Israel has stopped all commercial goods from entering Gaza for at least two days, with COGAT — the Israeli military body overseeing border access — claiming local merchants voluntarily halted shipments over a Hamas-imposed fee of 10,000 shekels ($3,220) per truck and a demand that 30 percent of sales be conducted in cash. Gaza's government media office flatly denied the claims, calling them a "blatant disinformation campaign" designed to shift blame for the supply cutoff onto the territory's governing apparatus. The mechanics here matter more than the competing narratives. Israel controls every border crossing into Gaza. Whether or not Hamas levied fees on incoming trucks, the power to halt commercial shipments rests entirely with the entity that operates the crossings. COGAT's framing — that merchants "made the decision" — obscures the structural reality: nothing enters Gaza without Israeli authorization, and that authorization has been withdrawn. The humanitarian consequences are immediate and severe. Aid organizations deliver staples like flour, but perishable goods — fruit, meat, winter clothing — flow through commercial channels. With commercial trucks accounting for roughly two-thirds of the approximately 300 trucks that actually enter Gaza daily (against a US-brokered minimum of 600), this halt removes the bulk of Gaza's market supply. The Norwegian Refugee Council warned plainly: "The humanitarian sector on its own cannot meet the needs of all the people." Gaza's private truckers union president Nahed Sheheiber directly contradicted the Israeli narrative, stating that Israel imposed the restrictions and is using the ministry fees as pretext. Gaza's media office described the disputed fee as a voluntary contribution to a fund supporting widows and orphans, and said cash-payment encouragement was a response to acute currency shortages — not a mandatory policy. The timing compounds the crisis. A global hunger monitor warned in July that more than two-thirds of Gaza's 2.1 million people could face acute hunger by year-end. Winter is approaching. The commercial market is the only mechanism keeping food prices partially under control; without it, price spikes are virtually guaranteed, hitting the most vulnerable hardest. Israel is already delivering far fewer than the 600 daily trucks required under the US-mediated agreement. The gap between obligation (600) and reality (~300) was already a crisis. Reducing that number to zero for commercial goods transforms a chronic failure into an acute one. The dispute framing — taxes, fees, merchant decisions — functions as information cover for what is operationally a supply blockade. The core extraction is structural, not incidental. Israel holds monopoly control over Gaza's supply lines and can use any pretext — security, taxes, merchant behavior — to throttle or halt the flow. The population bears the cost. The pattern is older than this particular dispute, but the mechanism is laid bare: whoever controls the crossing controls the food.
