For months, Israel and its defenders have insisted that Hamas is stealing humanitarian aid entering Gaza. This narrative was aggressively promoted in Western media, used to justify a brutal siege on over two million Palestinians, and cited as a reason to bomb bakeries, block food convoys, and fire on civilians waiting in breadlines. The message was clear: this was a war against Hamas, and Palestinians were simply collateral damage.
But now, disturbing new evidence reveals the exact opposite: the very gangs disrupting aid delivery and terrorizing civilians in Gaza are being armed and supported by the Israeli government. Not only has Israel been accused of enabling these criminal networks, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly admitted to backing them claiming that it saves Israeli soldiers’ lives.
This revelation isn’t just alarming; it’s a watershed moment. It confirms what many Palestinians and international observers have long suspected that Israel is not fighting for peace or security, but for total control through fragmentation, chaos, and desperation. This isn’t a war on Hamas. It’s a war on Palestinian society itself on unity, governance, and the very possibility of statehood.
Weaponing Chaos: A Colonial Playbook
The deliberate arming of criminal elements in Gaza echoes the oldest tactics in colonial warfare: divide, destabilize, and dominate. This strategy is not new in the Israeli playbook. In the 1980s, Israel quietly encouraged the rise of Hamas as a religious counterweight to the then-dominant secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The objective was simple and strategic: weaken Palestinian nationalism by sowing internal division.
Israeli officials openly admitted this. Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, a former military governor in Gaza, told the New York Times in 1981 that Israel helped Hamas grow by allowing its leaders to operate freely even as it cracked down on the PLO. Later, former Mossad officials acknowledged that this move backfired. Hamas grew into a potent resistance force. But in the short term, it had served Israel’s purpose. It splintered Palestinian leadership and delayed the possibility of a unified front for independence.
This tactic has returned, but now it’s more sinister. Reports, including investigative work by British newspaper The Guardianand Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have exposed that gangs like the one led by Yasser Abu Shabab accused of looting aid and intimidating civilians are receiving weapons from Israel. These are not resistance fighters. These are opportunistic criminals, and they serve a vital function: they destabilize civil society, discredit local leadership, and make effective governance impossible.
Starvation as Strategy
By supporting these gangs and simultaneously blaming Hamas for aid theft, Israel creates a carefully managed narrative. One where it starves Palestinians while painting itself as the reluctant enforcer of order. The United Nations and multiple aid organizations, including Oxfam and the World Food Programme, have repeatedly said there is no verified evidence that Hamas systematically steals aid. Yet that falsehood continues to justify one of the most severe humanitarian blockades in modern history.
The toll is staggering. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), over half of Gaza’s population is now at risk of famine, with children dying of starvation in hospitals. Meanwhile, Israel continues to bomb agricultural land, bakeries, and even convoys carrying flour.
This is not a miscalculation. It’s a conscious, political decision to weaponize hunger, to engineer despair.
Turning Victims into Villains
What Israel is doing in Gaza and the occupied West Bank goes beyond military action. It is narrative warfare, aimed at shaping global perceptions. By fostering lawlessness and internal strife, Israel can point to Gaza and say: “See? They can’t govern themselves. We have to maintain control.”
This strategy is visible in the West Bank as well. Israel routinely withholds Palestinian Authority (PA) tax revenues funds essential for paying salaries and maintaining civil services. In parallel, it allows armed settler militias to attack Palestinian villages, often under the watchful eye of the IDF.
According to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, more than 1,000 Palestinians were displaced by settler violence in 2023 alone.
Israel’s daily military raids in PA-administered cities like Jenin and Nablus serve not just tactical purposes, but psychological ones. They humiliate PA security forces and further undermine any semblance of Palestinian autonomy. This is not peacekeeping. This is state sabotage.
Silence and Complicity on the Global Stage
Despite the growing body of evidence, there has been no real condemnation from key international actors. The United States and the United Kingdom both of whom have professed concern for humanitarian access in Gaza have offered no meaningful rebuke of Netanyahu’s admission. This silence is deafening. It reveals a global double standard where violations of international law, including war crimes, are excused so long as they are committed by a strategic ally.
Netanyahu’s open arrogance reflects not just personal hubris, but systemic impunity. Israel continues to receive military aid, trade agreements, and diplomatic cover even as it violates the Geneva Conventions, bombs UN-run schools, and now, arms violent gangs that terrorize its own occupied population.
This is not merely a failure of policy. It is a moral crisis.
A War on Palestinian Identity
From the streets of Gaza to the towns of Galilee, Israel’s policies are not just about territorial control. They are about erasing Palestinian identity. Inside Israel, Palestinian citizens face systemic neglect rampant crime, underfunded schools, and lack of infrastructure. In mixed cities like Lod and Jaffa, far-right groups attack Arab residents with virtual impunity.
This isn’t poor governance. It is engineered chaos. The aim is to create the appearance of dysfunction so that Palestinians are seen not as a people striving for self-determination, but as an ungovernable threat. That narrative is then used to justify endless occupation and apartheid.
As the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling warned, this is a form of politicide: the systematic destruction of a people’s ability to define themselves as a nation.
The Urgent Need for Action
The international community cannot continue to reward brutality with silence. It must act not with empty declarations about a future Palestinian state, but with concrete steps:
- End military aid to any government violating international law.
- Recognize Palestinian statehood at the UN and in bilateral agreements.
- Support independent investigations into crimes committed in Gaza and the West Bank.
- Demand accountability for Israeli officials who enable war crimes, including arming criminal militias.
The cost of inaction is not just Palestinian lives though that should be enough. The cost is the erosion of every principle we claim to stand for: justice, human rights, and the rule of law.
Conclusion: The Price of Manufactured Chaos
Gaza is not a failed state. It is a suffocated one denied the air to breathe, the space to grow, and the right to govern itself. The gangs now weaponized by Israel are not accidents of war; they are instruments of it. This is state policy masquerading as chaos and chaos weaponized as proof of Palestinian failure.
The people of Gaza are not mere victims of conflict. They are survivors of a deliberate system built to break their will. And yet, they endure they teach, they heal, and they raise their children amid rubble. That perseverance alone is a form of resistance.
If the world still believes in justice, now is the time to prove it.
