Framed as an Israeli failure, regardless of the facts

unique to the UK; it reflects a broader international consensus that has become ideologically and diplomatically entrenched: humanitarian suffering in Gaza is to be framed as an Israeli failure, regardless of the facts. Any Palestinian terrorists deliberately causing suffering to their own are to be ignored at all costs.

But the facts are stubborn. This latest incident is not a deviation. On Saturday, reports confirmed by Cogat, Israel’s military coordination body for the territories, described another deliberate sabotage of aid efforts: Hamas terrorists are said to have fired at UN teams working to open a new humanitarian corridor in southern Gaza. Armed men seized UN vehicles and reportedly used them to blockade roads meant to carry food and medicine. It is all part of a deliberate strategy to obstruct aid distribution in order to engineer a crisis and externalise blame.

If Israel were truly trying to starve Gaza, why would it coordinate with the UN to open new routes for food and shelter supplies? Why would it allow in therapeutic nutrition and medical equipment that is then stolen or intercepted en route by Palestinian terrorists? The uncomfortable truth is that Israel’s logistical and military apparatus has, despite the war, continued to facilitate aid, often at the expense of its own operational freedom, in a desperate attempt to separate civilians from combatants. It is the terror groups embedded within the civilian population who blur that line.

There is a deeper rot exposed here: the moral degradation of the aid discourse itself. Humanitarian law is predicated on neutrality and civilian protection. But in Gaza, that framework is regularly distorted by a UN system unwilling to hold Palestinian actors accountable, either out of fear, political alignment, or institutional corruption. The result is grotesque: children are being deprived of food by the very actors who claim to be their protectors, shielded from scrutiny by a media and diplomatic class that prefers to heap condemnation on the democratic, free nation acting to remove that very evil which threatens both Israelis and its own population.

The UN – notably the UNRWA – are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Meanwhile, Britain, France and others press forward with plans to ‘recognise’ an imaginary Palestinian state – an impossible and undesirable entity that in its current form exists only as an idea, not as a functioning polity. And what is the fantasy state they are recognising? One in which a terror group starves the country’s children for political point-scoring? That obstructs aid corridors with armed force? That creates and exploits its own population’s misery as a weapon of diplomacy? To recognise this as a state is to recognise the strategy of hostage governance. It is to endorse a political culture in which children’s hunger is not a crisis to be solved, but a tool to be cynically and ruthlessly engineered and leveraged.

If that is the foundation upon which Europe intends to recognise statehood, then it is not recognising a future of peace and sovereignty, but entrenching a system of impunity, cruelty, and permanent conflict.