On Sunday morning, the Israeli army and U.S. mercenary contractors committed yet another massacre, opening fire on a crowd of starving Gazans at one of the food distribution sites that the U.S. and Israeli are managing as part of the ongoing weaponization of the famine. The shooting left at least 31 dead and more than 170 wounded, according to a provisional death toll that is rising by the hour.

Since the recent resumption of aid earlier this month, masses of Gazans have been forced to humiliate themselves for the chance of getting a food package, and Israel has taken advantage of this cruel system of distribution in order to further its genocidal goals. The press, particularly Médiapart and Le Monde in France, are downplaying the significance of this situation. They are criticizing Israel for its inability to properly organize these food distributions, but say nothing about the fundamental problems with the system of distribution itself, which is part of Israel’s larger plan to control Gaza.

Indeed, these distribution sites are being run like concentration camps, where starving Gazans must wait in barbed wire corridors before being duly identified to receive their rations. Further, these facilities were deliberately built to the south of the enclave in an attempt to concentrate the population amid the ruins of Rafah.

Meanwhile Israel is fueling the famine by limiting the amount of aid and humanitarian trucks that Israel is allowing into the rest of the Gaza Strip in order to force hundreds of thousands of Gazans to move south. Worse still, is the use of facial recognition technology to “register” Gazans at distribution points, raising fears that Israel will draw up a list of survivors to be deported or even executed during a later phase of the ongoing operations. These initial distributions are likely intended to test the plan developed by the army before implementing it in its entirety. As Palestinian journalist Rami Abou Jamous, who lives in the northern part of the Strip, writes in his logbook for Orient XXI:

They [Israel] want to introduce new security measures, and above all, launch the real plan to attract those like me who live in the northern part of the enclave to the South, by creating several food aid distribution centers. The closest one is to be set up inside the Netzarim Corridor, which cuts the Gaza Strip in two a few kilometers south of Gaza City. But it will be a one-way trip, the Israeli army has warned. Those who enter the corridor from the north to receive food aid will not be able to turn back. They will only be able to go south. There you have it, it’s always the same psychological warfare strategy: pretending they are saving us by giving us food, while destroying us.

As usual, Israel has once again denied any responsibility for the most recent massacre. While the General Staff claimed that it had simply not heard any gunshots yesterday morning, the army is now claiming that Palestinians were responsible for the shooting, going so far as to provide video evidence, which it has since removed from X. The problem, and no doubt why they removed it, is that the video actually showed looting committed by Israeli-backed gangs in Khan Younis, not Rafah.

This is a crude form of Israeli propaganda that the actual videos of the massacre completely refute. In one of them, we can see dozens of Palestinians throwing themselves to the ground to avoid being mowed down by a burst of machine gun fire. Other images report a widespread movement of panic and show the wounded.

This rhetoric, relentlessly hammered home by the general staff, that Gazans are to blame for their own repression, is actually intended to conceal the genocidal famine that Israel is creating in the territory. For several months, the army has accused the UN of being unable to account for the humanitarian trucks it is allegedly allowing into the enclave, and even of being complicit with bands of looters who target the convoys.

However, as several observers, including historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, note in a book that looks back on his trip to the Gaza Strip, it is now clear that Israel arms, protects, and finances bands of looters who operate in the areas under its control to prevent humanitarian trucks from reaching NGOs and Gazans. On the night of December 22-23, Filiu reports that a UN convoy, which was following a new route, was looted thanks to the active assistance of the Israeli army. According to Filiu, after targeting guards assigned to monitor the route, the army mobilized drones:

A few hours later, when looters attacked the aid trucks and encountered strong resistance, Israeli drones came to their aid, killing six of the security guards. The Israeli military also immobilized half of the convoy, which made the task of the highwaymen even easier. Around twenty trucks were thus stolen, a feat impossible to achieve without some form of Israeli complicity in the air¹Jean-Pierre Filiu, A historian in Gaza , Paris, Les Arènes, 2025, p. 44..

According to Filiu, the same scenario was repeated on January 4, 2025, the date on which an Israeli drone attacked the escort of a convoy. According to an investigation by the Washington Post, Israel entrusted a local leader from Rafah with the task of setting up a gang of looters: Yasser Abu Shebab and his men, equipped with state-of-the-art weapons, operate in areas under Israeli control, with total impunity. While the Israeli army massacres anyone who enters the buffer zone, which the army has transformed into a series of “kill zones,” ordering its soldiers to shoot on sight anyone who is in their field of vision according to Haaretz, Israel actively supports this militia, even targeting UN convoys to facilitate their work.

The famine is thus part of a meticulously elaborate genocidal scheme. While international pressure forces Israel to open the gates of Kerem Shalom, the army has its own proxies to ensure that aid never reaches its destination. While famine ravages the Strip, the “distribution points” aim to draw the population south and thus constitute an integral part of the second phase of the ongoing operations, during which the entire population is to be moved south, before its deportation or extermination.

As Israel accelerates its genocidal plans, it is more urgent than ever to denounce and mobilize against the complicity of imperialist powers like the U.S. and France with Israel, and put an end to the genocide. While some European leaders are issuing extremely cowardly and tepid criticisms of Israel’s operations in Gaza — for fear that they could potentially trigger resistance throughout the Middle East — they continue to effectively support the genocide, notably by criminalizing all voices at home that denounce the ongoing massacres.

As the Freedom Flotilla heads toward Gazan waters, under threat from Israeli drones and destroyers, to break the blockade of Gaza, mobilizations are resuming around the world. In this moment it is urgent that we reinvigorate and massify the movement against the genocide in the imperialiost core. The union leaderships, in particular, must break with their passivity and throw all the forces of the labor movement into the battle, following the initiatives of the dockers of Fos-sur-Mer in France, who blocked arms shipments bound for Israel.

Originally published in French in Révolution Permanente on June 2

Translated and adapted for Left Voice by James Dennis Hoff