JERUSALEM—Since Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza one year ago, Israel has transferred nearly 25,000 truckloads of fuel, food, medicine and other supplies to Gazans through the Sufa, Nahal Oz and Karni border crossings. Weighing in at 580,000 tons of humanitarian aid, if the total were divided evenly among Gaza’s 1.4 million residents, a typical family of five would have received more than 2 tons of food and supplies over the past 12 months.

During our brief, 15-minute visit to the Sufa crossing on Monday, at least five trucks were admitted into a heavily secured passageway, where Jewish civilians on forklifts zipped back and forth offloading pallets onto the dusty ground. There they would sit for a few hours, awaiting inspection by security officials and bomb-sniffing dogs, before Palestinian trucks would be allowed into the facility to load the goods and transfer them into the heart of Gaza. (After that, the world has absolutely no way of monitoring how those shipments are distributed.)

“As many as 80 trucks pass through here every day, six days a week,” said Shlomo Tsaban, who manages the facility. About 20 miles north of Sufa, at the Karni crossing, Israel uses a massive conveyor belt to move tons of grains across the border each week—wheat, barley, soy beans, corn, as well as livestock feed. Just beyond Karni is the fuel depot at Nahal Oz. (The Erez crossing, at the north end of the Strip, is primarily used by international workers and Gazans who are admitted into Israel for medical care.)

Sufa is the bottleneck through which Gazans receive all kinds of meat, fruits and vegetables, rice and beans, salt and sugar, baby food, as well as medicine, hygiene products and basic raw materials.

“It’s not easy working at the crossing,” Tsaban said, “with Hamas firing rockets overhead.” In fact, a few hours before we visited the facility, the Israel Defense Forces (idf) killed three terrorists who approached the crossing armed with explosives and guns.

Hamas strikes against border crossings with Israel are not unusual. Earlier this month, terrorists fired rockets toward the Nahal Oz fuel depot, injuring a Palestinian worker. After being attended to at a hospital in Gaza, Israel later admitted the injured man into a hospital in Ashkelon.

Earlier this year, under the cover of Kassam rockets, Hamas gunmen infiltrated the crossing at Nahal Oz and murdered two Israeli civilians who were working at the fuel terminal. The following week, three idf soldiers were shot dead by Hamas gunmen who were approaching the security fence near Nahal Oz.

On April 19, at Israel’s southernmost crossing into Gaza, Kerem Shalom, terrorists ignited two car bombs at the terminal—wounding 13 Israeli soldiers and destroying much of the border crossing, forcing Israel to shut it down.

Who’s Laying “Siege” Upon Whom?

After visiting the Sufa crossing earlier this week, reporters were briefed by Col. Nir Press, director of Israel’s Coordination and Liaison Administration at the Erez crossing. The challenge for Israel, he said, is in finding a balance between Israel’s security needs and the Palestinian civilian needs.

Hamas’s position, on the other hand, is much less tenuous. They see their own people—like the mortar shells they launch from residential districts inside Gaza—as expendable. They attack the border crossings that supply their own people with food—baiting Israel to choke the flow of humanitarian aid—knowing, if they do, that the international news media will roundly excoriate Israel for “causing” Gaza’s humanitarian disaster.

At the briefing with Colonel Press, a Reuters reporter asked the colonel if he believed Israel was also fighting a propaganda war. He politely admonished the young journalist to examine the media coverage herself.

Indeed, you need not dig very deep into Google News for the conventional wisdom about Gaza. UN envoy Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently called Israel’s “siege” of Gaza “illegal” and a “gross violation” of human rights. In April, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter called Israel’s economic sanctions against Hamas an “atrocity.”

Right in step with the United Nations and Jimmy Carter, the international media—which, before 2006, often denounced Israel’s “occupation” of Gaza as unbearable for Palestinians—now sees Israeli-imposed restrictions on the flow of goods into an Islamic terrorist state as laying an unbearable “siege” on the people of Gaza. For example, a simple Nexis search of the three words “Israel,” “Gaza” and “siege,” finds 450 news stories in just the last month.

Some reports have even gone so far as to praise the “progress” Hamas has made while simultaneously condemning Israel for securing its shrinking border. cnn, for example, says Gaza—after a year under Hamas—is “safer” (thanks to Hamas), but out of food and gas (thanks to Israel). After last June’s takeover, reporter Ben Wedeman writes, “Hamas quickly imposed law and order [sharia law, he fails to mention], tried to reacquaint Gaza’s drivers with long-forgotten traffic regulations, launched a municipal cleanup campaign, and forced the release of kidnapped bbc journalist Alan Johnston, who had been held in captivity for almost six months.”

Wedeman continues, “Chaos-weary Gazans applauded all of these initiatives. But the honeymoon ended quickly as reality sank in.

“Since Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006, and even more so since last year’s takeover, Israel has tightened its siege of Gaza” (emphasis mine).

Hamas releases prisoners, cleans the streets and enforces traffic laws. Israel, on the other hand, starves the people of Gaza.

Another Victory for Terrorism

Even as the world’s attention fixates on the Hamas-induced suffering of Palestinians in Gaza—and blames Israel for it—the new Islamic dictatorship is thriving in Gaza. Last Friday, in Israel’s largest mass-circulation daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, Roni Shaked wrote, “Hamas achieved hegemony by implementing a dictatorial system of government that precluded any form of mutiny or even protest. There is no opposition.” He continued,

Israel is sending humanitarian aid through the crossings. … European Union states pay for Gaza’s fuel, which goes to operating the power stations. Hamas’s government nonetheless collects fees for the use of electricity. … Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s president, also pays the salaries of roughly 78,000 former state employees, who are of course out of a job under Hamas.Iran signs all the checks for Hamas’s Gaza entity, and especially the military costs. … And while the people of the Strip are busy panhandling to charity organizations, Hamas is preoccupied with the one subject that’s really on its leadership’s mind: the amassing of military force. Hamas is assembling a military defense establishment. A regular army which is divided into brigades, battalions and companies, arranged according to a distinct military and professional framework.Hamas’s army, which is styled after Hezbollah’s model, is now 16,000 strong. Many of them exit through the Rafah tunnel system, to undergo military training in Iran and Syria.This is Hamastan, which is now celebrating its first birthday. This is its profile: a violent and dictatorial terrorist nation, which survives on the mercy of others.

Yet, despite these sobering realities on the ground, Hamas is still able to chalk up victories against the West, like this week’s cease-fire agreement with Israel. Though few expect the truce to last for very long, Israel is expected to increase the flow of goods into Gaza by about 30 percent.

Thus, Israel has effectively given up hope of squeezing Hamas from power with economic sanctions. Hamas, on the other hand, will lay siege upon the increased flow of goods once it crosses the border and go right on squeezing the life out of their own people.

The truce, meanwhile, allows Hamas time to mobilize its forces and resupply its front lines, where missiles are still aimed at the hand that tries to feed them.