Gaza, Palestine — As international scholars have finally come to officially define Israel’s actions in Gaza over the last 23 months as genocide, we look at how Israel is using starvation to weaponize humanitarian aid in the strategy of further killings. Over the summer of 2025, Unicorn Riot heard firsthand accounts from dozens of witnesses in Gaza who describe Israel’s new aid mechanism as a death trap, see the video below — for more Palestine, visit here.
After banning UNWRA from operating in Gaza and all occupied Palestinian territories starting in February 2025, Israel systematically criminalized and dismantled the rest of Gaza’s network of civilian aid that was in place for decades. Around the same time that Israel’s ban on UNWRA’s went into effect, Israel violated a fragile ceasefire with Hamas and then fully stopped allowing the entry of aid into Gaza in March — Israel controls all access points into Gaza.
In late May 2025, the so-called ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (GHF) began distributing limited aid rations at four military-controlled stations in the Gaza Strip. This led to over 1,300 unarmed Palestinian civilians being killed by Israeli forces while trying to obtain aid at sites run by GHF from May 27 to Aug. 31, 2025.
“I consider this the invention of a new mechanism for killing the Palestinian people,” said Ahmed Refaat, who called GHF a “security agency” that’s working with “the Zionist enemy to lure Palestinians into these traps, and then giving the signal” to kill Palestinians.
“Last night alone, about 50 people were martyred and many injured,” said Abdullah Afash, “right in front of my eyes I saw a citizen being shot, yet, no one was able to help — nor could an ambulance help — because it was really hard to reach those areas.”
“They treat us like dogs. We’re dogs in their view … we gain nothing. We go and die … People face death as soon as they approach the sites. As people try to get aid they die. No one helps each other. It is death. Dead people are laid around.”
Khaled Refaat
Abdullah Naeem said he felt “they want to kill as many young people as possible. Because why did they change the method of distribution … the first method was very successful.”
“I want Anera or any other org that can help the aid reach us under the auspice of the UNRWA,” exclaimed Enaam Mahmoud.
While unloading victims killed at GHF aid sites out of his ambulance, paramedic Mohammed Ayoub said, “this is a trap for the youth.” The shooting directly targets civilians, and “most of the injuries were shots to the head,” Ayoub said.
Walking among troves of others after receiving aid west of Rafah in early June, Shadi Al-Ghazali said, “We suffered a lot to come here, we faced death, killing, every bad thing to get our children some food.”
A former U.S. soldier contracting with GHF, Anthony Aguilar, publicly came out in late July to share his experiences of participating in “war crimes” while working at GHF’s distribution sites.
Abu Muhammad Tahi told Unicorn Riot, “This is a great injustice in terms of the distribution of aid.” “There’s attacks on crowds, robbery, looting, and gunfire at citizens,” said Tahi, “while they try to reach the aid.”
In northern Gaza in late June 2025, the National Gathering of Palestinian Clans and Tribes collaboratively started to help escort aid convoys to safely distribute aid from the Zikim crossing.
“We came here to prevent our children from receiving aid from the backs of trucks. We want the trucks to be secured in barracks,” said Mukhtar Abu Iyad Abu Jubbah.
A day after the communities acted with self-determination and guarded the aid to dispense later, Israel closed the crossing, claiming they were Hamas and continued to attack the crossing, killing hundreds of unarmed aid seekers.
For more details on the weaponization of aid in Gaza, see +972Magazine’s ‘The Hunger Games’ and Forensic Architecture’s investigative report released in late August titled The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation.
The aid is weaponized after Israeli-made starvation became a tool used by the occupying forces. In May, we heard the story of four-month-old Jeneen Saleh Al-Sakafi, who died in Al-Rantisi Hospital in Gaza City in early May 2025 due to malnutrition. At least 367 Palestinians have died from hunger-related causes during Israel’s blockade of Gaza, 131 of them being children.
Meanwhile, Israel continues its globally-condemned, Western-supported colonial quest to occupy and ethnically cleanse Gaza while annexing the occupied West Bank at an escalated pace. It’s estimated that since Oct. 2023, much more than 80,000 Palestinians — with estimates in the hundreds of thousands — have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces with over 83% of the dead being civilians, according to Israeli numbers. Since August 13, at least 1,100 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s assault on Gaza City alone.
Help support Unicorn Riot contributor Mohamed El Saife as he seeks to get his family out of Gaza.
More media from Palestine in the image below.
Follow us on X (aka Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky and Patreon.
Published September 4, 2025