Every day for the past four weeks, Hamas keeps announcing that Gaza has only a day, or a few hours, or an hour, before something critical to peoples’ survival — water, fuel, food, medicine — will run out completely. But it never comes to pass. The next day comes, the same dire warnings are offered, and again people in Gaza do not run out of water, fuel, food, or medicine. Could it be that Hamas has been lying to the world? Has Hamas ever been known to tell the truth? A sober discussion of the state of humanitarian conditions in Gaza can be found in the report issued on November 1 by Israel’s COGAT, the office of Coordination of the Government Activities in the Territories, right here: “The REAL humanitarian situation in Gaza as of 11/1, not Hamas propaganda,” Elder of Ziyon, November 2, 2023:
Israel’s COGAT published a humanitarian status report on Monday where it describes the real situation in Gaza. (It is unfortunately not online.
Excerpts:
Hamas possesses fuel reserves, and it is continuing to take control of private fuel reserves as well. The Hamas fuel reserves are variously located around the Gaza Strip, and Hamas is controlling the supply of fuel to hospitals and other vital facilities according to its own interests in a way that creates pressure on the international discourse and leads the public to believe that the Gaza Strip has insufficient fuel.
We know that at just one site, containing eight huge storage tanks, Hamas has hoarded 500,000 liters of fuel. It has smaller sites throughout Gaza, some underground, that the IDF knows about, or has just discovered, which together hold, according to the IDF, at least another 500,000 liters of fuel, and likely much more.. Hamas has also been seizing the fuel reserves stored by private citizens and institutions. It has refused to share this fuel with those running the two desalination plants that provide so much of Gaza’s potable water. However, those two plants do have alternative sources of energy — solar farms.
Hamas has been known to supply fuel to hospitals that sit on top of the group’s tunnels. Hamas wants those hospitals to keep operating, so that their staffs and patients will remain as human shields, their presence helping to stave off attacks by the IDF on the tunnels underneath. Other hospitals, without tunnels underneath, have to make do as best they can; some have their own links to solar farms, or possess reserves of fuel that Hamas has chosen not to appropriate.
With Hamas in control of fuel, the water, sewage, and hospital systems are all directly affected.
Energy
The vital facilities of the Gaza Strip depend on the fuel depots controlled by Hamas, which supplies a limited quantity every few days.
There is local energy production based on solar farms and on generators powered by private fuel reserves.
All the vital facilities — hospitals, desalination plants, wells, and the like — have alternative energy sources.
This needs to be emphasized: “all vital facilities [in Gaza] have alternative energy sources.” These may be from solar farms, or from solar collectors on their roofs, or from generators that are powered by private fuel reserves that Hamas has not confiscated. Gaza is not running out of fuel. Its problem is that Hamas has chosen to hoard fuel, and then to dispense it most selectively, according to its own needs in wartime, and not according to what the people of Gaza need.
Operations are adjusting their activities in order to preserve energy.
All of the hospitals, and desalination plants have alternative sources of energy. Some have solar farms, or solar collectors on their roofs, or their own fuel reserves that Hamas has left alone. Despite the daily claims of Gazans interviewed on American news programs,, they are not “running out” of all power. The desalination plants are linked to solar farms that have proven able to keep them going, albeit at a slower rate than before. Israel has now restarted two of the three pipelines by which it has delivered water from Israel to Gaza in the past — something never mentioned in the Western news reports. The third pipeline is out of service because Hamas, not Israel, bombed it, and given the battlefield conditions, there is no way for Israel currently to repair that pipeline safely. The Hamas rulers of Gaza have been so busy stealing aid money for themselves, and spending donors’ money on weapons and a vast network of terror tunnels, that they have failed to dig new wells into the Coastal Aquifer, failed to build enough solar farms to run the desalination plants or water treatment plants at full throttle, failed to build new generators that can run on solar power. Yet now Israel is being blamed for what is due to the mismanagement, theft, and misallocation of resources by Hamas.
In fact, Israel has done nothing to limit water supply to Gaza save to briefly turn off the two pipelines which are now operating again. But when you turn on the BBC or CNN, or read The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, you get the distinct impression that Israel has “cut off all water to Gaza.” No one bothers to mention that that would. be impossible: before the current war Israel supplied only 9% of Gaza’s water; that 9% is the most water that Israel could conceivably “cut off.”
Food
Food reserves are sufficient for the near term. There is no food shortage.
