
In recent weeks, two significant developments have dominated the news from Gaza. One is the daily deadly violence surrounding the operations of the new Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a highly controversial Israeli and -US-backed initiative to replace the United Nations-led system of delivering aid to what has been called the “hungriest place on earth.” The second, related, development is the widespread hunger and even starvation of Gaza’s 2.1 million people. This crisis, ongoing since 2024 and made even more severe by Israel’s March-May 2025 total blockade on food, fuel, water, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies into the ravaged coastal enclave, has unfolded against the backdrop of Israel’s 21-month-long military campaign in Gaza. Far from being a “humanitarian response operation” to address the forced starvation of Gazans, GHF’s food distribution since its late May 2025 launch has been humiliating, totally inadequate to the scale of the crisis—and, most alarming, deadly.
Deadly Aid
The daily scenes at GHF distribution sites have been extremely chaotic, with thousands of hungry Palestinians rushing to reach the fenced aid sites, desperately trying to grab whatever they can get of the dry-food boxes. While the United Nations had operated hundreds of distribution points in Gaza, GHF has opened only four sites—three west of the ruined southern city of Rafah and one near the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza, all within the Israeli-imposed military buffer zone.
The highly controversial GHF distribution sites were set up on destroyed areas of Gaza and are under the control of the Israeli military, with whom GHF closely coordinates. The sites are run by armed American private security contractors who lack familiarity with the place and its inhabitants. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), as of July 13, 2025, 674 Gazans have been killed in the vicinity of GHF sites. OCHA has reported that most of the deaths, along with the wounding of thousands of Gazans, have been caused by Israeli troops who have “shot or shelled” Gazans trying to reach GHF distribution sites.” June 17, which saw Israel kill 70 people and wound many others, was the deadliest single day of GHF operations yet, but the violence has been constant. The widespread killings are unprecedented in an aid-delivery context, even in a war zone. The specter of starving civilians walking long distances, often through active combat zones, trying to reach the few GHF hubs only to be shot by Israeli troops is a daily recurrence. Some of GHF’s American contractors reportedly also have used live ammunition against Gazans trying to reach food handouts. Indeed, Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA commissioner-general, called GHF a “death trap.”
In a post on social media, the country director of American Near East Refugee Aid described GHF’s distribution method as follows: “Place the food in an open space and then let the starving masses come and fight for some rations. Those who are strong enough, determined enough, and able enough will get the prize. This is not some scene from a movie. This is Gaza.” A more detailed and even more horrific account, with graphic photos, from inside one of GHF sites was reported by National Public Radio’s producer living in the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s new GHF system is designed to bypass the existing UN agencies and other international aid groups, which have a long history of running an extensive network in Gaza providing humanitarian assistance to the enclave’s 2.1 million people through hundreds of distribution points. Israel has justified its use of GHF instead of the well-established international system by accusing Hamas of systematically diverting humanitarian aid. This claim, however, has been firmly rejected by senior humanitarian officials including David Satterfield, the former US special Middle East envoy for humanitarian issues, and Cindy McCain, the executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP).
The UN agencies and other relief groups in Gaza have boycotted GHF, condemning it as militarized, unsafe, and failing to adhere to the core humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence. On top of these severe problems, unlike the UN and other international NGOs that have long provided aid to Gaza, GHF utterly fails to address the scale of the population’s needs. As James Hoobler, a humanitarian policy advisor at Oxfam America, noted, “It doesn’t do shelter. It doesn’t do water. It doesn’t do sanitation. It doesn’t do healthcare, and it doesn’t do fuel.” In mid-May 2025, the UN presented a “detailed and principled five-stage plan” to deliver large-scale humanitarian aid to Gaza, but Israel ignored it and launched GHF.
The Big Picture
Some context is necessary to understand how GHF is related to Gaza’s starvation crisis and Israel’s post-war plan for Gaza.
Prior to October 2023, Gaza had been under an Israeli siege since Hamas’s armed takeover of the coastal enclave in June 2007. The siege precipitated a dire humanitarian crisis affecting all aspects of life in the Strip. But the situation got significantly worse after October 7, 2023, when Israel, in brutal revenge for Hamas’s and other Palestinian armed groups’ attack on southern Israel, imposed a complete blockade on the Strip and launched what expects have described as the most destructive military campaign in recent history.
The war has drastically transformed the geography and the demography of the Gaza Strip. Israel’s massive firepower has spared nothing. As of July 16, 2025, Israel has killed a reported 58,000 people in Gaza. Israel has badly damaged or destroyed residential buildings, entire neighborhoods, public institutions, and basic infrastructure across the entire Gaza Strip. Some ninety percent of the Gaza population has been forcibly displaced, often multiple times. All this created a humanitarian catastrophe that has left Gaza, in the words of the International Committee of the Red Cross, as “hell on earth.”
