Israel is due to restore humanitarian aid to Gaza within weeks, whether it reaches a new hostage and ceasefire deal with Hamas or not, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
In early March, a variety of top governmental figures had said that Israel would permanently block the flow of new humanitarian aid to Gaza unless Hamas agreed to additional hostage exchanges.
However, Israel is now concerned that the extra food aid Gaza received prior to early March – which it has been using for sustenance since – will run out within weeks.
No decision has yet been made about how the food aid will be distributed, but IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir has made it clear that he opposes IDF involvement in directly distributing the food – though he might not oppose the IDF providing security for food aid distribution, to make sure that it is not given directly to Hamas.
However, absent a local Palestinian force or Arab peacekeeping force that can remain with the Palestinians even after the aid is initially distributed, concerns are that Hamas will find ways to steal the food aid afterward – as it has done during similar pilot programs to aimed at breaking the terror group’s break stranglehold on food aid in 2024.
The government and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had hope hoped that the combined impact of halting new food aid, renewing the IDF invasion of Gaza after March 18-19, and diplomatic pressure from the new Trump administration, would lead to a new hostage deal in less than the three months or so that it would take for the surplus food inventory in the Gaza Strip to run out.
From January 19 to early March, Gaza received around 650 trucks of food aid per day, far more than the estimated 200 to 300 trucks of per day that it is estimated to need, leaving a surplus of food aid for the last two months which avoided any real threat of starvation in the Strip.
The sides have, nevertheless, so far failed to reach a new deal, with Hamas offering to exchange five to 10 hostages to Israel for a temporary ceasefire of months, followed by a permanent ceasefire and IDF withdrawal from Gaza in exchange for the rest of the hostages and Netanyahu demanding Hamas’s leaders leave Gaza and that its fighters disarm.
Though a deal is still possible, with a variety of new ideas recently being proposed, such as a six-month ceasefire in exchange for around half of the hostages but without Israel committing to withdraw from Gaza or to end the war, it is now just as likely that Israel will widen its invasion in the near future, the Post has learned.
Country could see massive reservist call up to prepare for larger invasion of Gaza
As such, the Post understands that in the near future, the country could see a massive reservist call-up to prepare for a much larger invasion of Gaza, or, at the very least, a partial large scale call-up of reservists.
Netanyahu, the cabinet, and the IDF are debating how much push back they will get from reservists if they call up too many and for too long a time period after the war has already lasted around 19 months and large portions of the country support ending it to get all of the hostages back now, despite Netanyahu’s leanings.
Some officials believe that if they do a partial large-scale call-up, that will allow the IDF to intensify its invasion and to hold on to more territory in Gaza in terms of pressuring Hamas but that avoiding a full massive call-up, as in October 2023, can also avoid having to call up reservists who might embarrass the army by refusing to show up.
Alternatively, a partial large-scale call-up might not provide sufficient soldiers to make the Gaza invasion large enough to actually influence Hamas’s calculus and will leave Israel’s borders underguarded.
As things stand, it is possible that reservists may be used more for border security in places such as Lebanon and Syria in order to be able to shift more mandatory service soldiers to the Gaza invasion.
On April 16, Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed that Israel would likely eventually backtrack on its vow not to allow the provision of more humanitarian aid to Gaza before the Israeli hostages were returned, but he did not give a timeframe.
Katz’s statement left many questions unclear, as while he referenced private companies for handing out food to Gaza’s population – which he said would sideline Hamas as the party distributing food aid – he did not provide names or details. Following Katz’s statement, IDF sources told the Post that no deals had been cut with private companies to take over the food aid distribution.
This is not the first time that Israel has tried to cut Hamas out of the food aid distribution chain.
As early as January 2024, then-defense minister Yoav Gallant tried to initiate such a program in northern Gaza for direct provision of food to Palestinian civilians, without the intervention of Hamas, but the program was never workable or faced pushback within the government from hard Right ministers Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir.
Israel also tried to use the World Food Program and the World Central Kitchen to replace UNRWA for handing out aid, but each organization, at one point or another, withdrew, due to being mistakenly struck by IDF forces. Even when those organizations returned, they eventually handed out the food to Hamas directly, or Hamas took the food from whoever they entrusted with it.
It is unclear what private contractors would have large enough and powerful enough armed forces to distribute food aid to over two million Palestinians throughout Gaza on a daily basis, and would be able to stay in the field long enough to ensure that Hamas did not at some point take over the aid.
Seemingly, to try to dilute the admission and preempt attacks from Smotrich and Ben Gvir, on April 15, Katz had buried the food aid admission in a longer statement about crushing Hamas, regaining all of the hostages, and threatening a wider war.
Katz’s April 16 statement also included a harsh verbal attack by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, which in turn led to the defense minister issuing a bizarre statement in which he at first said, multiple times, that food aid would not be restored at this moment, later admitting that food aid would be restored in the future.
Now it appears the future has arrived.