After the Israeli military cut Gaza’s water supply on Oct. 9, 2023, then bombed water infrastructure and blocked fuel supplies to wells, the anti-poverty group Oxfam requested permission to bring solar-powered desalination units into Gaza to address the water crisis. After five months of correspondence with the Israeli military, including multiple resubmissions of the request, Oxfam obtained permission to bring fewer than half the system’s components into Gaza — which was not sufficient for the desalination units to function. A senior humanitarian official, seeking to bring prescription medication for a gravely ill teenage cancer patient, was asked to submit and resubmit letters from the attending physician explaining the need for the medicine, a photograph of the box of pills, contact information for the patient and details about how the box would be delivered, as conditions for being allowed to bring the 30 pills into Gaza. The Israeli military rejected a proposed aid shipment containing dates because, it told the United Nations, date pits are not permitted into Gaza. It also rejected U.N. requests to bring operating tables, blood bank refrigerators, latrine cubicles and 1.5-volt alkaline batteries.
As the Israeli military’s system for controlling the entry of food, medicine and other critical supplies veers into the realm of the absurd, shortages in Gaza have become catastrophic, with experts estimating that they have contributed to the deaths of thousands or even tens of thousands of people. Onerous, duplicative and inconsistent requirements for permitting goods into Gaza are not new but, after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israeli civilians, Israeli bureaucratic obstruction of humanitarian relief morphed into a tool of genocide — committed according to detailed regulations. The seeming orderliness of a bureaucracy whose function was to limit and block lifesaving aid may make it easier for the military officers and soldiers working within it to rationalize starving a civilian population.
Rolling back the mass starvation that has begun in Gaza will require the Israeli government to allow principled, impartial aid groups to flood the strip with supply trucks and to cooperate with them in coordinating safe delivery mechanisms at scale. It will also require ending the military bureaucratic requirements that burden, delay and ultimately thwart lifesaving aid delivery.
For this article, I interviewed an Israeli military spokesperson and five representatives of international organizations bringing aid into Gaza and reviewed court documents, Israeli military procedures and dozens of reports, statements and social media posts by Israeli, Palestinian and international organizations and Israeli authorities. Interviewees requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media or to use their names.
In the first weeks following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in southern Israel, which constituted crimes against humanity, the Israeli authorities completely blocked supplies from entering Gaza for two weeks, with then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant saying they were fighting “human animals.” Referring to Gaza’s 2 million residents, nearly half of whom are children, President Isaac Herzog, who has historically been affiliated politically with the center-left, said that the “entire nation” of people in Gaza was “responsible” for the attacks. The Israeli government then ordered the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the branch of the Israeli military responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs, to permit a trickle of supplies into Gaza but imposed administrative conditions that prevented an effective humanitarian response.
Even before an aid truck can be loaded for transit to Gaza, international aid workers are required to demonstrate the humanitarian need for the item through extensive, time-consuming and often duplicative documentation. That is the case even when the humanitarian need for the item — such as food, medical equipment and hygiene supplies — is obvious. Through a mechanism mandated by U.N. Security Council Resolution 2720 of December 2023, a dedicated U.N. team engages in extensive back-and-forth with COGAT that routinely includes providing photographs of aid supplies, the GPS coordinates of the locations where they will be installed or delivered and justifications for why they are needed. Relief organizations must provide detailed information about the intended recipients, even though the international organizations coordinating through the U.N. distribute aid to civilians impartially, and U.N. teams monitor distribution to ensure that the aid reaches its intended civilian destination.
According to international aid workers, every item, including food, needs to be itemized and approved in advance. But the Israeli military has not provided an updated list of what is permitted or prohibited, turning procurement into time-consuming and resource-intensive guesswork. Sometimes, the same item is approved one day but rejected the next, or rejected one day and approved the next, aid workers say. At other times, an item is approved for one organization but not for another. When asked to provide a list of dual-use items, the COGAT spokesperson said that Israeli authorities need to scrutinize materials that could be used for “terrorist purposes” on a case-by-case basis.
According to U.N. reports and U.N. officials, the items that COGAT has rejected for entry into Gaza include sterilizers for obstetric equipment, gel for ultrasound equipment and operating tables. The Israeli military also does not allow the U.N. to bring food into Gaza for distribution to households; it may only request food for institutions like bakeries and communal kitchens. When asked about that limitation, the COGAT spokesperson said that the Israeli- and U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was tasked with food distribution to individuals. The U.N. and other experienced international organizations working in Gaza have refused to participate in the GHF mechanism, which requires people to walk miles through combat zones in order to compete for food packages that typically run out in under an hour. Israeli soldiers posted near the aid compounds have shot and killed hundreds of people who were waiting for food packages to be distributed.
According to the U.N. and international organizations, requests for nonfood items can take months to be approved, or go unanswered. Of the requests approved in June to bring nonfood humanitarian supplies into Gaza, nearly one-third were pending for more than 30 days. The COGAT spokesperson said that there are no set timelines for considering requests but that COGAT tries to respond as quickly as possible.
Additional bureaucratic obstacles include intermittent requirements by the Israeli government, as of May 2025, to require customs clearance for aid consignments — adding costs and administrative burdens — as well as stringent vetting requirements for truck drivers that can mean that, even if a truckload is approved, there may not be anyone to drive it, and a requirement that international organizations reregister in Israel through new procedures as a condition for bringing aid.
