Our Reporter Got Into Gaza. He Witnessed a Famine of Israel’s Making.

It was Tuesday, June 10 when Khalil heard from neighbors that an aid truck had arrived a few kilometers from where he lived in Deir al Balah, Gaza. By then he had already lost about 45 pounds since the war began in 2023.

With his brothers and a friend, Khalil set off on foot. On the walk over, the 26-year-old could hear intermittent shelling, but the promise of food, he felt, was worth the risk. “Hunger has become stronger than fear,” said Khalil, who agreed to speak on the condition that his last name not be published. 

When they arrived around 6:30 a.m., a huge crowd was gathering at the aid point in Netzarim. “People start heading there before sunrise because the lines get impossibly long,” Khalil said. Thousands had clearly gotten the same tip. The sheer amount of desperate, hungry people was overwhelming. Khalil said, “I hadn’t eaten properly in days. I was dizzy and weak.”

The distribution site was run by a new aid provider active in Gaza for only a few weeks. Khalil quickly noticed military presence. “We saw the Israeli soldiers in full military uniform standing next to their armored vehicles. We arrived knowing the place was dangerous. But, there was no clash, no threat to them,” Khalil said. (The Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories bureau did not respond to written requests for comment for this article.) 

He stood in line with hundreds of others. There were children, women, and elderly men. “Some were barefoot, some had been waiting since the night before,” he recalled.

As his group inched closer to the point where they hoped they would be able to grab a parcel of items, gunshots rang out. Khalil ran for his life.

“They began shooting directly at unarmed civilians,” he said. “The bullets were chasing us as if we were targets on a shooting range, and not just hungry people. We scattered under a hail of bullets. I got closer to death that day than a piece of bread.”

Khalil survived that quest for food — alive to starve another day instead. But at least 36 Palestinians did not, and 207 more were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Since Israel broke its ceasefire with Hamas in mid-March, more than 875 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food.

Reporting from inside Gaza over the last few months, The Intercept observed a famine that is manufactured and an aid distribution system seemingly designed to cause more suffering and death. Amid the war, Israel has rendered Gaza inaccessible to the foreign press; American journalist Afeef Nessouli accessed the Strip by volunteering as an aid worker for a medical nonprofit and reporting in his off-hours.

Usually during war, the distribution of medical care and food to a besieged population would not be administered by any party waging war against it, much less by an illegally occupying military. And in most situations, aid operations would closely involve established organizations already active in the area.

But that’s not the case in Gaza. Israel has effectively banned the biggest and longest-running aid group in the region: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. And by gutting the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, a critical funding vehicle for aid groups including UNRWA, U.S. President Donald Trump has strangled international aid in Gaza.

Israel and the U.S. have instead rolled out a new scheme centered around a fledgling U.S.-based nonprofit that operates alongside the same Israeli military responsible for killing more than 230 journalists, 1,400 health care workers, and 17,000 Palestinian children in the last two years. 

With a few small exceptions, all aid reaching Gaza since May has moved through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was established in Delaware in February. The organization has received tens of millions from the U.S. to distribute aid in Gaza — and, reportedly, some $100 million from an unnamed country. GHF did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story.

Since it started operations, the number of locations in Gaza where residents could receive aid has plummeted from around 400 to four sites.

“Sometimes only one hub is actually operating,” said Hanya Aljamal, the senior project coordinator at the aid group Action for Humanity, who is based in Deir al Balah. Sometimes, Aljamal said, the sites are closed for security reasons, other times for maintenance. Khalil corroborates this: “I went a few days ago and it wasn’t open.” He says now he checks the GHF’s Facebook page, which informs people of the schedule. Aljamal says she believes “they operate semi-daily for only two hours a day.”

Arriving in Gaza in late March just as Israel broke the ceasefire, The Intercept witnessed firsthand what happened to Gaza’s most vulnerable after the U.S. defunded USAID and UNRWA and turned those agencies’ work over to the Israeli military and GHF.

Famine has been a problem in Gaza since the early days of the war. But when Israel and Hamas announced a ceasefire on January 19, 2025, access to goods became easier. “Meat, vegetables and chicken — and even snacks — were reachable, albeit at a slightly expensive price,” Aljamal said. “But we had options.” 

