Israel is threatening to cut off water and electricity to Gaza and tighten its siege of the enclave to pressure Hamas into releasing the remaining hostages on more favourable terms.
The Israeli military had on Sunday shut all routes for food and other aid, including fuel, to enter Gaza after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided not to continue negotiating the second phase of a ceasefire with Hamas within a framework agreed in January.
Israel is now considering cutting off a critical water line and power line, two people familiar with the deliberations within the Israeli government said. This would leave 2.2mn Palestinians dependent on dwindling supplies of fuel to pump water from the small number of tube wells that survived the war.
Omer Dostri, a spokesperson for Netanyahu, told Radio Galei on Tuesday that “we are not ruling out” cutting off water and electricity to Gaza in the coming days.
Israel, whose foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar on Tuesday accused Hamas of turning aid into an “economic engine” to fund military activities, is counting on the siege to pressure the group to agree to new negotiations on Netanyahu’s new, tougher terms.
The 42-day truce that ended last week was meant to transition into talks to return all remaining Israeli hostages and hundreds more Palestinian prisoners, and end the war permanently.
But the new proposal backed by Israel demands instead that half the hostages be released up front, followed by negotiations to release the rest in exchange for a possible long-term truce.
Israel’s decision to reimpose a siege has provoked widespread criticism. NGOs led by human rights group Gisha filed a petition in the High Court of Israel seeking an interim order to prevent the Ministry of Defence from carrying out Netanyahu’s orders.
“Israel has an obligation as an occupying power and as a party to hostilities to facilitate entry of aid,” said Gisha executive director Tania Hary. Israel’s move to restrict aid “amounts to a war crime”, she said. “Aid cannot be used [as] a weapon of war.”
A similar blockade helped lead to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant against Netanyahu and a former defence minister.
Two people familiar with the deliberations within the defence ministry said they received legal assurances that imposing a full siege on Gaza would not immediately violate Israeli law.
A full siege has been a core demand of Netanyahu’s far-right political allies, including finance minister Bezalel Smotrich. On Sunday, he welcomed the closing of Gaza’s borders, calling it “the threshold of the gates of hell”, and demanded that Israel return to fighting with Hamas.
“The decision to stop entry to aid threatens a humanitarian catastrophe and a return to famine in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas said on Telegram.
The Israeli military, which denies that its actions amount to war crimes, did not respond to a request for comment. The judge in Gisha’s case has not responded to the petition, part of a months-long legal challenge that has yet to be resolved.
Israel controls the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel also temporarily cut off water and electricity in the early weeks of the war following Hamas’s cross-border raid on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 people inside Israel, while the group took about 250 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 46,600 people, according to authorities in Gaza.
Roughly 60 hostages remain in captivity, many of whom are believed to be dead, after two rounds of tentative ceasefires. In the latest truce, Israel swapped hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for more than two dozen hostages and allowed the unfettered flow of aid.
This blunted the worst of the food shortages, especially in northern Gaza, and helped bring down food prices.
But Gaza remains in a precarious position. While the three main water lines from Israel into the strip were partially repaired during the ceasefire, distribution has been difficult because Israel’s bombing campaign destroyed pipes and pumping stations.
The dependence on water piped in from Israel has grown because local wells have also been destroyed. Remaining wells will become dysfunctional without fuel to operate pumps, said Monther Shoblaq, director-general of Gaza’s Coastal Municipality Water Utility.
Prices in local markets, especially for fresh food, shot up as soon as Israel sealed the border. “Prices rose in an unnatural way,” said Emad al-Ghoul, director of the north Gaza Chamber of Commerce, with a kilo of tomatoes doubling to $3 and cucumbers tripling to $6.
“People were starting to kind of think about their lives, kids could go out and play without worries of being bombed,” a UN official said. “And now people are going back to what things were like before. They’re fearing the worst again.”
Data visualisation by Aditi Bhandari