No one is starving in Gaza. The videos of men, women, and children in Gaza do not remind us of the gaunt victims of hunger in Ethiopia in the 1970s, or of the people starving today in the Democratic Republic of the Congo today. No gaunt looks, sunken cheeks, swollen bellies. People in Gaza look, in fact, about as well fed now as they were before October 7, and their calorie intake compares favorably with that of the poor in Cairo, Calcutta, and Karachi..
International organizations are permitted to bring food aid into the Gaza Strip.
Neither UNRWA nor any other international aid agency, such as Medecins Sans Frontières, is being prevented by Israel from bringing food aid into Gaza. What causes the problem is Hamas, that seizes much of that food aid for its own operatives; this reflects not an absence of food resources, but a misallocation of those resources. The UNRWA people should be preventing Hamas from taking so much of the food, but, of course, they are afraid to tangle with the terror group. So the humanitarian aid — food, fuel, medicine, water — is now entering Gaza at the rate of 100 truckloads a day, which according to Israel will soon “rise dramatically,” but once inside, Gaza, Hamas takes control of all of the aid, much of which it keeps for its own operatives. And no one mentions Hamas’ seizure of so much of that aid, just as no one mentions that it is Hamas, not Israel, that has been preventing dual nationals, including Palestinian-Americans, from leaving the Strip.
There is hoarding of food — purchasing at the groceries and hoarding by private parties.
Hoarding of food is not the same thing as the absence of food. People in Gaza are afraid that food supplies will run out (that’s what they hear the Hamas spokesmen telling the West) and hoarding, while in fact it is unnecessary — food supplies in Gaza increase with each passing day — is the result. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy: Gazans hoard because they fear there will be a lack of food, the hoarding itself creates scarcity for those who arrive too late to buy food in stores. The solution to the hoarding problem ration books; such rationing has not yet been tried in Gaza.
Eight major bakeries operate in the southern Gaza Strip. During the past 24 hours, hundreds of tons of flour have been brought to the Gaza Strip’s bakeries.
Health
A number of options are being weighed, in coordination with representatives of the international community, for the establishment of field hospitals.
Hamas has resumed supplying diesel fuel once in 48 hours to the hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip. Not even the hospital directors know when they will receive fuel, or how much. The matter is kept secret among the inner circle of Hamas.
Hamas decides on its deliveries of diesel fuel — the diesel fuel it has in the past repeatedly claimed is “just about to run out,” even though Israel has posted photographs of immense storage tanks full of fuel — on the basis of where the fuel will do the most good for the terror group. That means fuel for those hospitals that sit on top of tunnels, so that they can continue to operate at full capacity, making it more difficult for the IDF to minimize civilian casualties should it decide to attack those tunnels underneath that hospital.
All the hospitals have alternative energy sources.
At the hospitals, work is affected by the high occupancy and by the weariness of medical staff. Uncertainty regarding fuel for operating the hospitals is also a factor.
The hospitals are very full but are functioning.
There are people sheltering at the hospitals and they add to the burdens of functioning.
The Gaza Strip has a stock of medical supplies available. Hamas manages the stock and decides how to allocate the medical supplies to the hospitals. It even keeps some of the supplies for itself, while trying to give the false impression of a shortage. The international organizations are preparing a shipment of medicines, and we will give its entry priority.
There is no shortage of medical supplies, that have been stockpiled for a long time by Hamas, in anticipation of its October 7 attack and the Israeli response. Hamas decides who gets what. It sets aside the lion’s share of medical supplies for its own operatives. Meanwhile, Israel is not now, and never has, prevented medicines and other medical supplies from entering Gaza. And right now it wants to give priority, over other kinds of humanitarian aid, to whatever medical supplies international aid groups are providing. None of this has prevented Hamas, with a straight face, of insisting that Israel is preventing “medicines from reaching Gaza.” It isn’t true.
Water
There is no water shortage in the Gaza Strip as of this writing.
Most of the drinking water in Gaza comes from within the Gaza Strip. Only about 10% of the water came from Israel. Over the past two weeks, we [Israel] have opened two water lines from Israel — Birkat Sa’id and Bani Suheila — and they provide water to hundreds of thousands of residents in the central and southern Gaza Strip.
One of the water lines was damaged by a mortar shell from Hamas. The damage was repaired and the supply of water has been renewed.
