The Israeli military has killed at least 410 people trying to get food at Israeli-run aid sites in Gaza in the past month.
This constitutes “a likely war crime” that violates international standards on aid distribution, according to the United Nations. “Desperate, hungry people in Gaza continue to face the inhumane choice of either starving to death or risk being killed while trying to get food,” the U.N. human rights office said. Palestinian health authorities reported that Israel killed 44 people waiting for aid in separate incidents in southern and central Gaza just on Tuesday this week. Israeli soldiers have reportedly killed aid-seekers with bullets, tank shells, and drone-mounted weapons.
Israeli officers and soldiers said that they were ordered to deliberately fire at unarmed civilians waiting for humanitarian aid in an investigation published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Friday; the military prosecution has called for a review into possible war crimes.
The Israeli military has said reports about casualties at aid sites have prompted “thorough examinations … in the Southern command” and that “instructions were issued to forces in the field following lessons learned.” “The aforementioned incidents are under review by the competent authorities,” an unnamed spokesperson for the Israeli military said in a statement emailed to The Intercept.
The aid distribution sites are run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a nonprofit formed earlier this year for the purpose of distributing aid in collaboration with the Israeli government and American private military and security companies, under a plan created by the U.S. and Israeli governments.
An open letter published earlier this week by more than a dozen human rights and legal advocacy groups, including the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Commission of Jurists, condemned the organization. The letter stated that the privatized, militarized aid distribution system — and close collaboration with Israeli authorities — undermines “the core humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.” They urged corporate entities, donors, and individuals to suspend action or support that undermines international humanitarian law and “to reject any model that outsources life-saving aid to private, politically-affiliated actors and to press for the urgent restoration of independent, rights-based humanitarian access for all civilians in Gaza.”
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been marred with controversy from the start; the former head, Jake Wood, quit in May, worrying that “it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.” Boston Consulting Group, which helped run the business, also backed out. The Israeli military said that they allow “the American civilian organization (GHF) to distribute aid to Gaza residents independently, and operate in proximity to the new distribution zones to enable the distribution alongside the continuation of IDF operational activities in the Gaza Strip” in a statement to the Intercept. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
The American government, however, appears to be committed to this way of providing aid. On Tuesday, the Trump administration authorized a $30 million grant for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to documents viewed by Reuters.
Photo: Ahmad Salem/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Finding food has become a horrific risk for many in Gaza. Rolla Alaydi, a Palestinian American, provided The Intercept with a voice note from her cousin, Maher Ahmed, detailing how he went to an aid site on June 1 and witnessed a fatal bullet strike his friend.
Maher had gone three days without flour, so when the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation first opened its facilities, he went with three friends, prompted by an invitation from a food bank. At 6 a.m., on June 1, they went to Dewar Al’aalam for food distribution, and the Americans started to signal to them with their hands to enter and take the food, by shouting on a mic “Take only one box and go home,” Mahar said in the voice note. A group of about 1,000 people went inside. Suddenly, they heard the chaotic sound of gunfire. His friend, Mohammed, was shot in the head, chest, and belly — and killed immediately. They couldn’t move for about an hour because of heavy gunfire, so they tried to give Mohammed first aid but failed. The three of them managed to get Mohammed onto a donkey carriage before taking him to Nasser Hospital. “I survived by a miracle, by a big miracle,” Maher says. “And I lost my friend, Mohammed. Mohammed was only dreaming of getting a bag of flour for his mother and family.”
Maher wrote in a June 11 Instagram post accompanying a video of Mohammed’s funeral that they “survived the worst together … until a bag of flour took him from me.”
For months, environmental researcher Yaakov Garb has been using satellite data to analyze the design, location, and expansion of these facilities. Garb, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, found in an analysis published earlier this month on Harvard Dataverse that most of Gaza’s population cannot access these centers in a safe and practical way. Doing so requires crossing the dangerous Netzarim Corridor, entering a buffer zone from which Israel has banned them from entering, or a long walk across a barren rubble field, while carrying a heavy box of food.
Four Israeli-run aid compounds have already been widely reported on by the media, and Garb suspects a fifth is being formed on the coast —given that its construction features appear identical to the other four. All are close to fortified Israeli military positions, he says. “The fact that four of the five compounds lie south of the Morag corridor — repeatedly indicated by Israeli officials as the intended destination for concentration of Palestinians to be displaced from the remainder of Gaza in an impending intensification of the military attacks — is not reassuring,” Garb notes in his analysis.
