The Asymmetry of Aid and Trade in the Balance of Greed

News:

On 12 January 2026, Reuters reported that the global freight company Maersk is continuing a “gradual, cautious reintroduction” of services through the Red Sea/Suez route as the Gaza ceasefire reduces regional shipping risk.

Comment:

The Gaza ceasefire has exposed the Western world’s cynical hierarchy of values: what matters to global commerce is repaired first, while what the people of Palestine need to survive remains conditional. Maersk’s return to the Red Sea/Suez corridor shows how quickly the system moves when the objective is restoring the circulation of goods. Shipping lines must wait for the risk calculus to shift before resuming business, and resuming business is all that Gaza meant to the West, and this is all that the so-called Gaza ceasefire was required to achieve. That is what “stability” looks like when the stakeholders are insurers, carriers, and states whose economies inflate on uninterrupted trade. Inside Gaza, “stability” has been defined differently: not as the removal of constraints, but as the tightening of control under an outwardly calmer surface. The ceasefire terms have been widely reported as requiring 600 aid trucks per day, yet an Associated Press analysis of figures released by the occupation forces found an average of 459 trucks per day entering Gaza between 12 October and 7 December 2025. The point is that a deal framed as a humanitarian reset is already operating well below the floor of even what it publicly set for itself. The shortfall is not a technicality when families are living under plastic sheeting through winter rains and when basic repair materials, fuel, and medical supplies still move through an administrative maze.

The so-called ceasefire is only a reduction in the quantity of killing. UN OCHA reported on 14 January 2026 that Gaza’s Ministry of Health recorded 449 Palestinians killed and 1,246 injured since the ceasefire began. There is still very little protection for the civilian population, yet under the name of a truce and headlines declaring “calm”, international trade through the Red-Sea may return to normal, but not so to Gaza. Even where aid does enter, the decisive struggle is inside Gaza: whether supplies can actually reach people, and whether “humanitarian flow” is translated into shelter, clean water, power, and functioning hospitals rather than stacked pallets and stalled convoys. OCHA’s own operational reporting captures how access is rationed. In mid-January, the UN reported thousands of pallets offloaded and collected at crossings, yet movement within Gaza remained dependent on coordination with the genocide authority. That ratio matters precisely because it is not a total blockade; it is a governance system allowing just enough aid to trickle in so as to not disturb international trade.

This is why the shipping comparison is politically clarifying. Commercial corridors are treated as a global necessity, so the moment conditions permit, they are reopened. Gaza is treated as an exception, so even during a ceasefire, the population’s survival is managed through permissions—where “security” becomes the all-purpose rationale for restricting movement, limiting materials, and disciplining reconstruction. That discipline is embedded in the language of “dual-use” and in the practical power to decide which items are “too risky” for civilians to have: not just obvious military inputs, but also equipment and materials that make homes, water systems, and electricity grids recoverable. The result is that promised rebuilding is continually separated from the means to rebuild.

Beyond the immediate needs for survival comes the longer-term rebuilding without which life for the people of Gaza remains a torture. The scale of what must be rebuilt makes this separation devastating. UN-linked assessments have put Gaza’s recovery and reconstruction needs in the tens of billions of dollars, with figures around $70 billion cited publicly. But money does not rebuild a destroyed territory in the abstract; rebuilding is a pipeline—cement, rebar, generators, pipes, heavy machinery, spare parts, trained engineers, and time on the ground. When those inputs remain subject to discretionary restriction, “investment” becomes a theatre of pledges performed over a landscape of denied materials.

There is also a moral economy at work: not only what is allowed to move, but whose dignity is treated as urgent. Reuters reported in December that the body of "Israeli" police officer Ran Gvili remained in Gaza as the last unrecovered hostage remains. The politics of the Zionist entity and the criminal states that empower it treats the return of that one body as a central binding demand. Yet, at the same time, Palestinian bodies continue to be withheld as a matter of policy. Reuters reported in October 2025 that the Zionist entity still held the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians. And a Palestinian body-retrieval campaign reported by outlets including WAFA and Middle East Eye put the figure at 735 Palestinian bodies withheld in “cemeteries of numbers” and morgues. Last year, US president Trump was enthusing about how the Jews are so compassionate that they care deeply about getting their war-dead back almost as much as getting back the living. Are not Muslims also pained? Indeed, speedy burial of our dead is a right upon us. Of course, the Jewish entity knows it, which is why for years they have been practicing the holding back of Palestinian bodies from their families. Even in death, Palestinians face an apparatus that withholds bodies at scale while the cynical West cares not, but mobilizes intensely for the return of one dead Jew.

That is the wider set of comparisons the Suez story makes unavoidable. The world knows how to restore flow when the objective is commerce. Gaza shows what happens when the objective is control: relief is permitted but rationed, reconstruction is promised but obstructed, and “ceasefire” becomes a management regime in which Palestinian life remains conditional.

This cynical asymmetry is yet another wake-up call for the Muslim Ummah that has suffered dismemberment and destruction of life, property and dignity unchecked for 105 years since the destruction of the Khilafah (Caliphate) at the hands of the colonial British and the traitors who generation after generation conspire with the enemies of Islam against the return of true righteousness to the political arena through the re-establishment of the Khilafah.

[يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُواْ اسْتَجِيبُواْ لِلّهِ وَلِلرَّسُولِ إِذَا دَعَاكُم لِمَا يُحْيِيكُمْ وَاعْلَمُواْ أَنَّ اللّهَ يَحُولُ بَيْنَ الْمَرْءِ وَقَلْبِهِ وَأَنَّهُ إِلَيْهِ تُحْشَرُونَ]

O believers! Respond to Allah and His Messenger when he calls you to that which gives you life. And know that Allah stands between a person and their heart, and that to Him you will all be gathered.” [Al-Anfal:24]