Why is Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich suddenly at loggerheads over Gaza humanitarian aid with the new IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, who was supposed to be the savior of the smash Hamas and Gaza approach to the war?
Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented himself as if he was staying out of the fight, he has been on the side of allowing humanitarian aid to flow to Gazans almost throughout the war – and this time is likely no different.
True, Netanyahu celebrated cutting that aid off in early March, but this was part of a short-term strategy to try to pressure Hamas into concessions regarding the Israeli hostages it is holding.
Appearing before the ICJ…again
This was never Netanyahu’s long-term strategy, and certainly not as Israel will appear before the International Court of Justice from Monday through Friday next week to combat allegations of starvation.
From Israel’s perspective, the allegations are preposterous. There certainly have been cases where individuals in Gaza starved, and no one is eating well, as happens in almost any war.
But due to IDF facilitation of the flow of food aid almost throughout the entire 18 months of the war – none of the many warnings of imminent starvation in Gaza ever came to pass.
In fact, the reason Israel felt it was able to pause the food aid in early March was because during the prior 40 plus days of the ceasefire, around 600 trucks of aid per day had sailed into Gaza, leaving an estimated three to six months surplus of food for the population.
So if the ICJ was not in the mix, Israel might be able to hold off restoring new food aid access above and beyond the food aid inventory already in Gaza, for another month or even a few months, but it would still need to restore the flow of aid at some point to avoid an actual starvation crisis.
No one expects the ICJ to give Israel a completely fair shake, but to date the international judicial body has also ruled Jerusalem’s way a number of times.
The genocide case against it from which the current alleged starvation hearings arise, originated in late 2023, and around 18 months later, the ICJ is still letting Israel make its case, and even granted the Jewish state additional time until January 2026 to present evidence in the broader case.
Further, while the ICJ has made strongly critical declarations against Israel, it has ignored those who are suing Israel who sought a court order to end the war.
That means that when Israel walks into court next week, it needs to not only deny that starvation has taken place to date, it also needs to have a proposal in hand for how it will reopen the gates for food aid in the near future if there is still no ceasefire and the inventory of older aid finally starts to run out.
This is why the government is debating not whether to restart the flow of food aid, but only how it should be done.
Smotrich, who has made it clear for years that he is indifferent to the impact on Israeli global legitimacy in the ICJ, the International Criminal Court, and elsewhere, adamantly opposes restoring aid as a matter of principle and strategy.
Netanyahu has always mixed a strategy of verbally attacking international bodies probing Israel’s conduct of its war with trying to dialogue with them and with presenting Israel’s case as strategically as possible.
For political reasons Netanyahu is trying to take a passive position publicly on the issue and let Zamir take the fire from Smotrich, but just as Netanyahu in May 2024 quietly ordered then IDF chief Herzi Halevi to ignore Smotrich’s preference for a full military occupation of Gaza, the prime minister is likely behind or sympathetic to Zamir’s opposition to the military running the food aid program itself.
In contrast, Smotrich opposes the flow of aid, but if it is going to happen despite his objections, then he wants the IDF to completely control the aid, as that would at least further his broader goal of a permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza.
Zamir opposes a permanent reoccupation of Gaza (though he is fine with an extended temporary reoccupation), as does nearly the whole military, and opposes, for professional reasons, putting his soldiers en masse into the food distribution business.
As far as he is concerned, soldiers are for killing the enemy and for defending Israeli civilians, not for handing out food to foreign citizens.
Since January 2024, the IDF and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant were trying to push for various experiments to have private contractors or various more trustworthy international aid groups to hand out the food with IDF protection, and without Hamas taking control.
To date, these experiments either were thwarted by Hamas, who let the new aid groups hand out the aid, but then came shortly afterwards to take control over it, or were thwarted by a mix of political and legal issues.
For example, if private contractors are handing out aid and they are attacked by Hamas, how do they respond and what legal framework will judge them if they mess up and accidentally shoot civilians?
All of these complexities are part of why Israel has failed to date to take control of the food aid in Gaza away from Hamas, even as it has understood how important it is to do so since nearly the start of the war.
In short, this is not really about Smotrich and Zamir.
Rather, it is about Netanyahu trying to walk a tightrope between avoiding new problems with the ICJ and new problems with Smotrich threatening to topple his coalition.
