefire, and reconstruction.
As a member of the UN, Israel is an ipso facto party to the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and is thus compelled to comply with the decisions of the ICJ in any case to which it is a party, as established in Article 94 of the UN charter. Its blockade of humanitarian aid directly violates the fourth of the sixth provisional measures issued by the ICJ in South Africa v. Israel (2024), which orders Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable urgent humanitarian assistance and basic services” ‘in relation to Palestinians in Gaza’ (South Africa v. Israel). In the 2001 LaGrand decision (Germany v. United States of America), the ICJ’s provisional measures were determined to have binding effect and create “legal obligation” for the parties addressed—yet Israel has repeatedly failed to fulfill the provisional measures both during the war and ceasefire periods. These allegations are not new—the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also said there was reason to believe Israel had used “starvation as a method of warfare.”
Israel’s UN membership also makes it party to the Geneva Conventions. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) holds that the Gaza Strip is an “occupied [Palestinian] territory”; Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip thus confers upon it further unfulfilled obligations to ensure Palestinians in Gaza’s continued access to humanitarian aid, as occupation falls under the definition of international armed conflict and is regulated as such by the Geneva Conventions. The occupying power is “placed under an obligation to ensure, to the fullest extent of the means available to it, the food and medical supplies of the population,” and “if the whole or part of the population of an occupied territory is inadequately supplied… agree to relief schemes on behalf of the said population and… facilitate them by all the means at its disposal” (GCIV Arts. 55 and 59). Overall, the rules of the law of occupation forbid the occupying power from exercising its authority to further its own interests, in this case its exploitation of its blockade on Gaza to achieve the return of the remaining hostages.
Since 1949, Israel has also been a participant in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, also known as the Genocide Convention. As a party to the convention, Israel has the obligation to “prevent and punish” genocide as defined by the convention by enacting the necessary legislation and providing effective penalties (Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). The convention designates a number of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” to be genocide; with the group taken to refer to Palestinians in Gaza, the full blockade of humanitarian aid falls under (c), “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Israel’s blockade of aid has drawn international condemnation. Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan have released statements criticizing the decision—the Qatari and Saudi Ministries of Foreign Affairs described the decision as, respectively, “the use of food as a weapon of war” and “blackmail and collective punishment.” The foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany warned that such a halt on goods and supplies would risk violating international humanitarian law, positing in a joint statement that “humanitarian aid should never be contingent on a ceasefire or used as a political tool.” The blockade was likewise condemned by the United Nations and aid groups including Amnesty, Oxfam, and Doctors Without Borders.
In weaponizing humanitarian aid, the Israeli government forgoes its commitment not only to international law but to the foundational principles of humanity. These recent developments have only clarified what has long been evident—Netanyahu and the Knesset are capitalizing on the hostages’ confinement and the suffering of their own citizens to advance their ultimate aims: the dehumanization of Palestinians and the destruction of an entire people, enshrining the legacy of the Nakba.
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Lila Li is an intern at Massachusetts Peace Action.
