As the war in Gaza completes its fifth week, the death toll suffered by Palestinian civilians has left behind all precedent in the grim conflict between Israel and Hamas. The daily images from Gaza of flattened blocks, sheared-off apartment buildings, and rescue workers searching through mounds of rubble for survivors evoke scenes from Mosul in 2017, after the heavy U.S.-led bombing campaign there against ISIS. Since Israel counterattacked Hamas after the atrocities of October 7th, more than four thousand children have died in Gaza, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry. That figure is more than three times all of the combat-related child deaths in Gaza recorded by the U.N. since 2008, when it started keeping count. (The U.N. has not verified the casualty figures released by Gaza’s health ministry, but in the past, a UNICEF spokesman told the Guardian, the ministry’s figures have generally held up under review.) Doctors in Gaza’s hospitals supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross “have never seen this level of mass casualties,” Robert Mardini, the I.C.R.C.’s director-general, told me. An estimated two-thirds of Gaza’s population of more than two million people have been displaced from their homes. “No place is spared by the hostilities,” Mardini said.
On Friday, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected calls for even a temporary ceasefire until Hamas and its allies return the more than two hundred and thirty hostages, many of them civilians, whom the militants seized in the October 7th attacks. Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N., told CNN that no humanitarian break in combat was necessary, because Israel had allowed “the number of trucks entering Gaza now with food and medicines to reach almost a hundred trucks every day.” (Prior to October 7th, about five hundred trucks carried supplies to Gaza daily. On Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the current rate of supply to Gaza is “good, but it’s grossly insufficient.”) Erdan also said that “we shouldn’t believe or take any numbers coming out of Gaza at face value,” because “everything is being controlled by the terrorists of Hamas.” At one point during the interview, the Ambassador said, “There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
The Biden Administration seeks to shake up this dismal status quo by developing what the President and Blinken call a “humanitarian pause,” a vague, technocratic term apparently chosen to avoid “ceasefire,” the word mounted on posters by antiwar and pro-Palestinian protesters worldwide. A “humanitarian ceasefire” is also the goal enunciated by António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Blinken hopped last week from Jerusalem to Amman to Ramallah to Baghdad to Ankara, trying to advance Washington’s ideas about a pause or pauses. On Monday, speaking to ABC News, Netanyahu mentioned what he might accept: “Tactical little pauses—an hour here, an hour there.” Blinken, speaking to reporters during his travels, explained the nub of the challenge in his diplomacy: “Israel has raised important questions about how humanitarian pauses would work. We’ve got to answer those questions.” He said that “teams” of U.S. and Israeli officials were now addressing the matter.
Humanitarian “corridors” and temporary safe zones or ceasefires have been a controversial feature of aid delivery in war zones, including recently in Ukraine and Syria. The concept of stopping war to allow a kind of booster shot of humanitarian assistance to trapped civilians raises the question, “What happens when the ceasefire isn’t happening?,” Kirsten Gelsdorf, a scholar at the University of Virginia who specializes in humanitarian policy, told me. “Could it be a false promise of safety? Or does it actually put more people at risk?” Temporary agreements can be fragile or unstable, she said, and can create “this complex environment where you don’t know when and how and if you can deliver aid.”
In the case of Gaza, the equation is complicated by the hostage-taking carried out by Hamas and its allies. The latest remarks by Netanyahu and Blinken seemed to make clear that any concession by Israel to allow a temporary ceasefire would have to be linked to hostage releases. (In Baghdad, Blinken said it was “important” that a pause advance “the prospect of getting the hostages back.”) Qatar and Egypt played roles in two earlier releases of a total of four American and Israeli hostages, as did the I.C.R.C. On Sunday, Majed Al Ansari, a spokesperson for Qatar’s foreign ministry, said that “any hostage release has to be linked to a period of calm.”
