The State of Israel responded Tuesday to claims Monday by U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) that it is guilty of a “war crime” for allegedy “deliberately” withholding food from Palestinian children, saying his claims were “in conflict with the dry facts.”
As Breitbart News noted, Van Hollen went on an anti-Israel rant on the floor of the Senate on Monday, making the “war crime” claim.
Presented with Van Hollen’s allegations, Israel responded with an emphatic rejection.
“The only people who are deliberately withholding aid [are] Hamas,” said Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy.
He also said that Israel has been “exceeding” its obligations to provide aid, that Hamas has been “hijacking” aid, and that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been covering up for that theft.
Levy presented an extensive summary of Israel’s facilitation of the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, citing the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT)’s website, which provides daily statistics on the amount of aid entering Gaza.
(For example, on Tuesday, the website reported: “174 trucks carrying humanitarian aid were inspected and transferred to the Gaza Strip Yesterday (Feb. 12). 23 trucks were inspected at Nitzana and transferred via the Rafah Crossing, and 151 were inspected and transferred via Kerem Shalom. 83 trucks carried food.”)
Levy said that there were “no restrictions — zero” on food, medicine, water, and other forms of aid entering Gaza, once it had been inspected by Israeli authorities. He noted that seven times as much aid was crossing from Israel directly to Gaza through the Keren Shalom crossing point as through Rafah on the Egyptian border. “The problem is that UNRWA is struggling to distribute that aid at the pace Israel is allowing it in.”
He noted that so much aid was entering via Keren Shalom that it had to be closed on Saturdays to allow international agencies to catch up with the pace of delivery. Countries that wanted the Palestinians to receive more aid “should simply send it — we’re ready to receive it.”
UNRWA, he said, should be replaced with “the UN’s agencies that have tried and treated experience … that are not already riddled with Hamas.”
“Any allegations that Israel is somehow restricting the delivery of aid is simply in conflict with the dry facts,” he said.
Van Hollen also used a misquote of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reference to the Bibical “Amalek” — a misquote that has been used by anti-Israel activists and by South African lawyers at The Hague, and that dates to Nazi propagandists in the Second World War.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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