Recently Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, which rules parts of the West Bank, and Hamas, which rules Gaza, have declared plans to set aside their differences and hold elections for a new Palestinian Authority (PA) government to preside over both territories together. These would be the first Palestinian elections in fifteen years. Calling this promise the two rival parties’ “hoariest, least convincing talking point,” Hussein Ibish predicts that it will come to naught:

Neither Fatah nor Hamas has demonstrated any real interest in healing the fractured Palestinian body politic. Over the past decade, each has become well-entrenched in their own fiefdom, where it rules and consumes resources without effective opposition.

In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority receives tens of millions of dollars in annual aid from the international community. (This, even after President Donald Trump ended American aid to Palestinians last year.) Although the PA stopped all dealings with Israel to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans for annexation of large swathes of the West Bank, it can still lay claim to the taxes Israel collects on Palestinian imports and exports. With annexation off the table at least through 2024, the PA will find a way to resume dialogue and once again get the tax revenues.

Both sets of leaders can live with the current arrangements, despite the hardships they impose on the Palestinian population. If the Palestinian parties keep talking up the idea of national reconciliation, it is because, no matter how cynical and unconvincing, these performances are useful. The Palestinian public and their supporters around the world want unity, and promises of unity relieves some of the pressure on both parties. They also help to satisfy donors and the international community. For Fatah and Hamas, these promises are a substitute for having no governing policy at all.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.