How the Israeli Right Explains the Aid Disaster It Created

Last week, in a song for the TutorNick Maynard, a volunteer surgeon in a hospital in the south of Gaza, wrote: “I have just finished operating on another young adolescent girl seriously ill -nourished. Our best efforts, we are helpless to save it. The humanitarian situation in Gaza, which was already disastrous, deteriorated even more in July, with sixty-three people, including twenty-five children, dying of causes linked to malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization. Last weekend, Israel announced that it would cause military activity on the territory and allow more help, although it is not clear how long this break will last.

While more and more reports and images of emerging children emerge from Gaza, close Israeli allies, such as France and the United Kingdom, have issued severe criticism, qualifying the current humanitarian situation of “disaster”. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, announced that his country would become the first member of the G-7 to recognize a Palestinian state, and Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, also promised to do so unless Israel accepts a ceasefire. Even Monday, even President Trump acknowledged that the children were hungry. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, continued to emphasize that there is “no famine in Gaza”.) Two Israeli human rights groups began to refer to Israel’s actions as “genocide”. The scale of the crisis also made a certain number of American politicians and commentators, including war defenders, claim that more aid must be authorized to enter the territory, or that the war itself has become unfair.

Amit Segal, the chief political correspondent of Channel 12 of Israel, is widely considered as one of the most influential journalists in the country. Segal is an eminent defender of the Netanyahu government. He wrote on subjects such as what he calls “the scam of the violence of the colonists” and the need to annex parts of Gaza. Last week, he wrote an article for the Free press in which he said that “Gaza could well approach a real hunger crisis”. He quoted with approval the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, who said: “It is difficult to convince the Israelis of that because literally everything that told them for 22 months on this subject was a fiction.” He also wrote that without the “joyful hoas of Hamas”, Gaza “would not be confronted with the shortage of current food”. (The next day, Reuters reported that an analysis carried out by the USAID found “no evidence of systematic flight” of American humanitarian supplies by Hamas. Another report, in the Timessaid that Israeli officials agree in private that Hamas has not systematically looted the United Nations aid, directly contradicting a central discussion point for the Israeli war effort.)

I recently talked by phone with Segal. During our conversation, which was published for duration and clarity, we discussed his flickering opinion on hunger in Gaza, his support for Trump’s plan to develop Gaza without Palestinians, and how much power the extreme right has on the Israeli government.

For Americans who may not know your job, you have often talked like someone who knows Netanyahu’s thought very well. Are you in contact with–

Yeah, that’s right. I am not the mouthpiece of Netanyahu. I am a right winger, but no more than that. I’m only talking about myself.

I just wanted to say that people say that you understand his thought and that you have good sources in government.

I wouldn’t deny it. Yes.

So tell me what made you write this piece for the Free press Saying there was great concern about the food situation in Gaza.

So, first of all, I don’t think it’s hungry in Gaza. I want to put this before all that.

Don’t you think it’s hungry in Gaza?

I don’t think the hunger campaign that Hamas runs in international media is something related to the truth. However, I think there is a situation that can really deteriorate for something like that. Over the past twenty-two months, Hamas has led a hunger campaign in Gaza. The Israelis and perhaps some Americans are wary of these accusations because they know it is propaganda. The fact that there is a development crisis does not emanate from Israeli decisions, but from a cynical game played by Hamas and the United Nations. However, Israel will be blamed. This is why I want Israel to be wise and not only to be fair.

Just to be clear, your article talks about a “hunger crisis” in Gaza.

Development. Development. [The piece is titled “The Price of Flour Shows the Hunger Crisis in Gaza.”]

There are famine death reports in Gaza. Are you denying these?

I doubt it ninety percent. I cannot tell you that it does not exist in specific places or specific people, but I do not think that the figures of Hamas and the quotation of the international media is the figures.

One of the things that your room says is that, essentially throughout the war, there were false warnings on a hunger crisis. Why do you think the warnings were false before?

Hamas tried to represent an image that did not exist. There was no hunger in Gaza. For years, Hamas said Gaza is hungry. Hamas has always used this alleged hunger weapon in order to obtain more humanitarian aid. [A U.N. study from 2022, prior to the war, found that more than three-quarters of Palestinian families reduced the number of meals they consumed because of a lack of food.]

THE Times reported that “at least 20 Palestinian children died of malnutrition and dehydration”. So we don’t refuse that people are dead, right?

No, we do not refuse that people are dead. We are just not sure that people have died of dehydration or famine.

This report that I just mentioned was from March 2024.

I see. Please postpone with the New York Times Because the New York Times based on his relationships on the sources of Hamas. The New York Times Building strongly on gaza silts which have two options: either report what Hamas wants or die, and I blame the New York Times For that. The head of the New York Legal Department Times Told me, how can you blame us for writing what Hamas wants? Our journalists died because in the past, they have brought back things that Hamas did not like.

Did that person tell you on the disc?

They wanted to continue me when I said they were leaning on silts that collaborated with Hamas.

So they told you that in private?

Yeah. You can quote it. [David McCraw, the lead newsroom lawyer at the Times, was identified to me later by Segal as the person who allegedly said this. McCraw told The New Yorker, “I never said any of that. We never threatened to sue him. And our journalists have not been killed by Hamas.” In 2023, McCraw asked Segal to make corrections to some statements he had made on social media, including that the Times employed “ISIS-embedded stringers.”] Thus, even if we take into account the fact that twenty children died of dehydration, which I doubt and that the FDI doubts, there is no way to reveal it. [In the past several days, a number of news organizations have called on Israel to allow international reporters to enter Gaza, something that it has thus far largely restricted them from doing.] What can be hungry in Gaza is the unhorsed coalition between the UN and Hamas. Each Gaza organization must pay at least fifteen to twenty percent of humanitarian aid directly to the pockets of Hamas.