Hamas to Gazans: There's Plenty of Food After All
What a Hamas video from Gazan markets reveals about aid and Gaza's future
Market Report
Hamas Tells the World Gazans Are Starving — While Inside Gaza, It Brags of Abundance
For 17 years, Hamas used brutality and spin to dominate Gaza while narrating victimhood to outsiders.
Last week, even as UN officials warned that Gaza faces “full-blown famine,” Hamas activists posted video of Gazan markets stocked with cheap produce. “Cucumbers for five shekels!” one buyer exclaimed. “God willing, with these prices we’ll win the war!”
It’s clear that by alleging famine to outsiders, Hamas and its proxies seek to grow international pressure on Israel. But why do Hamas activists meanwhile tell Gazans that the Strip is filled with food at affordable prices?
The answer lies in the deepening animosity Gazans harbor toward Hamas over its theft of international aid. Locals charge that most food entering Gaza is diverted by Hamas to its members and supporters. As one resident of Rafah recently told us, “Food aid, and things like flour and so on, we don’t get any help with. All of this goes to Hamas, who give it to their relatives and the security forces … They have nothing to pay them with so they buy them with aid.”
Food shipments into the Strip since January total 3,268 calories per person per day, which would suffice to feed the population – free of charge – assuming fair distribution. But Hamas’s paramilitaries commandeer most aid as soon as it enters the Strip, either hoarding it or reselling it to merchants at inflated prices. Gazans have shown their anger through repeated anti-Hamas street protests and armed clashes with Hamas gunmen looting aid.
Hamas strives to manage this unrest in the same way it has governed Gaza for the past 17 years: a combination of brutality and spin. Blaming merchants for the high prices Hamas itself has imposed as their supplier, it deploys masked, baton-wielding “popular defense committees” into marketplaces to threaten vendors and publicly execute civilians accused of stealing aid. As food supply into the Strip continues to increase, Hamas films performative market visits, such as the one above, which praise the “Ministry of Economy and Agriculture” for lowering prices.
All the while, the militia’s foreign messaging claims “worsening famine” and deflects blame onto Israel for purportedly employing “starvation tactics.”
Such is the double narrative which Hamas has employed since its 2006 coup: to foreigners and non-Palestinian Arabs, a tale of victimization; to Gazans, a projection of power and authority. In deploying the same approach so brazenly now, Hamas signals not only its confidence that the world will fall for it, but also its expectation to win the war and resume business as usual.
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