There is still a third pipeline that used to bring water from Israel into Gaza. It was heavily damaged by a Hama attack from Gaza before the current war, and now, under wartime conditions, Israel cannot risk having workers attempt to rebuild the pipeline. But it is clear, with Israel now delivering water through the two pipelines (one undamaged, the other quickly repaired), supplying hundreds of thousands of Gazans, that the Jewish state has no wish to deprive ordinary Gazans of a water supply. It is Hamas, that refuses to provide enough fuel for the two desalination plants, so that those plants must rely only on solar power that is intermittent, that is preventing an adequate supply of potable water for the residents of Gaza. Elder of Ziyon remarks:
How do we know that this [the Israeli claims about a sufficiency of water, fuel, food, and medicine in Gaza] is not propaganda? Because the information out of Gaza has consistently been shown to be lies. The health ministry has announced that hospitals are hours away from running out of fuel for weeks, and yet they still function.
Also, COGAT’s information is consistent with what observers of Gaza have known for years. We know solar power generators that have been built in Gaza for years because of the inconsistent fuel supply. we know that huge water treatment plants have been built, that also rely on solar energy, that have turned around the major water problems Gaza had years ago. We know that no one has ever starved in Gaza even after years of such warnings.
Israel has consistently provided accurate information. Hamas consistently lies. And news media consistently treats Israel’s statements as suspect and Hamas’ statements as gospel.
There is no fuel shortage in Gaza. Hamas has held back enormous supplies — more than one million liters of diesel fuel in its tanks, and there may be much more fuel held by private parties to run their generators that Hamas has not yet managed to find and appropriate. Hamas distributes fuel when it serves its purposes — as in deciding to keep those hospitals that sit on top of a warren of terror tunnels running at full capacity, in order to discourage IDF attacks.
There is no shortage of medical supplies. Hamas has huge stockpiles, that it accumulated in anticipation of its October 7 attack. Of course, as with all humanitarian aid, Hamas first helps itself to what it wants, leaving the poor people of Gaza to fight for whatever is left. If this or that doctor at a Gaza hospital appears on the BBC or CNN, to plaintively claim to be running out of bandages, or anesthetics, or surgical masks, you can be sure he knows that Hamas has plenty of them, right under where he is standing, warehoused in a tunnel. But he dare not accuse Hamas; any putative lack of such supplies has to be attributed to those cruel Israelis.
There is no shortage of food. Tens of thousands of Hamas operatives are very well-fed. The ordinary Gazans have the basics. There are foods grown, and livestock raised, in Gaza itself. A modest tightening of belts is not the same thing as real hunger.
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MJ Raichyk, PhD says
Actually, since Hamas has said that they have no responsibility to protect Gazans from anything like destructive bombing etc, as the explanation for why Hamas provided no sheltering while building reams of tunnels beneath Gazans’ land… AND that it’s the U.N responsibility to protect Gazans’ lives …THEN since Israel has the uncontestable RIGHT TO Self- DEFENSE, we should demand the UN send troops in to ERADICATE that HAMAS SOURCE of harming to Gazans…. AND insist that Turks, Houthis, Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, and Iranians HONOR the cleanup… else we withdraw $$FUNDING from the U.N if the U.N fails to honor their official responsibilities…
That bunch of leftist parasites in the U.N should be held to their official responsibilities….maybe they’ll tire of excusing Hamas..
Boris Johnson’s tired of it… is Sunak?.. The Czechs, Poles and Hungarians might consider sanity as well… Nordiks as well? If the nonsense of Hamas is recognized it would make deportations work…Safe to go back…
If Iran is threatening to not hack U.S elections to support Biden again, maybe U.S democrats would have to recalculate..
So is it worth a try?
bagsgroove says
If the palestinians get hungry they round up some jewish babies and bake them in their ovens. Once they run out of the babies,they bake their own babies and eat them or else go to the nearest muslim grocery store and buy a precooked jewish baby. I hear it’s the latest trend in arabia land.
Spiro says
This article may be true but the jew haters will furiously clam it’s all Jewish propaganda and our delusional left in the US will trumpet the Hamas lies
Here we have the new Amerika
libertyORdeath says
Of course there’s no shortage in Gaza. It’s the country with the biggest contributions from charity and international aid per capita BY FAR.
In fact, foreign NGOs and fake charities are really the ONLY industry in the entire territory outside of terrorism.
Let’s not forget that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the Arabs in Gaza are considered to be REFUGEES (rotfl!) and hence recieve FREE medical care thanks onc3 again to FOREIGN AID and the ignorance of Westerners. Their whole lives are a terrorist/charity scam meant to destabilize Israel.
Scotsman48 says
Listen to Old Bernie in Congress spewing his nonsense about what awful situations the IDF have caused in Gaza…