Pollak: Trump’s Deadliest Weapon Against Hamas Is Free Aid, Directly to Palestinians, Without UN
President Donald Trump is shaking Hamas’s grip on power in Gaza in a way that not even the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) could do — not through weapons, but through free aid, provided directly to Palestinian civilians.
The U.S.-backed, non-profit Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is circumventing the corrupt United Nations (UN) and providing boxed meals to Palestinians at several aid sites throughout southern Gaza.
Hamas, the UN, the mainstream media, and established international aid organizations are crying foul — not because GHF is doing anything wrong, but because it is undermining the terrorists’ grip on power in Gaza.
The UN, whose agencies have long been infiltrated by Hamas, often fails to pick up truckloads of aid that Israel admits into Gaza. Hamas steals the aid, keeping some for itself and selling the rest at inflated prices.
The result is that Palestinian suffering in Gaza is exacerbated — not by Israel, but by the UN and Hamas — and Hamas is further entrenched in power, raking in millions and cementing its control over the population.
The GHF is challenging all of that. It makes sure that aid supplies reach their distribution points; it provides the aid to Palestinians for free; and it denies Hamas and the UN any opportunity for profits or kickbacks.
Hence the outcry — and the fake news. Every day this week, Hamas has pushed false claims of Israel killing Palestinians who come to aid sites. These stories are dutifully repeated, without checking, by Western media.
The reality is that no one has been killed or injured at an aid site. Hamas has reportedly attacked Palestinians on their way to the sites, and Israeli soldiers fired Tuesday on what the IDF says was a small group of a “few” people that deviated from the safe corridor to the aid site, and which continued trying to approach Israeli soldiers in a threatening way, despite warning shots. Gaza remains, after all, a war zone; daily life is a risk.
But no one who publishes these stories in the Western media, apparently, stops to think why Palestinians would come, day after day, to sites where they know Israeli soldiers are supposedly lying in wait to kill them.
The fact is that the GHF is delivering millions of meals to grateful Palestinians at the aid sites, daily, and without incident. It has found the safest and best way of distributing aid directly to the Palestinian people.
Critics of the GHF have claimed that it departs from standard practice in the aid community in that it requires Palestinians to walk toward aid sites. Do they imagine the UN, or Hamas, offer doorstep delivery?
The Western media accuse the GHF of causing “chaos” in Gaza — as if Hamas weren’t the actual cause of “chaos.” A more accurate way to put it is that GHF is disrupting a corrupt, cynical, and deadly status quo.
The real agenda here, for the UN, the media, and international aid organizations, is to prevent Israel from succeeding in rooting out Hamas. All of these institutions are invested in Israeli retreat. Hence the hysteria.
Give Trump credit: he has found the silver bullet that kills the Hamas monster, and it is not even a bullet at all. He should keep GHF going, and not allow the UN to regain control of aid, as in some ceasefire proposals.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
