For nearly two decades, the movement of goods into and out of Gaza has been governed not by normal trade law but by a system of Israeli military directives, crossing permits, and a list of restricted “dual-use” items that critics — including the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Israeli human rights organisation Gisha — have long argued bears no coherent security rationale. The result, for two million people, has been a managed form of scarcity: enough to prevent mass starvation in most years before October 2023, not enough to allow anything resembling economic normalcy.
The Mechanics of the Blockade: Crossings and Coordination
Gaza’s land crossings have always been the chokepoint. Kerem Shalom, on the southern Israeli border, became the principal commercial crossing after Israel and Egypt sealed the others to cargo following Hamas’s takeover of the Strip in June 2007. A second crossing, Karam Abu Salem in Arabic, it is the sole entry point for the vast majority of commercial goods entering Gaza — fuel, food, medicines, construction materials, and agricultural inputs.
A third crossing, Erez, handled people rather than cargo on the Israeli side; the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border was reserved for people and, occasionally, humanitarian goods. Neither substituted for Kerem Shalom when it was closed — by Israeli military order, by rocket fire, or, as happened repeatedly, by Israeli political decisions following escalations.
Under the post-2007 blockade framework, Israel issued what it called a “basic needs” policy, later updated after international pressure following the 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla incident. The policy nominally allowed civilian goods but retained vast discretionary power over what crossed, in what quantities, and when.
What the Dual-Use List Actually Restricts
Central to the blockade’s architecture is Israel’s dual-use list — a catalogue of materials deemed capable of military as well as civilian use. Gisha, the Israeli legal centre for freedom of movement, obtained and published internal Israeli government documents through freedom-of-information litigation that revealed how this category was applied in practice.
Among the items subject to restriction or outright prohibition at various points: Portland cement, steel rods, and gravel — the basic inputs of any construction project. Israel argued these could be used to build tunnels or fortifications. The consequence was that tens of thousands of homes destroyed in successive military operations — in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and 2021 — could not be rebuilt on any meaningful timeline. After the 2014 war, which destroyed or severely damaged an estimated 18,000 housing units according to OCHA, the reconstruction process dragged for years because aggregate and cement were metered through a separate Israeli-Palestinian-international mechanism called the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, which required individual project approval.
Medical equipment has also appeared on or adjacent to the dual-use list. Anaesthesia machines, certain surgical tools, and x-ray equipment have at different times required special coordination to enter. The WHO’s health cluster documented chronic shortages of spare parts for medical devices, with the WHO’s own Gaza monthly reports recording the percentage of essential medicines at zero stock regularly exceeding 40 percent in the years before October 2023.
Other items restricted at various points included: fertiliser (on the grounds it could be used in explosives), water pipes, pumps, and even pasta and coriander seeds — items whose restriction Gisha’s published documents showed were part of what one leaked Israeli government document, reported by Haaretz in 2010, described as a policy to keep the Gazan economy “on the brink of collapse” without tipping into a humanitarian crisis.
Truck Numbers: The Gap Between Supply and Need
Gisha and OCHA both tracked the number of truckloads entering Gaza as a proxy measure of the blockade’s severity. The figures tell a stark story.
Before the blockade, in 2005 and 2006, an average of roughly 400 to 500 truckloads of goods crossed into Gaza daily, according to Gisha’s published data. After 2007, that figure fell dramatically. Through much of 2008 and 2009, it hovered between 60 and 90 trucks per day for a population that had by then exceeded 1.5 million. Even in the relatively more open years between 2014 and 2021, daily truck entry numbers rarely exceeded 250 to 300 — still well below what economists and UN agencies calculated was needed to sustain the population and allow for economic recovery.
OCHA’s oPt monitoring reports, published regularly throughout this period, documented the gap in specific sectors. In 2022, OCHA noted that Gaza’s import of construction materials remained far below the level required to address a housing deficit it estimated at more than 100,000 units. Industrial fuel, needed to run the Gaza power plant, was subject to separate quotas that resulted in Palestinians receiving between 4 and 12 hours of electricity per day for stretches lasting years.
Exports from Gaza — once a functioning economy of citrus, cut flowers, textiles, and furniture — were reduced to a trickle. Israel permitted limited agricultural exports to the West Bank and Israel in some periods, then suspended them. By 2022, Gaza’s export volume was less than 3 percent of what it had been in 1994, according to UNCTAD’s reports on the Palestinian economy.
After October 2023: The OCHA Tracker and Total Collapse
Following Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack and Israel’s subsequent military campaign, the blockade moved from severe restriction to near-total closure. Israel halted all commercial imports in the immediate aftermath. Kerem Shalom was closed for extended periods, reopened partially under international pressure, then closed again following strikes in the area, including a strike on 1 June 2024 that killed a number of aid workers near the crossing and prompted a temporary halt.
OCHA’s Gaza humanitarian response tracker, updated regularly through its website, recorded monthly truck entry figures that fell to a fraction of pre-October 2023 levels. In the months of heaviest fighting in late 2023 and early 2024, the UN recorded some of the lowest import volumes since the blockade began — in a context where the destruction of homes, water infrastructure, and hospitals had dramatically increased the need for every category of restricted good.
The dual-use list, the Kerem Shalom quota system, and the broader legal architecture of the blockade did not begin in October 2023. They were built across nearly two decades of incremental restriction, documented in real time by organisations that were largely ignored. What changed after October 2023 was only the scale.
Sources
- Gisha – Legal Center for Freedom of Movement: published FOI documents and reports on Gaza crossing policy, gisha.org
- OCHA oPt: monthly humanitarian reports and Gaza humanitarian response tracker, ochaopt.org
- UNCTAD: Report on UNCTAD Assistance to the Palestinian People, multiple years, documenting Gaza export collapse
- WHO Gaza health cluster: monthly essential medicines stock reports
- Haaretz (2010): reporting on leaked Israeli government “economic warfare” documents regarding Gaza
- ICRC: statements on dual-use restrictions and civilian impact of the blockade
- Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM): UNSCO documentation on post-2014 construction material entry procedures
