Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid in Gaza are, first and foremost, a moral atrocity. Israeli policies since March, most notably the initial shutdown on aid entering the Strip, were very obviously going to cause a hunger crisis down the line. There can be no defense for intentionally starving children.

But strikingly, the policy has also become a strategic failure for Israel.

Its aid limitations, intended to starve out Hamas, have actually strengthened the group’s position and handed it new leverage in ceasefire negotiations. International outrage over the past week has prompted important Israeli partners — France, the UK, and Canada — to announce support for recognizing a Palestinian state. Perhaps most importantly, the suffering in Gaza has done severe damage to Israel’s alliance with the United States, alienating masses of Democrats and even some MAGA Republicans.

This is not only my opinion. It is a point of emerging consensus of well-informed analysts across the political spectrum, who see the recent international uproar over starvation in Gaza as a catastrophe for Jerusalem.

“Israel may have massive military superiority in Gaza but as of this week, it has lost the war,” writes Michael Stephens, a Middle East expert at the UK’s RUSI think tank.

If the policy is such an obvious disaster, both morally evil and strategically disastrous, then why did Israel do it all?

In some sense, this is the question of the entire war, which Israeli generals concluded over a year ago was no longer improving the country’s security. The answer, in both cases, is the same: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depends on Israel’s extreme right to stay in office, and they support ever-more-brutal war policies to further their project of Israel reconquering and resettling the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu has, in short, deliberately caused mass suffering and inflicted a strategic disaster on the country he leads — all for the purpose of appeasing a handful of fanatics who hold his future in their hands.

“All the gains on the battlefield jeopardized”

Even before October, Gaza was in poor economic straits — thanks both to Israeli restrictions and Hamas’s own poor governance. But the war has destroyed even the limited capacities Gazans had to sustain themselves. Roughly 95 percent of farmland is no longer operational; fishing, a vital activity in the coastal enclave, is now “virtually........

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