A video from Gaza. Another sunny day. No clouds.
Hundreds of sweating people lie crowded together on the hot sand, stretching as far as the eye can see. Waiting. Gunfire crackles toward them. They duck their heads.
In the middle of the crowd rises a mound of sand. Bullets hit the mound again and again, sending up small clouds of dust. People shout at each other not to move. The shooting continues. A video that encapsulates an entire reality.
Since the start of its war on Gaza, Israel has restricted the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into the strip as a pressure tactic. Its declared goal is a military victory. Its undeclared goal: ethnic cleansing.
For two years, Israel tried to suppress horrific images of starving children, fearing international pressure. But in recent months, it has treated images of famine as merely a PR problem, one to be solved by denying their authenticity or casting doubt on the medical history of the starving, as if it were somehow legitimate to starve children to death if they had pre-existing health issues.
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Food restrictions operate on four levels. First, by drastically reducing the humanitarian aid entering Gaza. Second, by supporting armed militias that loot part of the aid and sell it at high prices, thereby challenging Hamas and undermining its governance.
Third, by seeking to fracture Gazan society from within. Israel has targeted not only police and municipal workers but also volunteers, doctors and journalists.
The fourth level is the focus of this article. This is the use of the misleadingly named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as a fig leaf, allowing Israel to claim aid is entering the strip.
In practice, GHF enables Israel to use aid distribution to push the population southward. In recent months, these distribution points, concentrated in the south, have become death traps. So far, more than 2,000 people have been killed on their way to or near distribution centres, and thousands more have been wounded.
The chaos is the point
The recurring motif of GHF’s humanitarian aid distribution is chaos.
The US-backed organisation operates four distribution sites – one in central Gaza and three in the south. These are located far from population centres, in areas under Israeli military control, guarded by American private security firms. The sites are not open daily, and when they do open, sometimes they stay open for only 20 minutes or less.
Announcements of opening times appear only on GHF’s Facebook page – sometimes hours before, sometimes minutes before, or even after the fact – making it impossible for people living 8-12 kms away to reach them in time. Moreover, without reliable electricity or internet, many residents cannot access these announcements at all.
GHF publishes supposedly safe access routes, but in reality Palestinians must reach distribution points through Israeli-controlled zones and devastated urban areas with no landmarks left. As a result, tens of thousands gather in advance around the sites, waiting for them to open and hoping for the best. Distribution itself is a free-for-all: aid crates are placed inside the points, and Palestinians must run to grab what they can.
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According to GHF’s own figures, by 3 September, three and a half months into the operation, some 152 million food rations had been distributed. By quick calculation, that is less than a quarter of the rations needed in Gaza during that period. Some of the supply makes its way to the market: individuals sell flour to buy healthier or more varied food, or traders and profiteers send people to grab supplies and then resell them at exorbitant prices.
Chaos also reigns in site security. A guard from UG Solutions, hired to secure the sites, said the company never vetted its employees. It didn’t even check if they knew how to use the weapons provided.
Another UG Solutions worker said guards entered Gaza on tourist visas, even though they carried automatic weapons and were authorised to use them against civilians.
Both guards said they did not receive rules of engagement. Despite their close contact with civilians, only one interpreter was assigned per site. When one guard suggested posting signs or using loudspeakers to communicate with Palestinians, the idea was rejected on budget grounds.
Attacks on aid seekers
Oral testimony, video evidence from aid seekers, statements by former GHF employees, accounts from Israeli soldiers, and reports from foreign doctors working in Gaza all paint the same picture: continuous gunfire to deter people from approaching until the designated time, followed by more fire to drive them away once supplies had been distributed.
Witnesses report sniper fire, drones, tanks, artillery, helicopters, naval fire and pepper spray. Aid seekers are crushed in the crowds, suffocated by a lethal mixture of tear gas, heat and overcrowding, or beaten by others desperate to take whatever food they managed to grasp.
Mark Brauner, an American doctor who worked at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, described a pattern of precise bullet wounds to the head, neck and chest.
Another doctor at the hospital, Nick Maynard, a consultant surgeon from the UK, said there were days when dozens of patients arrived with injuries in exactly those areas – “as if someone were running a live-fire training exercise”.
An investigation by Sky News based on June data found a correlation between the number of food distributions and the number of casualties: on days with more distributions, more Palestinians were killed and wounded.
According to an employee of GHS subcontractor Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), Israel also uses distribution sites to gather intelligence.
