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Comment by elcritch | Hacker News Reader

That the US contributes doesn’t take away from the billions Israel did and does invest. The US defense contractors also get a big chunk of that aid.

The US also gives similar levels of military aid to Egypt as well. The EU and US give billions to Ukraine.

Gaza also receives billions in aid; substantial amounts of which has been hihacked and looted. For example this lady summer the UN reported that 88% of their aid trucks in Gaza were looted [1].

1: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/08/05/un-reports-88-percen...

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> That the US contributes doesn’t take away from the billions Israel did and does invest

Actually it does? It takes about 1/4 away.

> The US also gives similar levels of military aid to Egypt as well. The EU and US give billions to Ukraine.

Yes, the US uses defense aid to further their own agenda internationally, and funnel public dollars into private hands.

> Gaza also receives billions in aid

Food, medical, and infrastructure aid is not the same thing as weapons.

> 88% of their aid trucks in Gaza were looted

Ok? This tells me that both food and food aid are in short supply, if people are willing to take it by force. If myself and my family was starving, i would hyjack food trucks too. Wouldn’t you?

>> That the US contributes doesn’t take away from the billions Israel did and does invest

> Actually it does? It takes about 1/4 away.

It literally does not. The way that every English speaker uses the word "invests" is exactly the opposite of this. If you're going to speak English, you use words as native speakers use them and you don't make up your own definitions.

I am a native english speaker.

Israel “invests” ~30b in military spending.

Of that, ~7b is not their own money, and the could not accept that money and spend it another way.

Therefore, israel “invests” about 1/4 less than it would seem.

They want you to think that.

There is no way any group other than Hamas could be operating at that scale. It's Hams taking the aid to use it to control the population. It's not like they were actually starving--Hamas never managed to find a legitimately starving person to point a camera at. Every single person they paraded in front of the cameras had medical issues that were the cause of their problems. Just go look inside a hospice, should we conclude they are starving people?

Reminder the UN said it could feed the millions in Gaza more than the 1200+ calories per person Israel was letting in. The UN at the same time only fed the 400,000 Sudan refugees 400 calories per person per day.

Lots of politics at play.

The UN that couldn't move a substantial portion of the aid from the border to the warehouses. Because they wouldn't pay the drivers enough.

This doesn’t pass a basic plausibility test. It’s a war zone where food is super scarce and aid workers are there voluntarily. Between people wanting to feed their communities, and humanitarian aid workers who’ve already shown they are willing to risk life and limb, and gazan truckers with basically no other work, someone is going to be able to move goods for free or very cheap.

Neither of those are enough calories.

https://www.who.int/news/item/22-08-2025-famine-confirmed-fo...

IPC had to ignore their own definition to declare a famine though. An actual famine involves at least 2 starvations per 10,000 people per day, among other requirements. According to Hamas' own data, Gaza was always several orders of magnitude short of that.

First, the IPC famine scale is a scale in phases, not a simple yes-no binary.

Second, yes there is a war going on - solid data is hard to come by. But that’s a lack of data, not a change in their criteria. You can read their full mortality analysis and reasoning starting on page 24 https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/I...

The conclusion is:

>Considering the available evidence, and in line with the IPC Guidance Note on Famine Classification,64 the FRC infers from the available data that mortality thresholds for Famine have already been exceeded in Gaza Governorate. Based on expert judgement, we also conclude that the Famine thresholds for mortality have not yet been crossed in Deir al-Balah or Khan Younis governorates.

No goalposts moved. Based on the data we have, people are dying of malnutrition.

They made up that claim. Hamas never even claimed anywhere near the number of deaths that would comprise famine. And Hamas never managed to point their cameras at anyone starving for non-medical reasons. We have a very clear case of a dog not barking.

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