When the holy month of Ramadan began on February 28, it wasn’t hard to find a simple meal of rice or lentils for dinner, or labneh and za’atar for suhoor before fasting for the day. 

But on March 2, Israel cut off food imports to Gaza when it imposed a blockade. On March 18, Israel shattered the ceasefire when it restarted its campaign of airstrikes. Even after Eid, which marked the end of the Holy Month, one meal a day remained standard practice — if not a luxury. 

At the time, community kitchens like Shabab Gaza were running low on food. But they were still delivering what they could to areas the Israeli military referred to as “red zones”— swaths of land Israel has evacuated and banned aid from entering, such as Khan Yunis. By spring, 70 percent of Gaza was considered a “red zone.”

Shabab Gaza, “the youth of Gaza” in Arabic, was making meals of rice so people could break their fast at sundown. Inside a makeshift kitchen housed in a tent, the men, fasting themselves, worked in groups to cook the rice in vats. They packaged it quickly to deliver to the surrounding area, but neighbors also showed up with pots and pans, ready to grab the food for their families, or ready to eat themselves.

There were about 170 operational community kitchens before the crossings closed in early March. Just two months later, dozens had ceased operating.

The blockade halted the entry of vital goods for months, resulting in scarcity and price hikes. It was made worse by the resumption of fighting between Israel and Hamas, which restricted access to domestic produce “because of new evacuation orders from the north, Rafah, and areas in Khan Yunis where new crops were cultivated,” Aljamal said.

At the market, produce was fresh but limited. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions, and sometimes potatoes were for sale, grown on the shards of Gazan farmland remaining. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported that Israel has destroyed 83 percent of Gaza’s agricultural cropland and restricted access to some of what remains, rendering less than 5 percent of cropland “available for cultivation.”

“It used to be that three kilos of these onions were just $3,” an older woman said in her makeshift kitchen in eastern Khan Yunis. By April, an onion cost a dollar apiece. Flour became incredibly expensive, with a single bag selling for hundreds of dollars. Because nearly every bank branch and ATM remain inoperable in Gaza, people cannot find cash to pay for even a single bag of flour. They are reliant on an unregulated network of cash brokers to get money for daily life with commissions hovering around 40 percent.

Even domesticated chickens have been laying fewer eggs than usual, one international aid worker said. “Food isn’t available for them, neither are supplements or animal feed that provide stuff like calcium, which is essential to egg production,” the worker said. And like humans, chickens also experience stress. The Israeli military’s bombs and quadcopters are loud. 

As of July, OCHA reports that 100 percent of the population in Gaza was projected to face high levels of acute food insecurity. That includes 1 million people facing “emergency” levels of food insecurity, and 470,000 facing “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity. 

“I have lost nearly 37 kilos,” said Basel, one of the men at Shabab Gaza’s community kitchen. He showed pictures of himself from 2023, back when he used to weigh 247 pounds. Basel is bald with blue eyes, with a 6-foot, 2-inch frame. Now 165 pounds, he looks thin, his face gaunt. Several men showed pictures of this kind of transformation. They described the indignity of going hungry every day and how weakened they feel. 

“Look at what they are doing to us. We are so tired,” Basel explained. “By God, it has been almost two years, really we are so hungry,” he said.

Nessouli, the Intercept reporter, volunteered in Gaza with Glia, a medical nonprofit, from late March to early June. With other medical workers, he ate once per day — usually rice or lentils. Sometimes there would be tomatoes or peppers, occasionally canned tuna. During that time, he lost 12 pounds.

People begging for food at the market, rushing international aid workers’ cars on the seaside road, or even knocking on doors looking for flour became commonplace.

“Now we are reduced to one meal per day,” Aljamal, the aid worker, explained, which usually consists of “a variation of the same thing: lentils.” Lentils can take the form of soup or falafel, be steamed, or cooked into a gravy. But sometimes, Aljamal said, the sole meal of the day consists of “bread, plain bread.”