The inconsistency, opacity and sheer volume of correspondence take up inordinate amounts of time and money from international organizations, which have hired entire teams to coordinate approvals for aid. Aid workers say it is often the most senior officials who liaise with COGAT, in an attempt to push through blocked requests.
The results have been catastrophic, obstructing aid when it’s needed most and contributing to what a growing number of experts, including prominent Israeli academics, consider to be genocide, because the Israeli government is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their destruction in whole or in part. Put simply, if you deprive people of food, water and medicine, they will die. The World Health Organization has documented 63 malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza so far in July, and surveys reveal that 1 in 5 children under the age of 5 in Gaza City is acutely malnourished. We may never know how many people in Gaza have died of complications due to malnutrition, dehydration, lack of medical care and preventable and treatable diseases, but estimates by public health experts, health care professionals who have worked in Gaza and U.N. reports suggest the number is in the thousands or tens of thousands.
According to the Israeli government bureaucracy, however, there is no famine in Gaza. The Israeli authorities insist that they are allowing sufficient supplies into the besieged territory. In response to litigation from Israeli human rights groups challenging the aid restrictions, the Israeli government said it’s monitoring the situation daily, in close coordination with the international community and with the help of dozens of special “population officers” working in the Israeli army who conduct regular “humanitarian assessments.” Even during a nearly three-month period in which the Israeli military blocked all aid into Gaza, COGAT released a video stating, “There is enough food for a long period of time, if Hamas lets the civilians have it.” Last month, as the U.N. reported on catastrophic shortages, COGAT released a video stating that people in Gaza had enough water. And if there isn’t enough food or water, Israeli authorities say, then it’s the fault of Hamas, or the U.N., or both. The Israeli military, which does not allow international media to enter Gaza, has not released to the public evidence to support its claim that Hamas is diverting aid for its own use. Meanwhile, a widely reported internal assessment carried out by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) found no evidence that Hamas was engaging in widespread theft of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies, as Israel alleged.
I am an Israeli human rights lawyer, and I spent most of my early career litigating and advocating against Israeli restrictions on access to and from Gaza. Over decades, in the name of security, the Israeli military developed and implemented a system in which soldiers and generals pored over detailed requests to travel or bring goods, demanding intrusive information that seemed irrelevant to any legitimate security precaution. They presumed their own expertise in evaluating the humanitarian needs of Palestinians in Gaza and used those assessments to decide which food items Palestinians could eat and in what quantities. But I did not anticipate how quickly bureaucratic structures created to control the population in Gaza would be used to regulate and facilitate its destruction. Weaponizing the military bureaucracy to inflict starvation, it seems, did not require much additional work.
Since 1967, the Israeli military has occupied the Gaza Strip and controlled movement into and out of it. Beginning in the 1990s, the Israeli military surrounded Gaza with fences and walls with limited openings, creating a default rule against travel or movement of goods, unless explicitly permitted. Over the years, that permission became harder to obtain and required not just undergoing security checks but also demonstrating the humanitarian necessity of the request. As of 2007, the Israeli military calculated the number of calories they deemed people in Gaza required and, for a time, created mathematical formulas to translate that minimum standard into the maximum number of truckloads of food and other essential items they would allow into Gaza. Between 2007 and 2010, senior Israeli officials scrutinized requests to bring food into Gaza, at one point deciding to approve cinnamon but ban coriander and to approve packaged hummus, unless it was seasoned with pine nuts. That presumption of expertise in evaluating what was truly humanitarian extended to requests to travel. For example, if a child had no parent in Gaza and wanted to join a parent who lived in the West Bank, Israeli military officials were tasked with evaluating the nature and quality of the parent-child relationship, as part of the information they would use to decide whether to allow the child to reunite with her mother or father. The Israeli military bureaucracy controlling Gaza presumed its own expertise in what Palestinians actually needed and implemented routine mechanisms for denying requests that exceeded that assessment.
Once the Israeli government made the political decision to lower the level of supplies it would permit in Gaza to far below the “humanitarian minimum” of the previous decade, it was easy to use the permit bureaucracy as one of a number of mechanisms to commit genocide through delay, rejection and burdensome or impossible requirements that thwart aid.
In “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” her report and analysis of the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt observed that atrocities can be committed by ordinary people working within a system, following its rules and failing to exercise independent moral judgment. If we view perpetrators of genocide as deviant monsters, we miss the structures and systems that facilitate widespread participation. The orderliness of Israel’s military bureaucracy makes it easier to commit atrocities, because it provides a structure that can seem logical; military personnel review Excel sheets, assess need, request follow-up information and reject or approve requests, according to opaque but detailed internal procedures. People are doing their jobs, even when their jobs are to keep aid workers busy removing dates from a food shipment and finding alternatives to blood bank refrigerators, while Palestinians in Gaza die of malnutrition and inadequate medical care.
For now, the urgent priority is to dismantle the Israeli bureaucracy that is burdening, delaying and limiting requests to bring food to a starving population, and to allow aid groups to flood Gaza with truckloads of food, subject only to physical inspection and credible U.N. assurances against diversion. But, in time, we will have a moral and legal reckoning of Israeli military conduct in Gaza, and it should include the bureaucratic mechanisms regulating mass starvation in Gaza and the decisions by its staff to follow the rules.
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