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Machine-gunning and shelling people to avoid crowd crushes is obviously and inherently counter-productive.
If the IDF cared so much about how food was distributed in Gaza, they should try doing some food distributions themselves, win hearts and minds. Having food makes you popular amongst the hungry! US/British troops were very, very popular in Germany post-war since they controlled the food and treated the Germans with a very, very basic level of respect - even though they'd just bombed and blasted the country to ruins.
The IDF doesn't want to distribute food, they think it's too risky getting close to these guys? Then let some UN or NGOs do it.
But the IDF wants to starve the population as part of their campaign strategy and out of hatred, which is why they shoot people trying to get food and make it so extremely difficult to bring food in at all.
US/British troops post-war were in full control of Germany, so they didn't have to deal with Nazis who would forcibly take the food when they tried distributing food to German civilians.
US troops also were in full control of Japan, a nation expected to violently resist such, but they didn't, in part due to a careful occupation and how we actually imported quite large quantities of food to keep them from starvation there too. What do you know, now we're allies. Weird.
We should also just get this out of the way - if there's a sufficient amount of food going in to Gaza, food riots don't happen. Because, you know, people have enough food. Israel dropped the ball on food imports from the very early days! If I remember right, they declared a blockade a few days after the attack, and it was almost two weeks or something like that until food began flowing again - and even then, slowly and not enough. I feel like people aren't really aware of, or thinking through, the absolute numbers involved. A bit down this page there's a nice little chart. Before the attacks, it took 500 trucks a day to "break even" food-wise. That's about 15,000 truckloads per month, yes? Please look at that chart. November 2023 only 2,548 trucks entered over the entire month. Now, people have disputed these numbers, and I'm not 100% sure of the correct ones. But some have tried, here's one attempt which landed on a ca. 200/day figure, or 6,000 per month. That was never hit even once even at maximum aid flow. The chart shows that aid showed up more in the 3,000 per month range. So there's quite obviously a major gap here. And by gap I mean malnutrition, and even death, because food distribution systems have variability in coverage, even the really good ones.
It built up to critical mass over the last nearly two years. And now some people are stating with a straight face, oh look at all the riots, it's the fault of the Gazans, as if the situation just happened out of nowhere. That's a good example of victim blaming missing the point.
The point is that they could only do this because they were in full control. Israel cannot do this, because they don't have full control over Gaza.
That doesn't follow. Food that goes into Gaza freely would just be taken by Hamas. Hamas would then offer it only to people who follow their orders, up to and including becoming suicide bombers so their family gets fed.
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Yes, let the organizations that are actively trying to secure a Hamas win distribute food. That'll definitely fix the problem.
An explicitly pro-Israel NGO doing it would have better results, because they will genuinely attempt to make sure that does not occur, but their work would be frustrated because of (and by) the above.
So the army doesn't want to distribute food. They don't want to let anyone else distribute food. But they do want to shoot people coming up to get food... Doesn't take a genius to see what's going on here! And it's not a sincere concern for crowd crush and equitable distribution of aid.
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