UNRWA was set up in 1949 to provide humanitarian relief to Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Originally, it was intended to provide jobs on public works projects and direct relief. It grew to offer education, health care, and social services to wide swaths of Palestinian society, even serving more than 5 million registered Palestinian refugees and their descendants in the diaspora. 

The Palestinian Authority has been a recipient of UNRWA’s services and support as it has governed the West Bank since 1993 and Gaza until the U.S.-monitored election of 2006, in which Hamas gained power.  

At its height, UNRWA employed over 30,000 staff, 99 percent of whom were Palestinian. Most of UNRWA’s funding came from European countries and the United States, but this largely disappeared after Israel accused UNRWA employees of participating in the October 7 attacks. (A U.N. investigation cleared most of the accused UNRWA workers but found that nine of the 13,000 people who worked for the organization in Gaza may have participated in the attacks.) 

USAID also once provided financial support to the Palestinian people for various development and humanitarian projects. Since 1994, the United States has steered more than $5.2 billion in aid to Palestinians. This funding dried up after Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised in March to cut USAID’s foreign grants by 83 percent before shuttering it entirely on July 1. 

Ending USAID, a Cold War tool of soft power founded in 1961 as “an independent executive branch agency responsible for administering foreign aid and economic development assistance outside the US,” has been a signature policy of Trump’s second administration. For decades, the agency has played a key role in treating HIV/AIDS and in providing lifesaving care to LGBTQ+ people, including in Gaza. One study estimates the USAID cuts will result in the deaths of 14 million people by 2030.

Over the decades, most international aid to Gaza has been run through either UNRWA or USAID partners, though Qatar too has been a key funder, providing over $1 billion in reconstruction funds and stipends for poor Palestinians between 2014 and 2019. 

Much of the Strip’s economic activity has been reliant on aid infrastructure, with UNRWA specifically playing a critical role in the distribution of food even before the war began.

“UNRWA has been the backbone that held Gazan society together,” Aljamal said. “As a child I went to UNRWA schools and was offered the best possible education available with the smallest of resources. When me or any of my siblings got sick or needed medical attention, we rushed into subsidized UNRWA clinics that even provided us with the needed meds, too. When it comes to food, lots of refugee families relied on their three-month dry ration distributions,” which consisted of “flour, cooking oil, sugar, rice, lentils, chickpeas per family member for three months.”

For years, this program helped ensure food security in the region. “We often held great pride in the fact that wherever you went and however bad it had gotten, you wouldn’t possibly sleep without food,” she said.

Community kitchens also played a critical role in aid distribution in Gaza. Glia’s head of mission, Moureen Kaki, a Palestinian American, moved from Texas to Gaza more than a year ago to help; she never left. She also volunteers at Shabab Gaza in Khan Yunis. 

Kaki, who switches breezily throughout her day between Palestinian Arabic and English with a slight Texas lilt in her voice, notes that when she arrived, community kitchens across Gaza were producing 250,000 meals a day, feeding about 800,000 people — about 45 percent of the Strip’s population. Back then, community kitchens were able to reliably source food via donations and USAID. But now, it is extremely difficult to operate.

Today, community kitchens still exist, but their capacity has dropped from 250,000 meals a day to about 25,000, Kaki says, because they simply cannot source supplies.

The current famine, she says, is “the worst I have seen, hands down.” 

World Central Kitchen — founded by chef José Andrés and one of the most recognized food distributors in Gaza, and whose workers were killed in a 2024 Israeli airstrike — ceased operations in May after it ran out of supplies; it resumed operations recently. Smaller mutual aid organizations like the Sameer Project have continued to churn out as many meals as they can, even after their camp coordinator Mosab Ali was killed. 

Shabab Gaza’s capacity dropped from 15,000 meals a day to 3,000 in June — and by July had to stop operations because rice became too expensive. The group hopes to resume as soon as possible.

As long-standing aid providers languish in Gaza, Israel and the United States have embraced a new approach: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 

According to the New York Times, Israeli officials, military leaders, and businesspeople began discussing the concept of an Israeli-backed food distribution system in December 2023, and had brought a former CIA agent-turned-private security contractor on board by the summer of 2024. The new program was announced on May 19, 2025, as a U.S.-led initiative, with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee saying it was “wholly inaccurate” to characterize it as an Israeli plan. By June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the initiative had in fact originated in Israel. 