Cameras, some with facial-recognition systems, are deployed at the sites. Video feeds stream to a control room inside a shipping container on the Israeli side of the Kerem Shalom crossing, staffed by Israeli soldiers and American analysts.
If a person of interest appears on one of the dedicated cameras, his name and age pop up on a computer screen – indicating a link between GHF databases and Israel’s security apparatus – and soldiers add him to their lists.
Smoke screens
The name GHF refers to a network of at least six different entities working together opaquely.
GHF is the public face, the organisation that distributes aid. It is led by Johnnie Moore Jr, an evangelical preacher close to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, and John Acree, a former USAID official. Alongside them, GHF contracted SRS, which is headed by Phil Reilly, a former senior CIA officer involved in training militias in Central America who later moved on to private mercenary firms.
SRS, which is a registered in Wyoming with an American asset management company acting as its registered agent in the US, is also linked to the US security firm UG Solutions.
Although UG Solutions does not provide information about the people behind it, journalist Jack Poulson discovered it is run by Jameson Govoni, a US special forces veteran who also operated in Central America and once described himself on camera as “a degenerate from Boston who joined the army to hurt people who hurt us” (the video has since been taken offline).
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The head of SRS’s Israeli branch is Charles Africano, a former US mercenary now tied to another private firm, Quiet Professionals. GHF also contracted Arkel International, an American logistics and construction company that employs, among others, Israeli businessman Hezi Bezalel, known for security ventures in Africa.
None of these companies or individuals have prior experience in aid distribution or humanitarian work of any kind.
The fund claims its operating costs as of August are around $2m per day, though that is probably an underestimate. UG Solutions alone employed 314 guards at the start, with salaries ranging from $1,380 to $1,700 per day for guards and $2,500 per day for paramedics.
Funding sources are deliberately murky. While a GHF spokesperson insisted Israel does not fund the organisation directly and Israel’s finance ministry and prime minister’s office say the same, Israel has in fact allocated 700m shekels ($210m) to GHF.
Recently, reports indicated that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich would earmark 3bn shekels ($897m) for GHF, of which 1.6bn ($478m) had already been budgeted.
The US announced it was considering contributing $500m, pledging $30m as early as June, but by August had allocated only a tenth of that amount.
Israel against international organisations
In recent weeks, we have witnessed a campaign to rehabilitate GHF’s reputation.
The foundation promotes itself as a safe, efficient channel providing direct access to food and aid, appealing to the international community to cooperate while accusing critics of lying and “helping Hamas”.
GHF echoes the claim that the UN and established aid agencies are ineffective and unable to get aid into Gaza, ignoring the deliberate obstacles Israel places in their path.
The US and Israel argue that GHF is a viable alternative to the global humanitarian system and present it as a model for other conflict zones. International aid agencies have condemned the arrangement and refused to cooperate, but Israel and the US continue pressuring them to hand over their aid to GHF.
In other words, they are asking the international community to bankroll feeding Gaza’s population while ethnic cleansing carries on apace in the north and centre of the Palestinian enclave.
Inside Israel, GHF faces eroding legitimacy. Its lowest point came in July, when even mainstream media admitted that “the humanitarian fund has failed” and food distribution centres “created a daily bloodbath that destroyed what was left of Israel’s support in the West”.
Criticism of GHF has seeped into Israeli civil society. The Teder music club publicly distanced itself from Shahar Segal, one of its partners who served as GHF’s spokesperson. On 12 and 19 August, protests were held in Israel outside the hotel where GHF managers were staying.
International criticism of GHF’s model is also intensifying. In late June, for example, 15 organisations called on GHF and its contractors to halt operations, citing violations of international law and ties to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
Aid agencies argue GHF is not a humanitarian organisation at all, since it does not adhere to neutrality, independence and humaneness – the core principles of humanitarian aid. Central to these principles is refusing to turn aid into a tool of forced population transfer, which is why Israel dismisses international demands as “surrender to Hamas”.
Yet GHF’s model in Gaza is only one small piece of a much larger problem: the unravelling of the international order established after World War Two.
Some see GHF’s approach as a model worth copying. The profit is clear: large sums change hands; guards earn high wages; companies and entrepreneurs awarded contracts take handsome cuts.
The losers are those too weak to run for food parcels, and those unlucky enough to be shot on their way there or back. In the longer term, the silent acquiescence of the world’s governments to this arrangement accelerates the breakdown of the international order, harms vulnerable populations now and in the future, and stains wealthier societies with a lasting moral blot.
