Netanyahu: Gaza Aid Scheme Offers Israel Symbolic Cover to Finish the Genocide

In order to conquer and seize Gaza, “We need to do it in a way” where the world “won’t stop us," Netanyahu says.

Jeremy Scahill

May 19, 2025

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/netanyahu-trump-gaza-aid-genocide-smotrich-ceasefire-hamas

Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear: His decision to allow a minuscule amount of aid to enter Gaza is a tactical one aimed at quieting international condemnation of Israel’s forced starvation of Gaza and to clear the path of a final solution imposed on the Palestinians of Gaza.

"We're going to take control of all the Gaza Strip,” Netanyahu vowed Monday in a video released by his office announcing that Israel would begin delivering “minimal humanitarian aid: food and medicine only.” Netanyahu claimed that international pressure, including from pro-Israel Republican senators and the White House, required the appearance of humanitarian intervention. "Our best friends in the world—senators I know as strong supporters of Israel—have warned that they cannot support us if images of mass starvation emerge," he said. “They come to me and say, ‘We’ll give you all the help you need to win the war… but we can’t be receiving pictures of famine,’” Netanyahu added. To continue the war of annihilation, he asserted, “We need to do it in a way that they won't stop us.”

Netanyahu’s coalitional ally Bezalel Smotrich—an extreme right-wing government minister and longtime advocate of starving, mass killing, and depopulating Gaza—endorsed Netanyahu’s move. Smotrich said the aid scheme would allow “our friends in the world to continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and the Hague Tribunal, and for us to continue to fight, God willing, until victory.”

In what he described as an emergency press conference to address criticism from his own base, Smotrich laid out the Netanyahu government’s genocidal agenda and explained why the appearance of allowing aid is necessary on a strategic level. “The [aid] that will enter Gaza in the coming days is the tiniest amount. A handful of bakeries that will hand out pita bread to people in public kitchens. People in Gaza will get a pita and a food plate, and that's it. Exactly what we are seeing in the videos: people standing in line and waiting to have someone serve them, with some soup plate,” Smotrich said.

“Truth be told, until the last of the hostages returns, we should also not let water into the Gaza Strip. But the reality is that if we do that, the world will force us to halt the war immediately, and to lose. It would be winning the battle, and losing the war. I'm committed to winning the war,” Smotrich declared. “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn't stopping us. There are pressures. There are those who attack [us]; they are trying to [make us] stop; they are not succeeding. You know why they aren't succeeding? Because we are navigating [the campaign] responsibly and wisely, and that's how we'll continue to do [it]."

Smotrich said that the Israeli forces are initiating a campaign to force Palestinians into the south of Gaza “and from there, God willing, to third countries, as part of President Trump's plan. This is a change of the course of history—nothing less.”

In recent days, Trump has resumed promoting the threat he first floated on February 4 when Netanyahu visited him at the White House: that the U.S. would seize Gaza and create a Middle East Riviera. “I think I’d be proud to have the United States have it, take it, make it a freedom zone,” Trump said Thursday, an assertion he repeated over the weekend in an interview with FOX News. “Gaza is a nasty place. It's been that way for years. I think it should become a free zone, you know, freedom, I call it a freedom zone,” Trump told host Bret Baier.

On Sunday, Netanyahu said that allowing “a basic amount of food” to enter Gaza was pursued out of “the operational need to enable the expansion of the intense fighting to defeat Hamas.” He said that Israel would resume limited aid deliveries on an interim basis starting approximately a week ahead of a longer term aid plan that would circumvent the UN and other international agencies. The emerging Israeli policy offers enough food to Palestinians in Gaza to ward off international condemnation that could impact its war, while preparing to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza.

Netanyahu’s announcement comes amid renewed talks over a possible Gaza ceasefire and exchange of captives deal. Netanyahu has insisted he will not make any agreement that ends the war without the total elimination of Hamas and the demilitarization of the entire Gaza Strip. Hamas has said it will not release any more Israeli captives held in Gaza unless an internationally certified deal is reached that includes the total withdrawal of Israeli forces and a long-term truce.

“We are ready to release the prisoners in one batch, provided the occupation commits to an internationally guaranteed ceasefire,” said Sami Abu Zuhri, head of Hamas’s Political Bureau Abroad, on Sunday. He told Al Jazeera Mubashar, “We will not hand over our prisoners to the occupation as long as it continues to insist on continuing its aggression against Gaza indefinitely.”

