The U.S. and Israel have reached a new low in their murderous assault on the people of Gaza. After starving Palestinians there for three months, they are now turning food distribution centers into killing fields, sniping and bombing the starving and desperate children, women and men lined up for food.
Since U.S. security-run centers began distributing aid on May 27 Israeli Occupation Forces have repeatedly opened fire on the starving people who came for food, murdering more than 350 and wounded more than 2,600, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
For many worldwide, this weaponizing of aid to further a genocide has only fueled their anger and disgust. Progressive individuals from scores of countries, sickened by the genocide live-streamed before their eyes and by infuriated by the refusal of their governments to stop it, are organizing to break the blockade of Gaza themselves.
Weaponizing hunger, food and water
First Israel and its U.S. backers weaponized hunger. In what the Gaza Government Media Office called “engineered starvation,” on March 3 Israel closed all crossings into the Gaza Strip and shuttered the 400 food distribution sites run by the United Nations agency UNRWA.
By May, this stranglehold on aid reduced the average Gazan to eating only 67% of what the human body needs to survive and made Gaza “the hungriest place on earth” according to the UN. Now food distribution itself is being weaponized.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a new U.S.-and-Israeli-backed private entity created for aid delivery in Gaza. Run by four private American contractors and under direct Israeli oversight, it is the creation of the same forces committing the genocide.
While the UN-led distribution network which it replaces operated 400 distribution sites, the GHF has set up only four sites for 2.3 million people.
Head of ‘aid’ group backs ethnic cleansing of Gaza
International humanitarian organizations and the UN have warned that the purpose of the GHF is not to distribute aid but to use the control over aid as a weapon.
The first executive director of GHF, Jake Wood, abruptly quit on May 25, citing concerns over independence and impartiality. GHF’s new leader is Rev. Johnnie Moore, formerly of the evangelical Liberty University of Jerry Falwell, Sr. Moore has praised Trump‘s plan to take over and ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Remarkably, Moore has even declared that aid distributions, where hundreds have been killed, took place “without incident.” The truth is that the IOF has bombed and sniped starving people at all four GHF locations since their very first week of operation.
We were ‘shot by drones, helicopters, boats, tanks and soldiers’
One of those wounded at an aid site who made it to the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis told the staff that they were “shot at from all sides by drones, helicopters, boats, tanks and Israeli soldiers on the ground.”
Mansour Sami Abdi, a father of four, said, “People fought over five pallets. They told us to take food – then they fired from every direction. I ran 200 meters before realizing I’d been shot. This isn’t aid. It’s a lie. Are we supposed to go get food for our kids and die?”
The Gaza government media office called what is happening “the systematic and malicious use of aid as a tool of war, employed to blackmail starving civilians and forcibly gather them in exposed killing points, managed and monitored by the occupation army and funded and politically covered by the occupation and the U.S. administration, which bears full moral and legal responsibility for these crimes.”
‘Americans are conspiring with the Israelis to kill us’
Arafat, who made it to the Nasser Hospital with a small child after being fired on at another distribution site and whose brother was killed there said, “Why do they tell us to go get food only to kill us when we get there? … They lie to us and the world. The Americans are conspiring with the Israelis to kill us. …
“They made a place for us to go and be killed in cold blood,” Arafat continued. “They shouldn’t say this is a humanitarian area. It’s a trap and a massacre of starving people.”
Others report that even the food being distributed is not enough to support a family for a week, as promised. Moreover, most of it, like rice and flour, needs water to prepare, but the water has been shut off by Israel for three months.
Why the sudden Israeli interest in giving aid?
Up till now Israel has been doing all it can to collapse aid delivery networks. Israel killed more than 300 UNRWA staff members since October 2023. It closed UNRWA’s 400 aid distribution centers in May.
Over the past several months, the IOF has conducted targeted assassinations of community leaders and Gaza officials in charge of aid distribution. It has even armed Palestinian criminal gangs so they hold up aid trucks and stealing the food, which it then blames on Hamas.
Food distribution is a military strategy to force displacement
The formation of the GHF was never really about feeding the hungry. The creation of this group coincides with the announcement in May of Israel’s new military strategy, Operation Gideon’s Chariots, and many see the so-called aid group as part of it. Gideon’s Chariots is a plan to take over 75% of Gaza and to drive the Palestinians who live there into smaller and smaller isolated zones.
The GHF aid distribution serves to lure starving Palestinians into these zones, using food as bait to force displacement. The Gaza government media office describes this as “systematic political engineering designed to prolong starvation and dismantle Palestinian society.
Major aid groups have denounced the GHF as a “blueprint for ethnic cleansing.” Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories has called the GHF a “criminal enterprise.”
The Center for Constitutional Rights holds the U.S.-run GHF “potentially liable for aiding Israel’s war crimes and genocide against Palestinians. … Internal planning documents reveal that people involved in the development of GHF understood the risk that these privatized distribution hubs would further forced displacement.”
All this is being downplayed by the U.S. and other Western and Arab governments who aid and abet the genocide, and whose establishment media builds consensus for it by painting Israel as the victim.
When governments refuse to act, the people will. On June 3, twelve individuals from different countries, including the climate activist Greta Thunberg set sail for Gaza with aid. While their ship, the Madleen, was stopped by Israel, their effort has inspired others.
On June 9, thousands of activists from scores of countries headed to Egypt to walk across the Rafah border in a “Global March to Gaza,” only to be beaten and repressed in Egypt and Libya. But their brave efforts will inspire others, who will inspire others until the people end the seige.
Photo: World Health Organization.
