The Israel Defense Forces announced on Friday that it is closing the Jordan-Gaza humanitarian aid route, after a Jordanian truck driver shot and killed two Israeli soldiers at the Allenby Bridge crossing yesterday.
“This is a grave and difficult incident,” Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, chief of the general staff of the Israeli military, stated at the site of the attack. “We will thoroughly investigate it and draw the necessary lessons.”
Jordan has been a significant source of aid deliveries to Gaza since Oct. 7, sending more than 8,500 truckloads into the coastal enclave since the 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel.
Days before Rosh Hashanah, Zamir added that “we are approaching the holiday season, a time in which we must remain vigilant and strong in defense in all arenas.”
“We will operate wherever we are required to prevent harm to Israeli civilians,” he said. “IDF soldiers stand guard to enable the people of Israel to celebrate the High Holidays in peace, this is our mission.”
The attack was a topic of conversation on Thursday evening at the Israeli embassy in Washington, where Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, hosted an event ahead of the High Holidays.
Leiter told the more than 100 people present that with Rosh Hashanah approaching, the death of Israeli soldiers meant having to celebrate accomplishments and mourn tragedies at the same time. He also said that he expected Israel to be blamed for any decrease in aid deliveries to Gaza following the attack.
“We’re going to have to shut down humanitarian aid coming in from Jordan,” he said. “You know what you’re all going to hear about? How terrible the Israeli government is, and how we’re preventing humanitarian aid from coming into Gaza.”
“You know what we’re going to be doing?” he asked. “We’re going to be trying to figure out how we’re going to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, despite the fact that we had to shut down the Allenby Bridge to save our soldiers.”
Johnnie Moore, executive director of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which the United States funds and which the United Nations and other humanitarian groups boycott, told JNS that the shooting at the Allenby Bridge and consequent halt of aid crossings from Jordan highlight flaws in the current aid mechanism for Gaza and come “at the absolute worst moment.”
“One of the consequences of the existing system is that it is too easily either hijacked or infiltrated by terrorists,” Moore told JNS. “I don’t know what policy decisions will be made in Israel. I know that there are plenty of other ways of getting aid in the Gaza Strip. We do it every single day.”
“But one of the consequences of not dealing with these issues is that things like this can happen,” he said.
Moore said that he expects every aid organization working in Gaza to face pressure to increase deliveries.
“Everyone is preparing for servicing more people,” Moore said. “There’s no room, no time for politics. Everyone needs to get to work getting what’s needed into the Gaza Strip based upon what’s developing.”
“Had the international community taken the systemic issues more seriously that GHF was designed to address, these types of events would have been less likely and the situation would be less severe to begin with,” he told JNS.
Leiter, who took office as ambassador in January, described the increasing challenge of maintaining support for Israel amid the “contagion of lies” about Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas in Gaza.
“When the international community came out and branded our prime minister and our defense minister ‘war criminals,’ what happened was that degenerated into a branding of our entire country, of all of us, as ‘war criminals,’” the ambassador told guests at the embassy. “Now the country is guilty of ‘genocide.’”
He also alluded to waning support for Israel among some Democrats, including Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians after the two visited the country earlier in September.
“We actually processed their passports and picked them up at the airport and accompanied them throughout their two-day visit. We know exactly what they saw,” Leiter said. “They came back and said they saw ‘ethnic cleansing.’”
“I asked one of their colleagues, when I was told that, if we really wanted to, we would feed the Gazans appropriately, I asked the following question. I said, ‘Do you put blood in the matzos that you eat on Passover?’” Leiter said. “There is no distinction between the two. This is a blood libel.”
Leiter said he was nonetheless committed to ensuring that support for Israel remains a bipartisan issue.
“We’re going to do everything we can, because Israel is bipartisan. Not only because it’s politically smart, but because it’s the moral thing to do,” he said. “Because Israel is in its body, in its essence, something that belongs to everybody.”