Israel’s cumbersome inspection procedures and tight restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza compounded the post-October 7 humanitarian crisis, and made aid operations, according to the UN, “one of the most obstructed in recent history.” Before the war, as many as 500 truckloads of commercial and humanitarian supplies entered Gaza every day. From mid-October 2023 through mid-January 2025, an average of only 105 truckloads a day were allowed to enter the enclave, according to the UN data. This situation created severe shortages of food and caused a large segment of the population across Gaza, around 1.85 million people, to experience high levels of acute food insecurity. The situation was particularly dire in northern Gaza, with the UN describing conditions there as apocalyptic.
A report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that between October 2023 and December 2024, the average Gazan intake of nutrition was 72 percent of the minimum of what a human body needs to survive. Life expectancy in Gaza during the same period dropped by about half (46.3 percent) from its prewar level, according to a study published by the authoritative medical journal The Lancet. The FAO/WFP “Hunger Hotspots” report, released on October 31, 2024, identified Gaza as one of the five “highest alert” territories facing severe food insecurity, alongside Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti, and Mali. The FAO/WFP report specifically highlighted the situation in Gaza as the “most intense,” in which 91 percent of the population faces crisis or worse levels of food insecurity. In the same month, October 2024, the UN-accredited Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) found acute malnutrition in Gaza was ten times higher than before the war. As the UN Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri wrote, “Never in post-war history had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.”
Israel’s Gaza Plan
This was the situation on January 19, 2025, when a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas began, providing Gaza with much-needed respite. The lull in fighting, however, was short-lived.
Two developments occurred during the ceasefire that significantly changed Israel’s military plans for Gaza. First, Hamas’s surprise resurgence demonstrated it was still in control, despite Israel’s 470 days of brutal military assault. This was obvious during the show of force that Hamas armed militants put on during the handover ceremonies of some Israeli captives, a display that was intended to challenge Israel’s claim of having badly degraded Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. Second, on February 4, 2025, President Donald Trump announced, during a White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that he intended for the United States to “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip, and to transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”—after relocating its 2.1 million Palestinians to other countries.
These developments, along with dynamics in internal Israeli politics that advanced extreme right policies, led to a shift in Israel’s goal for the Gaza war: to take full security control over Gaza and to pave the way for the implementation of Trump’s Riviera project. To this end, Israel’s military plan seeks to turn 75 percent of the enclave into an uninhabitable security zone controlled by Israel and to force the entire Gaza population onto the remaining 25 percent of the land. “That’s the plan. We’re not hiding this,” Netanyahu said.
To advance this plan, on March 2, 2025, Israel imposed a total blockade on the entry of all humanitarian aid and commercial supplies into Gaza. Two weeks later, Israel unilaterally ended the ceasefire by resuming large-scale military attacks on the enclave and recapturing the areas from which it had withdrawn during the brief pause in fighting.
Israel aims to forcibly displace—through massive arial bombardment, intensive ground offensive, and repeated evacuation orders—the entire Gazan population and concentrate Gazans into three small “humanitarian zones” in the remaining 25 percent of the Strip. On May 5, 2025, Israel launched a major military operation, dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots,” to execute its strategy.
Israel is using intensified airstrikes and ground operations across the Gaza Strip; expanding the security buffer zone inside Gaza by razing all existing structures and forcing the population to relocate; and taking direct control of food aid distribution in Gaza through the use of armed private contractors—hence GHF.
Disintegrating Gaza
Nearly eighty days of total blockade on the entry of all aid into Gaza significantly exacerbated the existing humanitarian crisis and led to widespread starvation and hunger among the enclave’s population. On May 19, 2025, under international pressure, Israel partially lifted its March blockade, allowing limited aid shipments of flour and other goods, but no fuel, to enter Gaza, and for distribution by only a select number of UN agencies and international aid organizations. Most of this aid, however, was intercepted and offloaded from trucks by hungry civilians and by armed gangs before reaching the designated distribution points or storage facilities. The March-May 2025 blockade of all humanitarian aid into Gaza severely worsened the already desperate situation, bringing the entire population of the war-shattered enclave closer to the brink of famine, as WFP warned on June 10, 2025.
