How Gaza’s Humanitarian Collapse Collides with West Bank Expansion Plans

IntelScooper

GAZA CITY, Palestinian Territories — In the southern neighborhoods of Gaza City, children’s laughter has been replaced by the faint rattle of empty cooking pots. Food queues now stretch for hours, only to dissolve in frustration when the relief trucks fail to arrive. For many families, the next meal depends not on money, but on whether Israeli authorities will permit aid convoys to pass through the tightly monitored crossings.

More than 100 humanitarian organizations, including Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam, accuse Israel of implementing a new “registration” system that has trapped hundreds of aid trucks in Jordan and Egypt. Under the new rules, items not pre-approved — from infant formula to water filtration systems — are being rejected outright or left to decay at border depots. The United Nations reports that over 239 Palestinians, including 106 children, have died of hunger-related causes since the spring.

The figures are shocking, but the pattern is not new. In 2007, when Hamas took control of Gaza, Israel imposed a land, air, and sea blockade, restricting the movement of goods and people. While the stated aim was to prevent weapons smuggling, the blockade has also strangled the economy and eroded public health systems. What makes the present crisis uniquely grim is the accusation by UN-appointed experts that Israel is engaged in “medicide” — the deliberate destruction of medical infrastructure and the targeting of health professionals. Hospitals that survived past conflicts have been stripped of supplies, while doctors are forced to perform surgery without anesthesia.

The Gaza blockade is now intersecting with a separate flashpoint in the West Bank: the revival of the long-disputed E1 settlement project. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently claimed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former US President Donald Trump, and current US Ambassador Mike Huckabee support the plan, which would link East Jerusalem with the Ma’ale Adumim settlement through a stretch of Israeli-controlled territory. Critics, including Jordan’s foreign ministry, warn that E1 would sever the West Bank into disconnected northern and southern sections — a death blow to the idea of a contiguous Palestinian state.

The E1 plan has a long history. First floated in the 1990s, it was repeatedly shelved under international pressure, particularly from Washington, which saw it as incompatible with a negotiated two-state solution. But Israeli leaders have often revived the proposal during periods of political crisis at home, framing settlement expansion as a matter of national security. Past attempts to move forward on E1 have triggered mass protests in the West Bank, international condemnation, and rare public rebukes from US administrations.

In Amman, Jordanian officials warn that proceeding with E1 risks inflaming tensions not only between Israelis and Palestinians but also across the broader Arab world. Iraq’s foreign ministry echoed this view, calling the plan “a violation of international law and an assault on the rights of the Palestinian people.”

Meanwhile, in Gaza, the human toll deepens. Aid convoys, when they do arrive, are often met with chaos. Since May, nearly 1,900 people have been killed while attempting to collect food, victims of gunfire, airstrikes, or stampedes. Survivors describe desperate scrambles to grab sacks of flour under the crack of live ammunition.

The violence is not confined to Gaza. In the West Bank, Palestinian villages near settlement outposts have reported a spike in settler attacks, often carried out under the protection of Israeli forces. This mirrors patterns documented in past years, when periods of intensified military operations in Gaza coincided with escalations in settler violence elsewhere.

The backdrop to these dual crises is a shifting geopolitical conversation. In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin has signaled openness to renewed US–Russia talks on arms control, while also suggesting the Ukraine war could be a template for conflict mediation in the Middle East. In Washington, a more fractured political environment has seen unusual criticism of Israeli policy emerging from factions of the American right.

For Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, such international maneuvering can feel remote. “They talk of peace while we bury our children,” said Umm Ahmed, a mother of four in Khan Younis, whose youngest son died of malnutrition in June. Her words echo a truth often lost in policy debates: that the intersection of aid blockades and territorial expansion is not an abstract political puzzle, but a lived catastrophe — measured in empty shelves, fractured hospitals, and lives cut short.

Whether these crises can be addressed together — lifting the blockade while halting settlement expansion — remains uncertain. What is clear is that the cost of inaction is mounting, and that both Gaza’s starvation and the West Bank’s fragmentation are shaping the contours of the conflict in ways that will be far harder to reverse than to inflame.

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Via https://intelscoops.com/2025/08/14/starvation-settlements-and-stalemates-how-gazas-humanitarian-collapse-collides-with-west-bank-expansion-plans/