Jeremy Loffredo - Inside the Israeli Blockade on Aid to Gaza - Documentary (2024)

Jeremy Loffredo: On the trailer of this truck is wheat flour for the starving and besieged people of the Gaza Strip. But this humanitarian aid and thousands more aid shipments are not making it to the Palestinians in Gaza because Israelis have decided to engage in a direct action blockade.

Speaker 2: Ameed Faleh!

Speaker 3: Ameed Faleh!

Speaker 2: Ameed Faleh!

Speaker 3: Ameed Faleh! Ameed Faleh!

Jeremy Loffredo: For over a week, I embedded myself with Jewish Israeli nationalists who believe it's a worthy cause And even a religious duty to drive hours from the comfort of their illegal settlements in the West Bank and residential neighborhoods in Jerusalem and bring their loved ones to the Kerem Shalom and Eitzana border crossings to block the humanitarian aid trucks from delivering desperately needed food to starving Palestinians. At around 6:00 in the morning, a bus departs from Jerusalem. It heads south. Passing through the West Bank, with stops at a handful of illegal, highly militarized Israeli settlements, to pick up dozens of extremist minors and bring them to the borders of Gaza and Egypt. Once the settlers arrive there, they're met by dozens of other Israelis who drove themselves and their families to the border by navigating the backroads of southern Israeli kibbutzim. The border crossings are designated by Israel as closed military zones. Any civilian in the area is supposed to be swiftly removed and arrested. Instead, the military and police are actively supporting and encouraging these illegal humanitarian aid blocks. As soon as the settlers show up at these crossings, the military, meant to secure the area, stands down and guides everyone to the border gates. Then the Israeli military uses the presence of civilians, which they invited and escorted, to justify the closing of the humanitarian aid crossing gate for hours and sometimes entire days. The trucks are supposed to pass through Israel from Egypt for inspection, Once inspected by the Israeli authorities, they head into Gaza. Officially, the protesters justify the blocking of aid by insisting it's all going to Hamas, a claim repeated by the Israeli government, even as the U.S. State Department stringently rejects it.

Speaker 3: כדי לעצור את הסיוע ההומניטרי שנותנים לפלסטינים בעזה, זה לא יאומן וזה לא מקובל שנכנס אוכל. לסיור הומניטרי לפלסטין כל עוד החטופים שלנו בפנים אבל בעזה אין רעב לפי דעתי ממה שאני רואה אין רעב הם עושים את עצמם חייבים לעצור את כל הסיוע שנכנס לעזה עד שאחרון החטופים יחזור לישראל יכול להיות שהם צריכים עזרה אבל העזרה לא צריכה להגיע מאיתנו הם פתחו מלחמה They share snacks, refreshments, laughs, and party on the edge of an area that UN Secretary-General Luis Guterres has described as a graveyard for children.

Jeremy Loffredo: The settlers bring cotton candy mix, machine guns, pastries, their babies, prayer books, and loudspeakers. The military allows them to store their belongings and evade the blistering desert sun inside concrete IDF security bunkers. Even handicapped settlers who can't walk managed to traverse the dirt paths with crutches and wheelchairs, joining the direct action aid blockade with an escort and support from Israeli police.

Speaker 4: We give pastries for the people, for the soldiers, for the cops, for everybody. This is what we give to our people. This is real humanitarian, okay? They need to block the aid to Gaza. They need to block the gas to Gaza, everything to block. And this is what we do every week, 2, 3, 4 times a week.

Speaker 3: What's up? What is so-called humanitarian aid to Gaza is just a joke. And the police is aware of that. And this is the reason why it is without any violence, as they say, you know, off the records. Look, we are with you. So the atmosphere is nice, yeah? The people of Gaza, the population, is deeply with the Hamas. There is no difference between the Hamas and the population. The aim is here to bring the population into such a situation that they will just stand against the Hamas and say, stop, we want to eat, we want to get our life Back, just release the hostages. Enough is enough. At this place in Itzana, at the boundary with Egypt, nothing, no truck crossed over for the so-called humanitarian aid to Gaza. So we are efficient, and we have to keep doing what we have to do.

