“Hunger slowly crushes you. It feels like dying alone in a desert that no foot has ever touched. I cannot sleep properly or sit still long enough to read. I feel I’m coming apart.” These words were written by Palestinian poet Husam Maarouf in late May 2025, from the location where he was sheltering in north Gaza. “I survive on one meal a day. So does everyone in Gaza. A meal without protein, without calcium, without bread, without taste. A meal stripped of nutrients and meaning,” Maarouf said.
For nearly two years, Palestinian health officials and humanitarian agencies have warned about the inevitable increase of food insecurity and the potential for famine as a result of the “complete siege” imposed by the Israeli government shortly after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. A little over two months after the attack, humanitarian agencies accused Israel of using “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” by “deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.”
In November 2024, a UN Special Committee argued that Israel’s military campaign was consistent with genocide and was “intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury, using starvation as a method of war and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian population.” Since then, a rapidly growing number of human rights scholars and groups have reached the same conclusion, while South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice continues—and one of the justifications for the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is his use of “starvation as a method of warfare.”
Yet Israel’s tight grip on all movement in or out of Gaza has persisted, as has its campaign of unending destruction. Despite needing hundreds of trucks of aid per day, long-term tracking from October 7, 2023 through January 15, 2025 showed there has not been a single day during that period when adequate aid was allowed into the Strip, with some days when only a dozen trucks entering the besieged territory.
In response to Israel’s unwillingness to allow the entry and distribution of aid, over the past eighteen months, Israel’s allies attempted inefficient and ultimately embarrassing workarounds, including the derided floating pier installed by the Biden administration that ended up facilitating the delivery of less than one single day’s worth of aid and the aid air drops, which killed multiple Palestinians due to technical failures.
Rather than compel Israel to permit aid and accept a ceasefire, global powers have continued to watch the increasing suffering in Gaza, and the accelerating Israeli land grabs and violence in the West Bank. Predictably, Israel has thus continued its policy of collective punishment, depriving Palestinians in Gaza of the resources needed for survival, primarily food.
Although Israel, supported as it is by ironclad financial and political aid from the United States, created the conditions for mass starvation across Gaza, it also decided that it alone would be allowed to intervene in the crisis, in what the United Nations called “a deliberate attempt to weaponize the aid.”
The Inhumanity of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
In early March 2025, during a rare and too-short period of ceasefire, Israel implemented its harshest period of siege yet, imposing a full ban on the entry of aid and commercial goods into Gaza. Amnesty International called the action a continuation of Israel’s “policy of deliberately imposing conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza calculated to bring about their physical destruction; this constitutes an act of genocide.”
The deadly conditions created by the siege quickly became apparent. Just two months into the period of Israel’s new restrictions, the United Nations reported that at least 57 children had died from malnutrition, and predicted that if the siege persisted, nearly 71,000 children under five years old could become acutely malnourished over the next 11 months. In mid-May 2025, the World Health Organization warned that essential medical supplies were running out, and that enough supplies remained to treat only 500 children with acute malnutrition.
Israel’s allies began to vocally criticize the siege on Gaza and its obvious humanitarian impact. After nearly three months, Netanyahu finally conceded to permitting a small amount of aid into Gaza, acknowledging that he had been pressured to do so by allies, who he said told him, “There is one thing we cannot endure—pictures of mass famine. This is something we are unable to witness. We will not be able to support you.”
Despite witnessing nearly two years of mass death and destruction, Israel’s allies apparently found it difficult to justify their continuous funding and defense of an actor that is impervious to mere condemnation and that openly embraces collective punishment at its cruelest and most base level—withholding food from a population that it has killed, maimed, and displaced. But it was not difficult enough for them to stop doing so, or to reject Israel’s proposed “solution” to the famine: a U.S.- and Israeli-backed “private foundation” called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is using private military contractors, rather than credible, experienced humanitarian agencies, to run aid distribution facilities in Gaza, in coordination with Israel.
The link between the GHF and the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza is explicit.
