Demonstrators converged on the Israeli side of the Allenby Bridge near Yericho, the only official crossing between Jordan and Judea and Samaria, to prevent aid supplies destined for Gaza from entering.
The Tzav 9 (Order 9) grassroots movement organized the protest. Tzav 9 is a reference to the Tzav 8 emergency mobilization notices received by Israel Defense Forces reservists on Oct. 7.
“We are losing patience,” Rachel Touitou, a spokesperson for Tzav 9, told JNS on Tuesday. “We see the negotiations at a standstill. Our hostages haven’t returned home, we don’t even get the bodies of the deceased back.
“We are dealing with a terror organization that does not value life. Not only do they seize humanitarian aid to feed terrorists, but they also resell some of it,” she said.
While Israel has shown flexibility in the hopes of arriving at a hostage deal, Hamas has impeded an agreement, Matthew Miller, the U.S. State Department spokesman, said on Monday.
“Israel moved a significant way in submitting that proposal,” Miller said. “There was a deal on the table that would achieve much of what Hamas claims it wants to achieve, and they have not taken that deal.”
In response to Israel’s most generous offer yet, Hamas reportedly dropped the number of hostages it is willing to release from 40 to 20. The terrorist organization also demanded the release of more hardened terrorists and a ratio of more jailed Palestinian terrorists released per Israeli hostage freed. It also appeared to reject a phased deal, instead demanding an immediate withdrawal of all IDF units from the Gaza Strip along with international guarantees.
The Israeli protesters at Allenby Crossing on Monday included relatives of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
“We heard that trucks were coming in from Jordan and decided to prevent it from passing. [The authorities] did it at night because they thought it would deter us,” Touitou said.
“It was a successful protest. Right afterward, they designated the area a [closed] military zone and they decided to send this same shipment through Kerem Shalom today. That’s why we came this morning,” she added.
On Tuesday, Tzav 9 converged on Kibbutz Gvulot, near the Kerem Shalom crossing. Touitou stressed that for as long as the hostages remain in Gaza, activists would continue protesting.
“The Gazans are being sent aid while 133 Israelis are held against their will. We don’t know what their medical condition is, we get no sign of life, they haven’t received any medication or a visit from humanitarian organizations,” Touitou said.
“We can’t let the [Hamas] terror organization, which uses international law and humanitarian aid to its own benefit, walk all over us,” she continued.
On Monday, the United States confirmed that the quantity of humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip had substantially increased over the past few days.
Israel recently ramped up efforts to facilitate deliveries, with the opening of a new land crossing to the Gaza Strip designed primarily to facilitate the entry of foreign aid.
The crossing, located between Kibbutz Zikim and the Gazan village of As-Siafa, will reduce travel time for trucks entering the Strip after picking up shipments at the Port of Ashdod some 25 miles away, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said last week. The goal, according to Gallant, is to have at least 500 trucks a day entering the Strip.
Near-daily protests took place following Israel’s Security Cabinet decision on Dec. 15 to approve the opening of the Kerem Shalom crossing for the transfer of aid into the southern Strip after intense U.S. and international pressure.
All the Israeli crossings to Gaza had been shuttered after Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion, with only Egypt’s Rafah crossing from Sinai remaining open.
In late December and early January, protesters attempted to block trucks at Kerem Shalom, leading to clashes with security personnel. In early February, after two border crossings were declared closed military zones, activists moved their operations to Ashdod Port, where they blocked trucks destined for the Strip.
Last week, protesters from Tzav 9 succeeded in blocking aid at the Nitzana crossing between Israel and Egypt before security forces forcibly removed them a few hours later.
Touitou recounted that when Tzav 9 began its action months ago, Gazans started protesting against Hamas. Now that humanitarian aid goes in, she said Hamas isn’t encountering any resistance from the population.
“We are not only speaking about food, there is fuel as well. This is a problem for us and this is a problem for our soldiers,” said Touitou.
“Which country in the world would feed their enemy? Hamas gets whatever it needs and wants. It refuses to close a deal because there are no incentives to do so,” she added. JNS
One of the very top military commanders in US history, General Curtis Emerson LeMay (1906 – 1990), remarked that very often in a war, many of those killed will be people who are not directly fighting us. “It’s one of the sad things about war! It can’t be helped!”
In this intensive difficult war that we are now having, we well know that the IDF tries excessively hard that those who are killed are ONLY the Hamas, the ones who are directly fighting against us. With these efforts though, like General LeMay pointed out, it is NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to totally prevent deaths of non-combatants, and it is thus inevitable that here, non-Hamas civilians have also been killed. Now, the media has been reporting that these civilian deaths have risen to very high numbers of over 35,000. As the sources for these figures are from Hamas though, they are obviously huge exaggerations. However, these exaggerations are the numbers that are being reported, so many news pundits are claiming that Israel is trying to kill out the whole Palestinian people.
Then, about two weeks ago, was the exceedingly tragic incident when the IDF, in an identification mix-up, killed several workers of a food-aid-delivery-convoy. Even though IDF officials and Netanyahu himself announced strong apologies, many news pundits claim that this was not an accident but rather another brutal example of how we are trying to kill all the Palestinians: that we will not even let any food come in!!
With these terrible accusations being hurled at us, which is obviously a terrible Chillul Hashem, we certainly have a gigantic obligation to counter that with making a huge Kiddush Hashem, with even more strenuous efforts to prevent the wrong people from being killed and bringing in for them extra large amounts of needed aid.
So, these protestors repeatedly blocking the aid that the Israel government itself wants to give — if, Chas V’Shalom, news of this gets out — they are making a horrendous Chillul Hashem that is massively further pushing the gravely dangerous accusations that we are starving and killing the Gazan Palestinians.
Now, as related here, these protestors do have a totally valid concern, that the aid should not be stolen by Hamas operatives. So, for this good concern, maybe an arrangement could be set up that they could go in with convoys into Gaza to make sure that the aid is not stolen but instead gets to the needy civilians. But they absolutely must not go and stop all aid from going to where it needs to go.