Unlike prior aid distribution systems, GHF planned to use a small number of distribution hubs in southern Gaza that would be secured by private U.S.-backed contractors, with the Israeli military keeping watch “at a distance.” The aid would be prepackaged, filled with a hygiene kit, medical supplies, and food rations. Each meal was budgeted to cost only around $1.30 each.

Soon after it launched, officials said the GHF system would attempt to screen people for involvement with Hamas by using facial recognition or biometric technology, violating a core tenet of addressing hunger: that no political litmus test can be imposed for access to human rights like food and water. 

The United Nations rejected the new U.S.-backed distribution plan and sayings that it did not meet its long-held principles of “impartiality, neutrality and independence.” The U.N. aid chief said the new system would force further displacement, expose people to harm, and restrict aid to one part of Gaza. Oxfam and 240 other nongovernmental organizations called for immediate action to end the Israeli distribution scheme.

In late June, Israeli soldiers corroborated what Palestinians had been claiming about the GHF aid distribution sites: Commanders explicitly ordered soldiers to shoot unarmed civilians. Massacres were a result of soldiers doing what they were told to do.

Video obtained by Afeef Nessouli

One video shows thousands of people crowded all around at GHF distribution site in Rafah, according to Al Jazeera. The phone camera pans to the left, and the sound of gunshots hitting a mound of earth about 200 meters in front of the crowd is piercing. The video shows sand kicking up in a whirl upward from the bullets as people crawl on their knees trying to dodge the gunfire. 

“Imagine if Toronto was starving,” Dorotea Gucciardo hypothesized at a press conference at the Canadian Parliament in June. Gucciardo is the director of Glia, the NGO Nessouli volunteered with in Gaza, and with whom he and reporter Steven Thrasher have also worked to deliver antiretroviral medication into Gaza since reporting on AIDS in the Strip in January. 

In this Canadian analogy, Gucciardo said, “The U.N. system would deploy over 1,300 distribution sites. The GHF model? Ten. In Montreal, the U.N. would open 850 sites, while GHF’s version? Six.”

“And in Gaza, the UN. .had a well-maintained system of 400 aid sites,” she said. “GHF has replaced those with only three.” 

Glia was founded in 2015 with a focus on providing low-cost medical supplies using 3D printing technology, beginning with a stethoscope design. Over the years, its services have expanded. Since 2017, the group has rotated doctors, nurses, and other personnel into Gaza to support local health care workers. 

Glia doctors operating in Gaza’s incredibly damaged health care system have been treating malnourished patients throughout the war. Since GHF began operating on May 26, “20 to 50 Palestinians have been killed per day at the aid distribution sites,” Gucciardo explains. They are treating an ever-rising number of malnourished patients injured waiting for food. “Everybody my medical team treats is skin and bones,” Gucciardo said. 

Gucciardo called the switch to the GHF program an engineered starvation. “Aid is distributed by gunpoint by American mercenaries. It is inhumane, degrading, dangerous, and it violates every principle of humanitarian law,” she says.

The AP has reported that GHF contractors have shot live ammo at aid sites, allegations that GHF denies. GHF has also denied that multiple violent incidents have even occurred near their aid distribution sites, regularly blames outside agitators for the incidents it does acknowledge, and stated that “GHF remains focused on its mission: to safely, quickly and effectively feed as many people as possible, every day.”

When GHF’s original executive director, American veteran and entrepreneur Jake Wood, announced he was stepping down after just a couple of months, one reason he cited was because it was impossible to fulfill GHF’s “plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”

“From the outset, they were placed in active red zones — especially in southern Gaza, in Rafah,” said Majed Jaber, a Palestinian volunteer emergency room doctor who has worked at several hospitals in the southern part of Gaza. 

“At Nasser and the Red Crescent hospitals, where I worked during those distributions, we regularly received 50 to 100 wounded people in a single day. Dozens arrived already dead or died shortly after,” he said. “Every other day, the number would spike. The injuries were horrific. Limbs blown off by high-caliber bullets. Vital organs pierced — hearts, aortas, lungs. We saw far too many headshots to ever call it random.” 

