The near-daily killings at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) food distribution points – where over 550 civilians have been killed and over 4,000 maimed in a month while trying to access food – are not unfortunate byproducts of war.
Nor are they rogue acts by reckless soldiers and extremist commanders, or the consequences of loose rules of engagement.
Rather, they are a calculated tactic as part of a broader Israeli policy to weaponise humanitarian aid and starvation, impose forced displacement, and advance what many legal experts call a genocidal campaign.
A recent exposé by Haaretz confirmed what Palestinians and international observers have long raised an alarm about: Israeli soldiers have been given explicit orders to fire on unarmed civilians congregating at aid sites in southern Gaza.
These are not defensive actions; not a single one of those victims posed any threat, Israeli soldiers themselves say.
The report, for example, includes testimonies from officers and reservists describing standard operating procedures that include shooting and bombing people who arrive early, late, or simply deviate from the Israeli military’s arbitrary and undisclosed rules while waiting in line for food.
What has emerged is a dystopian ‘aid’ operation that is in reality a mechanism of social control, one carefully engineered to cover up the weaponisation of starvation and inflict maximum deprivation under the guise of humanitarianism.
Since the start of the genocidal war in October 2023, Israel has used starvation as a method of warfare in Gaza. This strategy continues today, through Israel’s opening of GHF hubs.
Last week, the UN criticised Israel’s “weaponised hunger”, “forced displacement”, and “death sentence for people just trying to survive”. The head of the UN humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) Jonathan Whittall concluded, “it appears to be the erasure of Palestinian life from Gaza.”
Israel’s starvation policy is premised on four pillars. First, severely restricting humanitarian access, where Israel currently allows in at best less than 15% of what Gaza needs for basic survival (60-75 trucks per day instead of 500).
The second pillar is the Israeli IS-linked criminal gangs that the army unleashes to loot the majority of the very little aid it allows in under full protection from the military.
Third is a deliberate policy of engineering societal collapse, lawlessness, and destruction of civic order, so that even the handful of trucks that make it through the gangs would be looted by desperate crowds.
Israel has been systematically targeting law enforcement personnel, civil servants, volunteers, municipality workers, emergency committees, community leaders and anyone who works to maintain a rudimentary level of organised human existence and social cohesion in Gaza.
Last week, some large Gazan families unaffiliated with Hamas stepped forward to protect aid trucks, prevent looting in northern Gazan, and ensure orderly distribution of food for the first time in months.
As soon as they succeeded, Israel responded by immediately halting all aid to northern Gaza to punish them and carried out targeted assassinations against key players in that improvised system.
The fourth and most cynical pillar is GHF. Israel didn’t create and fund this ‘aid’ group to address the very hunger it created in Gaza, but rather to “institutionalise” it and cover it up, as a joint UN-INGO memo viewed by The New Arab had warned in late April.
Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put it bluntly when he said that GHF is there to provide “the least of the least” to buy more time for the war. Smotrich specified more concretely that each Gazan would at most get a single piece of bread and a bowl of soup a day and nothing more.
GHF is also there to create an informational blackout about hunger by elbowing out legitimate international organisations and UN agencies that act as witnesses of the genocide on the ground, as Israel continues to ban all journalists from entering Gaza.
“In essence, this so-called mechanism is seeking to undermine and cancel an entire international system that functions, that of the UN and its partners,” Tamara Alrifai, UNRWA Director of External Relations, told The New Arab.
Israeli soldiers admit that GHF is only there to prevent “a total collapse of international legitimacy for continuing the war”. In other words, it’s not there to end the hunger, but rather to pretend to do so; to maintain a veneer of international compliance.
Israel allows only about 20 trucks of food to the GHF per day, which amounts to 125 grams of food per person, since each truck carries at most 15 tons of food. The hubs erratically operate for only one hour each day and serve at most, per their own inflated numbers, 38,000 boxes per day to a population of 2.4 million people.
The hubs open and close arbitrarily without any predictability or schedule, but rather last-minute announcements. GHF sometimes announces opening a hub, then closes the very same hub mere minutes later. People wait for hours or days, desperate and starving, only to face the barrel of a gun and be surrounded by an ocean of Israeli soldiers taking pot shots at them.
This is not aid – it is bait; a “mousetrap with fake cheese” as the renowned American political scientist Norman Finkelstein put it. That’s why UNRWA’s chief and Norway’s Foreign Minister have both called GHF aid sites “death traps”.
And this is precisely where near-daily massacres at GHF sites come into the picture; to deter the overwhelming majority of Gazans from even trying to get food from those façades and to leave the population with one option: leaving Gaza.
Conveniently, the only alternative to GHF is an aid distribution centre in Eastern Rafah that Israel’s proxy gangs established in close proximity to Egypt’s borders and are trying to lure people into it by using the aid they’ve been systematically looting. Smotrich declared an Israeli intention to move all Gazans into that area to then be expelled to other countries.
