Since the end of May, the Israeli army has killed more than 350 unarmed Gazans desperately walking or running to food distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The so-called charity was founded in February. Now, massacres occur every day at GHF food stations.

Israel first totally blocked, then brutally controlled all food entering Gaza. Until the end of March, there were 25 bakeries in the enclave making bread with World Food Program (WFP) flour. Until early May, there were dozens of community soup kitchens supported by the WFP and by the World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity, whose workers Israel has attacked twice. These soup kitchens were providing approximately half of Gaza’s population with a meager diet that just barely allowed them to survive. From March 2, Israel strangled the WFP, the WCentralK, and other aid organizations, exhausting their food stocks. 

Israel is using starvation as part of a policy of forced population transfer and mass murder. In mid-May, Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We must not reach a point of starvation — both as a matter of fact but also as a diplomatic issue.” A week earlier, Amit Halevi of the prime minister’s Likud party told a doctor in the Knesset, “I’m not sure you’re speaking for us when you say we want to treat every child and every woman … When fighting a group like this, the distinctions that exist in a normal world don’t exist.”

The Israeli and U.S. governments transferred responsibility for food aid to the GHF in late May. The supposed charity promised to create four sites to distribute food, medicine, and soap to the Gazan population of over two million people, claiming that private security guards, not the Israeli army, would control these stations. 

In reality, the GHF is an excuse for shutting down organizations that actually aided the population — a fig leaf to which U.S. and European media could extend enough willful credence.

At the end of May, the GHF opened two stations in the rubble of Rafah, in the extreme south, and one more in Israel’s militarized Netzarim Corridor across the center of the Strip — equivalent to promising to feed Houston with three grocery stores. This scheme forces the population to move southward. 

American armed guards place limited quantities of forty-pound boxes of food on the ground inside wire fences. Crowds are herded in and out, so they have to compete for their families’ survival. This has the effect of particularly starving elderly, sick, wounded, and disabled people, single mothers, and orphans.

Aid as a Genocidal Trap

The GHF has roots in both Israeli military strategy and U.S. mercenary companies. The IDF announced via statements to Haaretz that it intended to occupy three quarters of Gaza and “concentrate” two million civilians into three restricted areas. Food distribution by “an American company” was part of this plan. IDF sources promised to ration food distribution and to station Israeli soldiers “dozens of meters behind” the new aid personnel.

In mid-2024, Yotam HaCohen, an assistant to a key IDF general, published an article in a military journal arguing that Israel should, “manage the distribution of aid,” using “non-state contractor companies” to displace existing international aid organizations. Philip Reilly, the head of the CIA in Afghanistan in 2008-09, and later a vice president of Constellis, the merger of Blackwater and several other U.S. mercenary firms, met throughout 2024 with HaCohen and other Israeli officials.

In January 2025, Reily founded a company called Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) with investment from private wealth firm McNally Capital. The GHF “charity” contracted this firm, incorporated one month before itself, to manage its operations. The GHF hired another company called UG Solutions, run by a former U.S. special forces soldier who once posted that he was a “degenerate” who wanted revenge on Middle Easterners. 

Earlier this year, UG Solutions recruited special forces veterans at a pay rate of $1,100 per day. GHF’s original director, U.S. military veteran and philanthropist Jake Woods, resigned before it began operations, saying he could not uphold “humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.” Days earlier, he had written to the Israeli government that he would not demand aid-seeker identification, and requested to open aid stations north of the Netzarim Corridor. The GHF replaced him with evangelical Christian minister Johnnie Moore — an associate of Jerry Falwell, administrator at Liberty University, and staunch public ally of Donald Trump since 2016.

Several organizations have warned that the GHF—IDF joint operation is a cynical ploy to continue killing Gazan civilians. The U.N. and most major aid groups refuse to work with the GHF on the grounds that it is subordinate to Israeli and U.S. policy. Doctors Without Borders warned the GHF scheme would “entrench the Israeli occupation … conditioning lifesaving assistance on displacement and compliance.”

The IDF has repeatedlydenied that it shot aid seekers, claiming that it only fired “warning shots” near small numbers of “suspect” individuals for walking on unpermitted ground. The U.S. State Department dismissed the idea that the Israeli army had done anything unethical and again endorsed the idea that the IDF would investigate its own actions.

After June 3, extensive evidence from Red Cross doctors and civilian victims proved that Israeli forces fired for long periods of time with tank-mounted machine guns, armed drones, and other weapons. Yet bourgeois media continue to relay IDF press statements. The IDF constantly blamed the unarmed Palestinians it killed and wounded. These mass killings are nowdaily events.

U.S. Government Sponsors the Genocide

The deployment of U.S. mercenaries shows how deeply the U.S. government is involved in this genocide. Mainstream media cynically acknowledge these bloody events while obscuring the responsibility. After the IDF had killed dozens upon dozens of aid seekers, a director for the Israeli Foreign Ministry called the GHF aid “a dramatic success.” 

Over the next three days, Gaza went through an internet access blackout apparently caused by IDF destruction of a main telecom cable.

Zeteo has published an anonymous statement from a horrified GHF guard, confirming U.S. contractors are armed with pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, flash bang grenades, and pepper spray, and claiming the operation is badly organized and provides no access to water.

People sometimes have to travel miles to get to the sites – and that means through Israeli-controlled areas. Any excuse the military can come up with to say someone is a threat, they’ll take. There’s not really any international media in these areas, and the West doesn’t really want to believe the Palestinian media, so you get to this point where the truth itself is murky. All the while, all I’ve heard all day is Israeli tanks, machine guns, snipers, and bombs. But never any fire from the opposite direction.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza — including the naked weaponization of hunger and the replacement of actual aid organizations with the fraudulent GHF — would be impossible without the support of U.S. and European allies. We need a strong international solidarity movement of support for the Palestinian people. Part of this is exposing the hideous lie of the GHF.

Acts of solidarity by Moroccan, French, Italian, and Greek port workers, a demand for embargo from Brazilian oil workers, the solidarity flotilla seized by Israel in international waters, and the protest caravan repressed by the Egyptian dictatorship suggest accumulating conditions for internationalist action. We need to protest with working-class methods.