Strategies of Conquest

The Trump administration has publicly continued to fully back Netanyahu as the Israeli army intensifies its campaign of terror bombings and forced displacement across Gaza. The White House has offered no public criticism of Netanyahu’s operation, called “Gideon’s Chariot,” aimed at seizing control of all of Gaza in what officials have described as a “conquest.”

Before Trump set off on his Middle East tour, during which he notably did not stop in Israel, Netanyahu announced this new phase to his war of annihilation in Gaza. If Hamas did not surrender and agree to release all Israeli captives by the time Trump returned to Washington, D.C., Israel would initiate a large-scale ground invasion and occupation of the entire Gaza Strip.

Over the weekend, Israeli forces began intensifying ground operations and expanded its relentless campaign of bombings and air strikes. Israeli forces attacked several hospitals and camps for displaced people in operations that killed more than 500 Palestinians in just a few days. Missile strikes rained down on the southern city of Khan Younis accompanied by helicopter gunship attacks and artillery shelling. On Monday, Israel issued sweeping forced evacuation orders in the south, including the entire governorate of Khan Younis, that forced panicked residents to grab what they could and flee to sites Israel has previously designated as safe zones, including Al-Mawasi, which the Israeli military then later attacked.

Trump has pursued an increasingly close alliance with Arab Gulf leaders, who represent massive business opportunities for both his political and personal agenda. Trump’s deal-making has created some technical hurdles for Netanyahu’s murderous agenda. While the rulers of these states did not publicly demand that Trump impose a ceasefire or intervene to halt Netanyahu’s genocidal march, reports indicate that they did privately urge him to act swiftly to resume aid shipments to Gaza and to utilize U.S. influence to compel Netanyahu to halt the genocide.

During his recent tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, Trump said little about Gaza, but he did pledge to confront the humanitarian crisis and said that aid delivery would resume. “Look, people are starving,” Trump said Saturday in an interview on FOX News. “I’ve already started working on that.” Israeli officials have said that the White House had begun pressuring Netanyahu to allow a partial lifting of the blockade.

“I don’t think there’s any daylight between President Trump’s position and Prime Minister Netanyahu's position,” said Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, on Sunday in an interview with ABC News. “Everyone is concerned about the humanitarian conditions in Gaza,” he added. “We do not want to see a humanitarian crisis, and we will not allow it to occur on President Trump’s watch.”

As Drop Site reported on Friday, Hamas said its decision to release U.S. citizen and Israeli soldier Edan Alexander last Monday was the result of a direct commitment from Witkoff. According to Basem Naim, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, Witkoff made a direct commitment that, two days after Alexander’s release, the Trump administration would compel Israel to lift the Gaza blockade and allow humanitarian aid to immediately enter the territory. Witkoff, Naim said, also promised that Trump would make a public call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for negotiations aimed at achieving a “permanent ceasefire.” Naim said the U.S. “threw [the deal] in the trash.”

Both Israel and the U.S. have been promoting plans to deliver aid to Gaza that would circumvent a ceasefire deal, which the United Nations and all aid groups operating in Gaza have said would be necessary in order to address the acute humanitarian crisis. Instead, the U.S. and Israel have concocted a scheme involving a newly established “non-governmental” foundation run by a former U.S. marine to take official charge of establishing zones, mostly in southern Gaza, to distribute a limited number of rations.

Palestinians wishing to receive aid would have to go through an Israeli security vetting process and subject themselves to checkpoints and facial recognition technology as a condition for receiving food. On Monday, Netanyahu said the sites would be located in “a sterile area controlled entirely by the IDF.”

The UN and over 200 non-governmental aid organizations have denounced the plan, saying it is unworkable and weaponizes aid as a tool of war. The main UN humanitarian organization operating in the Occupied Palestinian Territories said the plan was aimed at dismantling the international infrastructure built over several decades and further enforcing Israeli dominance over access to basic life sustaining food and supplies for Palestinians in Gaza.

“It contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic – as part of a military strategy,” asserted the country team of the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory on May 5. “It is dangerous, driving civilians into militarized zones to collect rations, threatening lives, including those of humanitarian workers, while further entrenching forced displacement.”