Each day, Israel’s military carries out multiple killings at GHF sites. The first is against people who sleep rough on the streets nearby, waiting for the crack of dawn to be the earliest in the queue, most prominently near the Al-Alam Square.
As soon as there’s a buildup of people in the area and people start pushing the queue to advance towards the aid hubs, soldiers open fire between 3-5am. Then, when people arrive during the single opening hour of GHF sites and overcrowding begins, the Israeli military opens fire again to disperse the crowds and thin the queues.
As the second wave of people arrive afterwards and find no more aid boxes left, they sit and sift through sand looking for pasta, rice, and wheat flour that fell from the first wave of people. Israeli soldiers then open fire again.
A third wave arrives after GHF closes, and they find nothing left. They are told to go back and return tomorrow, but after having walked for dozens of kilometres on foot for hours in the boiling sun, they have no energy left to walk back without food. Israeli soldiers then open fire to disperse them.
Each time Israeli troops fire at the starved and desperate crowd, it creates panic and stampedes, which in turn makes the army fire even more. Israeli soldiers admit to firing at people running away or ducking from their shots. Live fire, drone strikes, grenades, mortars, and tear gas are all routinely used on those crowds of hungry people.
Soldiers even use thermal scopes at night to spot figures near the hubs and shoot them on sight, knowing full well they are civilians. In some cases, officers used code names and jokes to describe their rules of engagement, calling the massacres “Red Light, Green Light” – a reference to the deadly children’s game featured in Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’.
As a result of these systematic massacres, most people in Gaza have become too afraid to even try to approach GHF sites. They’d rather starve than risk certain death or loss of limbs. But once the starvation becomes too severe to the point of nearing death, it dulls their senses, their brains shut down, and survival instinct forces them to march into those slaughterhouses.
“In reality, getting food in Gaza has become a mission impossible, making the Strip a dystopian place,” Alrifai told The New Arab.
“The so-called aid mechanism put in place by the Government of Israel with support from the US is everything but humanitarian. It humiliates Gazans, forcing them to choose between starving or running the risk of being killed while trying to get a food parcel for their families.”
The clearest indication of a deliberate Israeli policy behind the GHF massacres is the appointment of Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, the commander of the IDF’s 252nd division, to oversee the very areas those hubs operate.
Vach is not a faceless bureaucrat but a known ideologue, an extremist settler from Kiryat Arba who called for flattening Gaza, halting the entry of food to it, and targeting humanitarian convoys to starve the population. He attended the Bnei David pre-military academy in the settlement of Eli, where Rabbi Giora Redel taught that “Hitler’s ideology was 100% correct, but he was aiming at the wrong target. He should have exterminated the Muslims.”
Vach instructed his soldiers that “there are no innocents in Gaza” and told them “only by losing land will the Palestinians learn the necessary lesson from the October 7 massacre.” He brought his two settler brothers and hilltop youth to demolish and wipe out all homes in northern Gaza with political protection all the way from Netanyahu’s office.
That is why the Hind Rajab Foundation calls Vach “Netanyahu’s most loyal and lethal asset in Gaza – the man entrusted to carry out the will of a government that has openly embraced genocidal policies against the Palestinian people”.
Vach was appointed precisely because of his fanatical opposition to aid entering Gaza, not despite it. Using security pretexts, Israel’s government seeks plausible deniability to portray the mass killings as anomalies rather than state policy. GHF, in this view, is a containment zone designed to accelerate collapse and displacement, not to deliver food.
Destruction of the next generation
Israel’s starvation policy serves three goals. The first is to debilitate the general population and weaken their resistance and will, so that it becomes easier for the Israeli army to advance and occupy Gaza. Second is leverage and blackmail, to force Hamas to comply with Israel’s demands without an end to the war. Third is genocide, which even Israeli experts concluded is the goal when starvation entered into the picture as a policy.
Deaths from starvation and hunger are not registered as war casualties in the official health ministry count and instead fall into the category of excess mortality. In many cases, starvation is not even registered as the main cause of death, but rather, severe hunger would weaken the immune system or cause organ failure, hence the cause of death would be masked. This hides an iceberg of deaths in Gaza that go under the radar.
Furthermore, prolonged starvation causes severe and lasting damage to bodies and minds in the long term, including muscle wasting, stunted growth, sepsis, meningitis, severe anaemia, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and metabolic disorders.
A recent study found that “even 48 weeks after children recovered from acute malnutrition, they continued to show signs of inflammation in the gut and throughout their body, making them more likely to be readmitted to a hospital and die.” That damage is even passed down to descendants and future generations.
Lastly, Israel’s engineered hunger will leave a deep trauma on the general population, as seeking food is now etched into the minds of Gazans as synonymous with death, as they watch their loved ones executed while trying to get a bag of rice or lentils.
When soldiers are ordered to shoot starving civilians, when the military commanders who oppose humanitarian aid are in put in charge of food distribution hubs, or when aid itself is weaponised to coerce displacement and enforce siege, and when all of it is framed as part of a broader “security architecture” – this is not war.
It is a policy of extermination dressed in military language.
Source: The New Arab
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