Thread: Muna Haddad and I trace in this long piece how Israel has used food to control the Palestinians in Gaza from 1967 until today. Below is a thread of just one paragraph so as to provide a sense of the kind of machinations that were put to work.
nybooks.com/online/2024/03…
nybooks.com/online/2024/03…
The document assumed that Palestinians would be able to import only limited quantities of “basic food items,” such as flour, rice, oil, fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, powdered milk, and baby formula, which Israel calculated could be delivered with seventy-seven trucks a day. 
Adding medicine, medical equipment, and hygiene and agricultural products, the number of trucks allowed entry daily, five days a week, reached 106—plus sixty truckloads’ worth of wheat per week via Karni Crossing, bringing the total number of truckloads allowed to 118 daily.
Such calculations, based on a model provided by the Ministry of Health (were doctors involved?), took for granted that the food entering Gaza would be distributed equally among the population, an assumption with no precedent in any historical or geographical setting.
Israel assumed, too, that only 10 percent of the population’s dietary needs would be met by fruits and vegetables produced in Gaza—an implicit admission of how thoroughly the state had come to control Palestinians’ lifelines.
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