Jeremy Loffredo: So no food, no nothing?

Speaker 2: No, they don't deserve it. What I care?

Speaker 3: Kill them.

Speaker 2: I don't care.

Jeremy Loffredo: Do you trust Palestinians?

Speaker 2: No. I know all about them. I don't trust them. I want them out of here.

Jeremy Loffredo: What do you think should happen to Gaza?

Speaker 2: I want to be civilized with Jews from Israel so we can be in peace in there.

Jeremy Loffredo: This young man was present at every aid-blocking action for the last 2 weeks. He was in Gaza for the first 2 months of the military operation.

Speaker 5: We've been training for 1 month, and then we got inside Gaza. Yeah, and then we've been there for 2 months. My unit was in charge of explosions. We blew up houses of terrorists, mosque, UN— We blew up a mosque, UN headquarters. I remember we got into some UN office that was in charge of helping families in Gaza that was affected by the war, and we destroyed it. We've been dealing with the tunnels.

Jeremy Loffredo: Were you ever in a tunnel?

Speaker 5: No, we didn't, but we have the equipment to destroy them. Investigate what's happening there, and then to destroy it.

Jeremy Loffredo: On numerous occasions, blocking humanitarian aid was not enough for the Israelis. They had already successfully blocked the aid for the entire day, and then they began approaching the Egyptian border in order to breach it. Once there, they would attempt to attack and taunt Egyptian truck drivers. Egyptian soldiers watched impassively as the settlers tried to evade the Israeli military and get into Egypt. And even then, the military did not arrest anyone for breaking countless laws and risking a major diplomatic incident. Instead, they ushered the Israeli settlers, who had just attempted to illegally breach the border to attack Egyptians, onto a bus that drove them 300 feet up the street and then dropped them off.

Speaker 6: The policeman, the head commander, came to us and said, okay, you guys came and blocked. We don't want to fight. And he said to us, I'll just lock the gate. You guys don't need to stay. We got lollipops. We got watermelon from the police.

Jeremy Loffredo: The police gave you lollipops and watermelon?

Speaker 6: Yeah, watermelons. And it was great. It was great with them.

Jeremy Loffredo: They essentially agree with you. They also agree that there should be no ongoing occupation.

Speaker 6: Well, duh. They also have friends and family which are kidnapped and are murdered and are dying, IDF soldiers. We are the same family. We are the same nation. We have the same goals. The best way is to transfer them to Europe. Europe already accepted, past the 10 years, accepted more than 100 million refugees. I don't think that another 1.5 million refugees would make any difference for the Europeans. And as the Bible says, this place is for us. It's promised for us. So they can starve to death to pay on the things that they've done to us on the 7th of October.

Jeremy Loffredo: Though the Biden administration has given Israel all the military support it needs and then some to level much of the Gaza Strip, most Israelis seem to believe the Biden administration is holding Israel back from achieving its final solution. They perceive their humanitarian aid-blocking strategy as a kind of direct action that will help the Israeli government carry out one of its key objectives: deepening the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and thereby forcing its population to flee, while giving the government According to the protesters, the government is in a tough spot with pressure from Washington. They're not asking the government to do anything differently. They argue that they're doing what needs to be done and taking things into their own hands.

Speaker 7: I must say that I think our own government is, in this specific issue, is kind of in a knot, because we're allowed to continue the war only if we let civilians I don't even want to— I'm not even pleading to the government. People that are here are not doing that. We're here to stop the supplies. So there'll be no political issue. We're just here to do what needs to be done. If the people, the government or other people are not doing what they need to do, we'll do it. I have no message to anyone. We're here to do.

Speaker 6: Bibi is a puppet of Biden, because we cleaned all Gaza except Rafah. We know all the live hostages are in Rafah. Why aren't we going in there? Because Biden asked us not to. That's the only reason. There's no reason not to.

