On the scene at Kerem Shalom’s Gaza crossing

Protesters blocking Gaza aid say entry of goods should be conditioned on release of Israeli hostages.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The country is with them, the hostages’ families are with them, and the government should be with them, too, said the head of the Order 9 (Tzav 9),  the activist group leading demonstrations that have been blocking Gaza-bound aid trucks from the Kerem Shalom crossing since last week.

“Not one bit of aid goes into Gaza until the last hostage is released,” was the message Sefi Ben Chaim kept repeating on Sunday to some 200 men, women and children who responded to his and his wife’s grassroots campaign, begun on Whatsapp from the couple’s living room in Netivot.

Additional reasons to block the trucks, were that “Every drop of aid goes to a Hamas fighter who is shooting at our soldiers,” he said, and no country in the world aids its enemies in such a way.

Israelis came from all parts of the country, religious and nonreligious alike, to tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop bowing to the pressure of the international community and start listening to his people, who gave several kinds of answers as to why they were there.

One belonged to Yigal Horowitz, who as a young child was forcibly taken out of Gush Katif with his family in 2005 when then-prime minister Ariel Sharon decided to get rid of all the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, promising that if the Palestinians shoot “one rocket” at Israel the IDF would return.

Tens of thousands of rockets later, but only because of the October 7 surprise attack in which the Hamas invaders massacred 1,200 people, including infants and the elderly, the IDF has gone in to root out the terror organization that took over the coastal enclave in a violent coup just two years after the Disengagement.

Horowitz cannot stand to see the absolute evil of Hamas being coddled.

“I’ve come to stop the trucks because I think what’s happening here is a war crime – really,” he told World Israel News. “I think that it’s completely illogical that at a time that the Jewish people is undergoing an actual Holocaust at the hands of the most evil people on earth, worse than the Nazis, who rape our women and are torturing our people [in Gaza] with the most awful torture in the world – we’re supplying them with food, water, electricity and who knows what else. It doesn’t make sense on any human level, so I’m here to stop this crazy thing.

“I’m not against any policeman or soldier here,” he added, in a possible reference to the painful confrontations between the authorities and the Jewish residents they expelled from their homes in Gaza almost 19 years ago. “I’m against the decisions made by those higher up. Hopefully God will help and… we will win.”

Two women who looked to be in their seventies made the trek from Ramat Hasharon – and trek it was, as the last two kilometers had to be done on foot due to the army blocking the road leading to the crossing.

Meira Simantov focused on the 132 women and men still being forcibly held in Gaza, saying, “I believe that those who prevent our hostages from getting food, doesn’t deserve to get food…. As long as I am physically able, I’m going to do what I can to support our hostages.”

And, she added, “If we keep giving them food, they’ll have the strength to keep fighting us.”

Her friend, Rachel Elbaz, said she had come to stop the aid because in her opinion there were no innocent Palestinians in the Strip.

“I think all of Gaza is with Hamas,” she said, “and I think they don’t deserve to get a single thing…. Not one single person there told us where a single hostage is, where our babies and elderly and soldiers are – so they’re all Hamas and we don’t have to support them.”

With a suddenly raised voice, she added, “And UNRWA – that’s the next step. We should have gotten rid of them 50 years ago.”

Israel has charged the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency with teaching virulent antisemitism in its Palestinian schools for decades and just provided proof of over a dozen of its employees’ active participation in the October 7 invasion, leading to their ouster.

An American who just immigrated to Israel five years ago wanted aid withheld as a tool not only to win the war but to force regime change from within.

“It’s ridiculous that our hostages are not back and we’re continuing to give humanitarian aid, or allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza,” said Raanana resident Edward Ades. “This is war. They kidnapped our citizens and our soldiers and in war, when a society kidnaps – and I speak of a society because every soldier who has come back has told us that they found weapons in every house… This is war, and I think we should lay siege on them until the…Gazans wake up and if they want food, they need to turn around and fight Hamas. And if half of them die fighting Hamas then so be it, they have to fight for their freedom then so be it, it can’t be just us fighting for their freedom.”

Ben Chaim noted that Sunday was a resounding success because only four trucks came through Kerem Shalom before the crowds got there, and the rest turned back to Egypt in the afternoon. He believes that it is demonstrations such as these, which, he stressed, have the support of the Israeli media – that is making a difference, even though “if [Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu will decide tomorrow to airdrop by helicopter crates of ‘ammunition,’ as I call [aid], he’ll do it,” no matter how many people protest.

One of the first people to demonstrate with Ben Chaim, Chanie Rosenfelder of Beit Shemesh, agreed with him, but added an intriguing idea.

“A hundred people [on site] aren’t going to stop it, but on the other hand, if the people in charge are looking for an excuse, then it doesn’t matter how many people there are as long as there are consistently people here every day,” she said.

Gaza humanitarian aidhamas hostagesKerem Shalom Crossing