Israel’s upheaval of Gaza’s existing aid distribution system amid warnings of famine has angered Garb. “To cloak this kind of tactical intervention in humanitarian wrapping rubs me the wrong way,” Garb says. “If you can’t do it properly then get out of the way and let the people who can do it get to work.”
Humanitarian aid experts agree. “We all saw this coming. To anyone that knows this stuff, it’s not a surprise. It is tragic,” says Maryam Z. Deloffre, an associate professor of international affairs at George Washington University who has researched aid distribution systems globally; she explains that this is why multiple nongovernmental organizations and the U.N. said they would not be involved in this way of distributing aid.
Before the war in Gaza broke out, Garb was focused on reviewing satellite imagery to look into waste burning and land contamination in the West Bank and Gaza. But over the last year, he started posting his observations about confusing evacuation warnings, which did not clearly describe which areas populations should flee from, or the so-called humanitarian safe areas, as well as the expansion of these aid compounds. “They are part and parcel of the same callousness,” he says. “These evacuation maps — if a student gave me a map like that in an introductory GIS course they would fail — and these are maps where people’s lives are hanging in the balance.” Garb has grown increasingly skeptical of the Israeli government’s actions. “I learned to trust less what people are saying and instead trust what I could see from the satellite,” he says.
“I learned to trust less what people are saying and instead trust what I could see from the satellite.”
Garb first started seeing the emergence of these compounds in late April, when he spotted intensive work on some big clearings that seemed different in size and formation to other military installations. He wasn’t sure if they would be used to relocate refugees instead. But as Israeli government declarations and media reports started mentioning an alternative aid distribution model in Gaza, he realized that is what these sites were going to be.
Garb’s report unpacks how the physical layout of the compounds prioritizes control and surveillance over safety. The aid sites appear to lack key facilities — such as toilets, water, and shade for recipients — and involve crowds moving in narrow lines through fenced aisles. This creates a “chokepoint”: a predictable movement path that allows for no cover or concealment. For the visitor, this kind of design is supposed to induce stress and fear. “This setup would be particularly distressing for an already traumatized population, especially given the compound’s proximity to the Israeli army forces that have been sources of violence they have experienced for almost a year and a half,” Garb writes. Aid sites should ideally have multiple exit points and freedom of movement, as well as facilities, trained deescalation facilitators, and dedicated lanes for vulnerable groups.
Asked to respond to Garb’s study and broader criticisms of their conduct around aid sites, an unnamed spokesperson with the Israeli military said it had “recently worked to reorganize the area through the installation of fences, signage placement, the opening of additional routes, and other measures.” It did not provide further detail on how many routes have opened up, or where the routes are located.
A small detail from Garb’s most recent paper has been turned into a meme in recent days. Some readers have interpreted population estimates he included in his report as proof that 377,000 people in Gaza are missing per official Israeli military statistics; Garb clarified to The Intercept that this is a misinterpretation. The numbers in his report refer to estimates for just three particular areas of Gaza, not its entirety; he also noted there was a typo in the map for the al-Mawasi area that he would promptly correct.
The official death toll of Israel’s war on Gaza, as reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, stands at more than 55,000. Two reports published in the British medical journal Lancet estimated that the real number is likely closer to 64,000 dead from direct attacks, with the number of deaths from disease, malnutrition, and other health issues related to the conflict potentially climbing above 180,000.
Deloffre, the GWU professor, points out that military involvement in handing out food can be problematic. Two of the key principles of humanitarian work are neutrality (not taking sides in a conflict) and impartiality (providing assistance to everyone without discrimination), Deloffre says. Militaries can’t be impartial and neutral when they are party to the conflict, she adds. What’s more, “people are generally afraid of the military; you don’t see the military and feel you can approach them.”
Deloffre worries more broadly about backsliding to a time when humanitarian need was not the main driving force behind humanitarian action and decisions about who to help were driven by political interests. She also notes that the core humanitarian principles — mentioned in the open letter — are not legally binding, and are instead adopted by nonstate actors such as NGOs and the Internatinoal Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. The principles are part of a Red Cross code of conduct, which was codified in the early 90s.
Israel claims that it needs this level of control to ensure aid doesn’t get diverted to Hamas. But humanitarian experts say that Israel could have used a good-faith effort to address any such concern through the existing system.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