Skepticism and distrust from Gazans and their allies came immediately. A New York Times investigation found that the GHF was created based on a proposal by Israeli officials, military officers, and members of the Israeli business sector just weeks after October 7. The goal was to ensure that Israel did not have to fulfill its humanitarian obligations as an occupying power, and to allow Israel to bypass the aid distribution mechanism of the United Nations, which Israel has spent decades attacking.
A collective of aid organizations critiqued the proposed plan, calling it an affront to humanitarian principles that would set a dangerous precedent of politicizing and militarizing the delivery of aid. “We have supplies ready. We have trained medical staff. We have the expertise. What we don’t have is the access–or the guarantee by Israeli authorities that our teams can safely do their jobs,” the groups’ statement said.
But the GHF plan moved forward, and it did not take long for the predicted violence and displacement to begin. In its first days of operation, Israeli forces killed dozens of Palestinians traveling to the distribution sites, and a UN agency called the GHF distribution mechanism a “death trap.” One man who came to get aid while a site was attacked told the New York Times, “It’s like a race for food.” Another man told the BBC, “We went there thinking we would get aid to feed our children, but it turned out to be a trap, a killing. I advise everyone: don’t go there.” By mid-June 2025, at least 300 people had been killed at or near GHF sites, and more than 2,600 more had been wounded.
Apart from the violence, the link between the GHF and the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza is explicit. Since October 7, 2023, endless Israeli “evacuation orders” have compelled Palestinians to flee large swaths of Gaza and cluster in so-called humanitarian zones (which have themselves been bombed), initially in the south of Gaza and now increasingly in only the coastal areas in the southwest of the Strip.
The GHF has established just four distribution sites, all in the south of Gaza, compared to the more than 400 sites that were operating in the UN aid system. The massive drop in the number of aid sites forces ill and starving Palestinians to travel for food, some for long distances and often across areas that Israeli forces had established as military zones. As of June 17, 2025, only three GHF sites were open. UNICEF warned that it was “dangerous to ask civilians to go into militarized zones to collect rations” and that forcing Palestinians to leave their homes and towns for food created an “impossible choice between displacement and death.”
On multiple occasions, GHF has intermittently closed aid distribution sites while many families seeking aid were unaware of the closures. After three straight days of massacres at aid sites, the GHF paused operations entirely for 24 hours. Even when the sites were operating, Gazans showed up on multiple days in a row without securing food because of chaos and shortages of aid parcels. Some reported that despite their hunger, they stopped attempting to access the distribution sites because they were too malnourished to travel or were frightened of being killed on the road.
The massacres at the aid distribution points have been so consistent and at such a scale that they quickly overwhelmed Gaza’s already destroyed health system. Just weeks since GHF began implementation, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a statement: “In the last two weeks, the Red Cross Field Hospital in Rafah has had to activate its mass casualty incident procedure 12 times, receiving high numbers of patients with gunshot and shrapnel wounds…a majority of patients from the recent incidents said they had been trying to reach assistance distribution sites.”
As the humanitarian toll mounted, GHF’s lack of transparency and expertise caused multiple bureaucratic and logistical failures. Before its first distribution site was even open, the executive chairman of the group, Jake Wood, resigned, claiming that the work of the group compromised his commitment to “neutrality, impartiality and independence.” Wood’s replacement is former Trump advisor Johnnie Moore, who refused to disclose the foundation’s donors. An American consulting firm contracted with the GHF, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), canceled its contract and the lead BCG partner on the project was put on leave around the same time as the massacre at the first distribution site.
Aid as a Mechanism of Forced Displacement
Despite widespread assumptions about refugees, asylum seekers, and other populations fleeing harrowing conditions, it is difficult to force a population to leave their homelands. Evidence from other conflict-affected populations demonstrates that it takes extraordinary circumstances for people to leave behind everything that they have known for the unknown, knowing that their return may be unlikely or impossible. A government or other actor that wishes to displace a population must create conditions that are so unbearable that the known reality of staying becomes worse than the unknown reality of leaving.
The Israeli government has no intention to allow Palestinians to return and rebuild.