The devastating impact on the population’s physical and mental health is evident. All indicators that registered deterioration in the pre-ceasefire period continued to worsen. According to a May 12, 2025, IPC snapshot for the Gaza Strip, the entire population of 2.1 million people faced high levels of life-threatening food insecurity, with half a million people (one in five) facing starvation. This finding was supported by the data simulation from FAO, which pointed out that the average Gazan is eating per day just “67 percent of what a human body needs to survive.” By June 2025, WFP reported that most families were “surviving on just one nutritiously poor meal per day.” In July 2025, a new WFP assessment found that nearly one in three people in Gaza was not eating for days.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s capacity to domestically produce food has been nearly destroyed by the war. An April 2025 assessment by the FAO and the UN Satellite Center found that less than 5 percent of the Gaza Strip’s cropland area remains available for cultivation. In May 2025, acute malnutrition among children under five was found to be three times higher than the number of diagnosed children since the March 2 blockade. The long-term impact of malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), “can last a lifetime in the form of stunted growth, impaired cognitive development, and poor health.” The WHO has warned that “without enough nutritious food, clean water, and access to health care, an entire generation will be permanently affected.”
Doubts Over Israel’s Gaza Plan
Twenty-one months of brutal war has brought mounting death, destruction, displacement, and deprivation to Gaza, transforming the coastal terrain “into a dystopian nightmare.” On top of the deaths, which some experts estimate may actually be closer to 100,000 than the reported 58,000, most of the territory’s residential buildings and civilian infrastructure have been reduced to rubble. Repeated mass displacement has forced Gazans to seek refuge in overcrowded makeshift shelters in open areas, and in the streets, without clean water, sanitation, or electricity. Starvation and water insecurity among the besieged population are rising at alarming rates, and the whole humanitarian situation in Gaza, according to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, is reaching “horrific proportions.”
Israel’s plan for Gaza, meanwhile, is advancing at full speed. As of July 2, 2025, 85 percent of the Strip’s territory is under Israel direct military control, active evacuation orders, or both. Yet, beyond continuing to inflict an unimaginable suffering on Gaza’s traumatized civilians, it is not clear how Israel intends to achieve its declared objectives.
There are at least three reasons to doubt that Israel will achieve its goals. First, as described earlier, Israel’s attempt to control humanitarian aid to Gaza has turned its sponsored-GHF distribution sites into killing fields. Second, Israel’s intent to facilitate “voluntary emigration” (a euphemism for expulsion) from Gaza to other countries has, so far, found no takers willing to receive displaced Gazans. Third and most important, the Israeli military plan to confine 2.1 million people within 25 percent of the enclave’s land, thus increasing the pre-war population density (already one of the highest in the world) fourfold, from about 6,000 to 24,000 people per square kilometer (0.39 square mile), is spatially inconceivable in a largely uninhabitable Gaza.
Uncertain Future?
Gaza’s catastrophic humanitarian conditions and Israel’s plan to reoccupy Gaza call for an entirely different approach to the enclave’s unending suffering. This must start with an immediate halt to Israel’s military campaign, the dismantling of the dangerous and unworkable GHF; the lifting of the blockade; the opening of all border crossings; the return of the UN agencies and other NGOs to resume their role in aid distribution throughout Gaza; and the release of all remaining Israeli hostages. These steps, if taken concurrently, should provide immediate relief to Gaza’s deepening humanitarian crisis.
This, obviously, cannot be done in an efficient and sustainable manner under continued war conditions, which is why a negotiated permanent end to the war, based on workable security and governance arrangements for a stable postwar Gaza, is essential. This is no doubt a challenge, but no lasting change to Gaza’s misfortune can be secured without it. Only then can the restoration of life-sustaining services, the rehabilitation of basic infrastructure, and, eventually, the long-term recovery and reconstruction process of the decimated Palestinian enclave, commence. This complicated endeavor, given the massive urban destruction across the Strip, could take several decades to achieve.
Things may go in a completely different direction, however, and Gaza’s fast decent into destitution, anarchy, and deadly violence may be the future scenario of whatever remains of the battered coastal territory. The July 6 announcement by the Israeli minister of defense of plans to build a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, in which to concentrate the entire Gaza population, and, quite possibly, to drip-feed them from GHF-like centers, is part of this doomsday scenario. Israel’s plan to destroy and eventually depopulate Gaza could bring about such a tragic outcome. Central to the horrific picture are the uncompromising nature of far-right Israeli politics, an Israeli public, still traumatized by the deadly events of October 7, that is indifferent to Gaza’s immense suffering, and western powers that refuse to use the their diplomatic, economic, and military leverage to change the course of events in Gaza.
Which way Gaza’s future will go remains, at this point, highly uncertain.
Mohammed Samhouri, a Gaza-born Palestinian economist and academic, is a former senior economic advisor in the Palestinian Authority and a former senior research and teaching fellow at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
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: Anas Mohammed