The circumstances of the releases to date suggest why. A Hamas-released video depicts the scene, on October 23rd, when the militant group freed two Israeli hostages—Nurit Cooper, aged seventy-nine, and Yocheved Lifshitz, eighty-five—by escorting them to an I.C.R.C. team. The exchange took place in darkness, as two Hamas militants wearing black ski masks and holding assault rifles passed the captives to unarmed I.C.R.C. delegates wearing white safety vests. The video captures the fortitude required by unarmed humanitarians in such situations. If hostage releases were to be scaled up to free dozens, if not hundreds, of other captives held by Hamas and its allies, perhaps in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, a well-established ceasefire would almost certainly be required. Still, the releases thus far show that freeing hostages in Gaza “is achievable,” Mardini told me. “The technicalities—I’m not saying it’s easy. Sometimes it takes many attempts, even if the parties agree to the terms.” But, he said, “it’s possible.”
Last week, Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, demanded that the I.C.R.C. visit the hostages held by Hamas and its allies, and he added that, if the charity failed to do so, it had “no right to exist.” When I asked Mardini about Cohen’s comments, he answered, “All our efforts are not visible. It doesn’t mean our efforts are not happening. Second, the I.C.R.C. has no means to enforce decisions of the parties to a conflict anywhere. Our only tools are dialogue and convincing parties to implement their obligations under international humanitarian law.”
He continued, “We never impose ourselves as an intermediary. We said the civilian hostages should be released without preconditions. We asked to visit them, to look at their health, to make sure they get medicine, to make sure they exchange messages with their families, which is their right.” All those requests, he said, “remain valid today. We know the plight of the hostages and also the families. We know the suffering, the impatience, the frustration.”
A second purpose of a humanitarian pause, as Blinken said over the weekend, would be to help with “getting more humanitarian assistance to people who need it in Gaza.” Since dozens of aid trucks are already entering the territory with Israel’s agreement, a large-scale infusion of aid enabled by a ceasefire would seem achievable. Yet there are complications. One dispute is over fuel supplies. Israel shut down electric lines running into Gaza after the October 7th attacks, and the territory’s own power plant has stopped functioning. Hospitals and bakeries now depend on generators, which in turn require fuel. According to the U.N., more than a third of Gaza’s hospitals and more than half of its primary-care clinics “have shut down due to damage or lack of fuel.” Aid groups say that if Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe is to be seriously addressed in the days and weeks ahead, fuel supplies will be essential. But Israel has also blocked all fuel shipments to Gaza since October 7th. The Israel Defense Forces say that Hamas pressures hospitals and other aid recipients to turn over fuel, which the group then uses to wage war. Last week, the I.D.F. released photos of what it said appeared to be Hamas-controlled storage tanks holding about five hundred thousand litres of fuel.
Meanwhile, aid organizations working in Gaza have been stretched to the breaking point. The war is already the deadliest on record for U.N. aid workers. At least ninety-two people who worked for the main U.N. agency serving Palestinian refugees have died in Gaza since October 7th, a number almost as large as the hundred and sixteen aid-worker fatalities suffered worldwide in all of 2022, according to an annual report on aid-worker security.
The Washington narrative about President Biden’s efforts to achieve a temporary ceasefire in Gaza often focusses on his “leverage”—or his apparent lack of it—over Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet. In this telling, Biden’s embrace of Israel after the attacks has not given him as much influence in Jerusalem as he might have hoped. There is obvious truth in that framing, but it is reductive. The President is trying to moderate Israel’s war, but the U.S. is also acting willingly as a lightning rod for criticism about the human costs of Israel’s campaign against Hamas, a role that the U.S. has long played in the alliance. And the recent public back-and-forth about a temporary ceasefire—including Netanyahu’s qualified rejections of the proposal—should be considered in light of the ongoing secret negotiations over the fate of Israeli and international hostages. The public statements of leaders engaged in such high-stakes private bargaining cannot always be taken at face value.
Bringing a successful, negotiated end to any mass hostage-taking is an excruciating high-wire act in the best of circumstances, never mind in a case such as this one, in which Hamas and its allies are apparently holding their captives in tunnels beneath Gaza’s apocalyptic war zone. To free those victims while also delivering food, water, and medical care sustainably and at scale to Palestinian civilians would be a miraculous achievement. Yet these are the imperatives of statecraft and aid work when confronted by a crisis of Gaza’s dimensions. “At the end of the day, everything boils down to carving out space for humanity in the worst of circumstances,” Mardini said. “Our only option is to always try harder.” ♦
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