Israel threatens to starve out northern Gaza, U.N. aid agencies say

TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel has blocked nearly all food aid from entering northern Gaza for the past two weeks, leaving some 400,000 Palestinians there with no good option, United Nations aid agencies say: Stay and starve, or follow orders to flee to the south, where there’s no guarantee of safety or shelters for the displaced.

Israeli human rights groups Gisha, B'Tselem and others say Israel quietly adopted a starve-or-leave policy for northern Gaza — a policy that Israel may be backtracking from now with pressure from the U.S. to increase aid to the area. In a letter Sunday, the U.S. secretaries of state and defense warned Israel the U.S. might cut off military aid to Israel unless it increases humanitarian aid to Gaza in the coming month.

The Israeli military denies Israel is deliberately blocking food to the area.

U.N. officials say that fuel, needed for hospital generators, bakeries, ambulances and water plants, is also running low.

 ”The situation in north Gaza is like a catastrophe within a series of catastrophes,” said Jonathan Fowler, a spokesman for UNRWA, the U.N. agency overseeing the distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza. “There's simply nowhere safe in Gaza.”

The ongoing Israeli offensive in northern Gaza has also thrown into question whether U.N. agencies will be able to carry out the second phase of polio vaccinations for children there. The second round of vaccinations began in central Gaza this week.

The first round of the campaign required humanitarian pauses in fighting and a pause in Israeli bombardment in specific areas where families were lining up to vaccinate their children from the highly contagious virus, which was found to be spreading in Gaza due to the destruction of water and sewage facilities in the war.

Israel’s offensive in north Gaza

Israel began its latest offensive in northern Gaza around two weeks ago with renewed calls for everyone to leave the area and move south, across Netsarim, a roughly 2 mile-wide corridor occupied by Israel’s military that cuts across Gaza. The corridor separates Gaza’s north from the rest of the enclave. Anyone who has heeded those orders throughout the war has not been permitted to return.

Israeli forces have also encircled and besieged the densely populated refugee camp of Jabalia in north Gaza since Oct. 5, where Israel’s military says Hamas fighters were trying to regroup.

Civilians in Jabalia say airstrikes from fighter jets and drones have killed people in their homes or as they tried to flee. Journalists are among those killed and wounded. Al Jazeera says its cameraman was shot live on TV by Israeli forces while reporting on the siege, and remains in critical condition.

Gaza’s civil defense rescue workers say hundreds of people have been killed since the offensive began in the north. U.N. agencies say people are left with an impossible choice.

“Civilians are given no choice but to either leave or starve,” tweeted Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA.

Vice President Harris has expressed concern about the situation, writing on the social media platform X on Sunday that civilians in Gaza “must be protected” and Israel must do more to ensure aid reaches people in need. “International humanitarian law must be respected,” she added.

The White House says President Biden also raised the issue in an Oct. 9 call with Israel’s prime minister.

The blockade appears to have eased slightly in recent days.

A U.N. team was able to deliver fuel to three hospitals in northern Gaza after several previous attempts were not permitted to proceed by Israeli forces at the Netsarim checkpoint.

The head of the World Health Organization said one-off missions like this are not sufficient.

“There is a sustained need for resupplying hospitals to keep them functioning,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, said in a post on X.

Also, COGAT, Israel’s military body responsible for civilian affairs in Gaza, said 30 trucks of food aid, from international aid agencies, entered northern Gaza on Monday under orders from Israel’s political leadership. It marked the first entry of food aid into northern Gaza since Oct. 1.

Rebecca Metzer, of the Tel Aviv-based Gaza rights group Gisha, said it’s hardly enough. “Given the scale of the crisis at this point it's merely a tokenistic gesture,” she said.

The World Food Programme says it has just two weeks of food supply left in northern Gaza, where people are already facing starvation and often eating just one meal a day consisting of bread and canned food, according to independent experts on famine.

Across Gaza, there’s been a drop in how much food is entering the territory. In the past two weeks, Israel permitted about a quarter of the food and aid trucked in compared to the same period last month, according to an online Israeli government aid tracker.

Israeli human rights groups petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court Tuesday with a demand that officials ensure aid continues to reach northern Gaza.

A starve-or-leave proposal

A proposal by former Israeli national security adviser Giora Eiland outlines a strategy to pressure Hamas to release Israeli hostages the group still holds from its deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. He proposed that Israel lay full siege on northern Gaza and order all civilians to evacuate south or else be denied food and water along with Hamas militants.

Palestinian militants in that area would have to “surrender or die of hunger,” Eiland, a retired army general, said in a Hebrew-language video promoting his proposal, which he dubbed the “Generals' Plan.”

Israeli officials studied the plan along with other proposals for Gaza, parts of which were implemented.

Israel’s decision-makers have not clarified whether any part of the starve-or-leave proposal has been adopted, a government official familiar with the matter said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss conversations with security officials.

“There are alarming signs that the Israeli military is beginning to quietly implement the Generals’ Plan … through tightening the siege on the area and starving the population,” a group of Israeli human rights organizations said.

A former Israeli legal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss war policies, said starvation of an armed enemy force would be allowed according to the international laws of war, but would be forbidden under the current circumstances in which civilians remain in northern Gaza.

“In my opinion, there was an attempt to partially implement the [starve-or-leave] plan. Pretty quickly it became clear that it wasn’t working,” said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military intelligence official specializing in Palestinian affairs.

Milshtein said the pressure tactic did not work in part because north Gaza civilians were not evacuating en masse, despite the military’s orders.

Trapped at home in north Gaza

The U.N. says more than 50,000 people have been displaced from Jabalia to other parts of northern Gaza over the past two weeks.

Residents of Jabalia, where the offensive is the most intense, spoke to NPR on the phone and in voice messages punctuated by persistent sounds of what they said was Israeli drone fire.

They said most of its residents fled to other areas of north Gaza under heavy fire, while the presence of Israeli tanks kept many residents trapped at home, unable to flee. They described quadcopters, a type of drone, flying through densely packed neighborhoods and firing on people and vehicles in the streets.

Mohammed el-Balaawy said he fled the camp under heavy Israeli fire with a group of 25 people but 10 of them did not make it — they were injured or killed trying to flee.

“No one looked behind them” as they fled, he said. His relatives who stayed behind had run out of food and water, he said.

Amna Suleiman, 42, who taught science and math at the American International School in Gaza before the war, has been trapped at home in Jabalia since the siege began.

“I’m worried, if we will be here for [more] days, we may finish all the water that we have,” she said.

Suleiman used to lead a women’s bicycling group in Gaza, the first to publicly ride in the conservative Hamas-controlled territory. Her bicycles were damaged in an explosion when the war began last year, and two of her sisters were killed in an Israeli airstrike a month into the war, on Nov. 19, 2023.

“I’m dreaming every day. I’m asking God every day to … take us to the sky, near our beloved people who left us in those bad and dangerous days,” Suleiman said in a voice message pierced by the sound of heavy gunfire.

“We are civilians. We deserve a life like others,” she said.

Daniel Estrin reported from Tel Aviv. Aya Batrawy reported from Washington, D.C. Ahmad Abu Hamda contributed to this story from Cairo.