For Palestinians, their long history of forced displacement, punctuated by the Nakba of 1948 and the ongoing Nakba since, makes the prospect of leaving one’s home or town especially fraught. Yet for nearly 80 years, Isarael has demonstrated that there are multiple tactics for what dozens of its politicians and other policymakers have explicitly confirmed are their goals when it comes to the Palestinians—to continue to push them off their historic lands.
Indeed, Netanyahu and many of his sitting ministers have openly affirmed that their current military aims have little to do with the remaining Israeli hostages.
The complete destruction of Gaza, as evidenced by on-the-ground reporting by Palestinian journalists, drone footage, and geospatial analysis, makes it obvious that the Israeli government has no intention to allow Palestinians to return and rebuild. The jubilation of Israel’s settler movement, as well as the participation of senior government ministers in conferences called “Preparing to Settle Gaza,” further indicate Israel’s intention to enact long-held plans to expand territory throughout Gaza and the West Bank.
Indeed, several Israeli ministers have made clear that the destruction and deprivation of Gaza was the intention. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich commented that because “Gaza will be entirely destroyed… [civilians] will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.” His remarks came just days after the Israeli security cabinet adopted a plan for what they called “voluntary transfer for Gaza residents who express interest in moving to third countries.”
Intervening in the Gaza Famine
Although governments and multilateral institutions have failed to intervene during Gaza’s starvation crisis, or indeed at any other point of the ongoing genocide, several grassroots efforts have tried to break the siege. In June 2025, thousands of activists from around the world attempted to travel to Gaza by land through north Africa, demanding an end to the siege and the entry of aid, in what has been called the Global March to Gaza. As they arrived in Egypt, Egyptian authorities detained and arrested hundreds of them, although organizers affirmed that the march would continue.
These arrests came just days after the Madleen, a small ship launched from Italy by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, headed toward Gaza’s shores to bring aid and to call for an end of the siege. According to the Coalition, Israel’s military “attacked” and “unlawfully boarded” the ship, and detained and deported most of the vessel’s crew and passengers, including Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and European Parliament member Rima Hassan.
As for the GHF itself, at the time of this writing, it is still only operating three or four distribution sites—despite claiming for weeks that it was planning to open many more. It asserts to have distributed 3.1 million meals in 55,000 boxes, most at the site in Khan Younis, which is far below the well-established need. The group continues to promote confusing and potentially deadly messaging, including telling Palestinians that their distribution sites will be open during times that the Israeli military has said the access routes are closed.
Meanwhile, Palestinians are still being massacred daily trying to retrieve aid at GHF sites. After the June 16 killing of 23 people at an aid site, the head of UNRWA denounced the GHF as a “lethal distribution system.” The day before, following another massacre of Gazans at a GHF site, the spokesperson for the UN Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs called the GHF “a failure,” much like the American pier and the aid drops that came before it. The US-based Center for Constitutional Rights has notified the GHF of its “potential legal liability for complicity in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against Palestinians.”
After Israel started bombing Iran on June 13, 2025, and Iran retaliated with missile barrages, some have cynically argued that Israel’s new war front (following its airstrikes and ground offensives in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen since October 2023) takes pressure off the need to manage the humanitarian crisis that it has created in Gaza. They cite the cessation of food aid shipments to Gaza shortly after Israel’s first attacks on Iran.
It is difficult to imagine a strategy more cynical than the current one executed by Israel. It has facilitated starvation in a besieged population under constant bombardment, engineered the complete capture of the humanitarian mechanisms that can aid them, forced them to leave their homes for the chance of securing that aid, and attacked them when they did. Israel has also created a system of “voluntary” migration for those who survive, all while openly declaring the intention to settle their land once they have been expelled.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that this is exactly what is happening in Gaza, global media is incapable of accurately covering the magnitude of the moment. For now, Israel’s allies have reverted to their standard talking points in defending Israeli actions. While such governments have forgotten about the famine and ethnic cleansing they were condemning just weeks ago, history will not forget their complicity.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Anas Mohammed