Tarek Loubani, a Canadian doctor in Gaza and the medical director of Glia, observed a similar pattern of wounds in those killed or injured at GHF distribution sites. “Today, I saw patients with gunshots to the head, gunshots to the neck … the gunshots to the head and neck are almost always targeted. Usually shot by snipers,” he said. 

When there are shots to other parts of the body, Loubani explained, it’s usually from “a machine gun being used to shoot on the crowd.” For its part, GHF acknowledges the dangerous proximity of the Israeli military to its distribution centers, writing on Facebook, “Our dear precious residents of Gaza, We ask you not to be near our centers between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m., for your safety, due to the possibility of the IDF conducting military operations in the area.”

[newsetter][/newsletter]

Amal, a trans woman who lives in Gaza City, sent The Intercept a picture of her bandaged arm on WhatsApp in early June. Amal gave The Intercept a pseudonym for safety. 

“Do you see what happened to me?” Amal said in her voice note. Her voice was trembling and angry, but still soft. 

“Yesterday, I went to the GHF distribution point to pick up some aid to get a bag of flour,” she said. “I finally got a bag after a really hard time, I was exhausted. And then after all of that, thieves stole my bag and stabbed me with a knife.” 

Hunger is painful, Amal said. She complained of joint pain, stomach pain, and a lack of concentration. “I faint and fall,” said Amal, who stands 6 feet tall and weighs just 119 pounds. “I do not want anything, I only want to eat.” 

Despite the Trump administration axing thousands of USAID awards (and firing the accompanying officers who managed these funds), GHF does not seem to lack for funds. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the State Department is considering giving GHF an additional $500 million. Zeteo reported that GHF requested $30 million dollars from USAID.

The group’s social media accounts regularly publish accusations against international aid groups and journalists. GHF has denounced the U.N. and Oxfam for standing “by helplessly while their aid is looted,” and allege that The Associated Press’s “Middle East bureau has sadly devolved into a propaganda vehicle — amplifying unverified claims, omitting critical context, and publishing narratives that serve a designated terrorist group.” Its belligerent posts have a Trumpian quality, down to the use of all caps (“let’s go through the history of how we got here in the first place. … HAMAS IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION WITH AN ACTIVE PROPAGANDA ARM”) and are marked with denial of any problems with their approach (“Scenes like this prove the GHF model is working”).

On June 17, reports emerged that Israeli tanks had killed over 50 Palestinians as they were waiting for aid trucks in Khan Yunis in the southern part of the Strip. On July 16, over 20 Palestinians were killed at a GHF distribution site in southern Gaza. Most of the victims were reported to have died in a stampede. Many Palestinians in Gaza who have limited supplies refuse to go to the new aid sites. 

“We don’t go to GHF aid points because they’re death traps,” says E.S, a 28-year-old restrained to a walker because of complications due to his HIV status. “I can’t fight through the crowds because of my disability plus we all know the whole situation is messy,” he continues. “There is no line and there is no distribution method at all, they offload everything into a big arena, in fact, people have been comparing it to ‘Squid Game’ or ‘Hunger Games,’” E.S explains. “It becomes a battle because everyone is desperate for food.”

The number of people reportedly killed by Israeli gunfire at GHF aid distribution sites continues to climb, as the people of Gaza face starvation. The Gaza Health Ministry has counted 1,021 people killed and another 6,511 wounded at GHF sites since the program was put in place, including at least 38 killed by Israeli fire this past weekend. A newborn baby died of malnutrition at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Saturday, and Palestinian journalists have been posting image after image of people dying of starvation.

More than 20 countries, including the U.K., France and Canada, released a statement Monday saying that “the suffering of civilians has reached new depths,” and calling for the war in Gaza to end now. “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” the statement continued. “We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.” 

On Monday morning, Israel also began a new military invasion of Deir al Balah, where Nessouli was based in June. As Israeli tanks moved into the dense area, packed with many thousands of displaced people, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a water desalination plant, killing five more people in the blast.