Speaker 4: Of course, we have to listen to our sugar daddy. We have to listen, you know, to the biggest superpower in the world, because they're standing on our side, the democratic Western side. But the Israeli public doesn't want it. And we're here to make sure that until 4:00, 4:30, when they close, make sure no single truck will feed our enemies while they molest Why they rape and why they kill the hostages they took 4 or 5 months ago. From 2002 until recently, we have been through a, I would say, kind of intifada, a journey of murder, which they use knives to kill Israelis. They use, in many cases, guns. They use pistols. They use cocktail Molotovs. They kill a lot of Jews. But we have airplanes, you see?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: We can erase them in one second, once we use what we have. Once we know how to use our assets, you know, we're not afraid to use what we have, we destroy Gaza. We annihilated a huge part of Gaza. We can do it also, the Palestinian Judea and Samaria and the West Bank. We have weapons we can use. We can use. We need the right circumstances. We need the right leaders. We have goddamn sexy F-16 airplanes. We annihilate all our enemies until the last of them. We decide to do so. We get over this. We have a kind of conception, a kind of state of mind, that we are subjected to the world, the community of the world and the nations of the world, and we are somehow limited. But it's only temporarily. We will unleash our strength very much soon.

Speaker 8: We don't think that the Torah says that we're supposed to feed our enemies, when the Torah says we're supposed to hashmid them. We're supposed to destroy them, or at least, you know, take back the land that is ours. Part of Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. And I don't think you can find any Jew in Israel that says it's a good idea to give assistance to our enemy when they have, you know, 100-plus khatoufim. But we're under a regime, if you will, of the government that orders that, a dictatorship that unfortunately folds to the desires of the West, that being the United States of America.

Jeremy Loffredo: By 5:00 in the afternoon, the The Israeli truck inspectors go home, whether the humanitarian aid trucks were inspected and sent to Gaza or not. If blocking the aid was successful, which it almost always was, the Israelis celebrate and then go home. Some of the settlers hang back and pitch tents and stay at the crossing overnight to make sure no aid trucks pass early in the morning. Presumably because of the bad optics, the military often destroys the tents in the morning, while allowing the settlers to illegally remain in the closed military zone in order to continue blocking the humanitarian aid. While in Israel, several settler groups embarked on marches from the southern city of Sderot into northern Gaza. These Israelis see the destruction and depopulation of Gaza as an opportunity to transform it into a beachfront, Jews-only region of Israel.

Speaker 2: We love the Gaza Strip. We can't just take a whole strip of land and say Israelis can't live there. That doesn't make sense. This is our sovereign state.

Speaker 8: Would you live there?

Speaker 2: Of course.

Jeremy Loffredo: By the beach?

Speaker 2: Oh, for sure. Yes, my husband's also talking about building— he has a yeshiva, a Talmudic institute here, so building a branch in— yes, in Gaza. We have lists already of about 500 families that are willing, on the drop of a hat, to just move into— we have north, south, east, west. Central and South Gaza, and people are going to start building towns. We have names of the towns. We have where we're building them. It's already being planned, and we have people signed up. You can't leave it without Jews in the Gaza Strip. It's too big a piece of land. It's too important for us to let it become Hamas town, as we call it, full of terrorists.

Speaker 8: צהריים טובים לכולם. הצעדה הזאת שמתקיימת כאן בעיר שדרות בא להגיד דבר אחד: לחזור להתיישב בחבל עזה. שהתושבים יגיעו להתיישב בחבל עזה. אנחנו דורשים זה שנפלו לנו כל כך הרבה חיילים וכל כך הרבה אזרחים לא מוכנים לחזור למצב שהיה וזה מה ששווה זה הלקמה הכי טובה שיכולה להיות לחזור לחבל עזה להתיישב.

Jeremy Loffredo: These Israelis got into their cars and followed each other to the area's border crossing. A military entrance to Gaza about 1 mile west. The army would not allow them to pass certain roadblocks, so they turned off the road and finished the drive by using a maze of dirt roads through the agricultural lands of different kibbutzim. I passed several signs warning drivers that we are now in an Israeli military sniper zone. Don't worry, they won't shoot near these settlers, my translator reassured me. The Israelis arrived at the crossing and entered Gaza, where they used drills and plywood to construct symbolic wooden outposts before the army removed them. For their own safety.