Israeli efforts to build its own aid distribution infrastructure from scratch in the Gaza Strip are failing.
Palestinians are routinely being shot or trampled to death while attempting to access aid hubs in the region, yet no party seems to have concrete plans to address the disastrous trend. The majority of these deaths are occurring near sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a joint nonprofit venture between Israel and the United States.
Approximately 73 people were killed on Sunday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, a notoriously unreliable narrator because of its affiliation with Hamas, after Israeli soldiers reportedly opened fire on Palestinians near a GHF hub in the north of the Gaza Strip. This follows a similar massacre reported just the day before in the south with over 30 victims.
Coverage of these tragedies, and the many similar tragedies that have occurred in recent weeks, is compromised by conflicting accounts, a lack of visual evidence, and widespread confusion surrounding an aid system incapable of accomplishing its goals.
“The [Israeli military] efforts to protect this food distribution have been disorganized, and in some cases, I think badly organized,” Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Washington Examiner. “They seem to be getting a little better at it, but I think it’s fair to criticize … some of the initial disorganization.”
“The larger reason is, the old food distribution network, which was mostly the U.N., was an enormous resource to Hamas,” he continued. “They don’t want it changed. They don’t want the GHF or anybody else to come in in place of the U.N., and particularly in place of UNRWA. So, they’ve been willing to actually murder people to keep them away from GHF distribution points.”
The GHF was created as an alternative to the United Nations agencies that have traditionally overseen humanitarian efforts catering to Palestinians, such as the World Food Program and the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Supporters of Israel allege that U.N.-affiliated programs have been heavily compromised by Hamas and that restoring them would only serve to put aid in the hands of the terrorist group, giving it further control of the Gazan population.
Their accusations are not entirely baseless. More than a dozen countries temporarily pulled their funding for UNRWA following accusations in January 2024 that approximately 19 UNRWA staff members contributed to the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks that killed 1,200 Israelis and sparked the current conflict.
UNRWA confirmed last year that Muhammad Abu Attawi, a Hamas commander who was documented killing Israelis on Oct. 7 at the Kibbutz Re’im, had been employed by the agency since 2022.
But the string of shootings at warehouses operated by the GHF, and widespread reports of deaths caused by desperate mobs scrambling for food amid the ongoing famine, have led to international condemnation of the alternative system.
“We’re stuck with sort of competing narratives, and in some cases propaganda and press releases,” Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told the Washington Examiner. “Whether it’s the Gaza Health Ministry, which is still controlled by Hamas … or the Israelis, who are the other combatants in this war.”
The U.N., which resents being pushed to the sidelines by Israel, claims that over 1,000 people in Gaza have died in the process of seeking humanitarian aid, citing data from “medical teams, humanitarian and human rights organizations.”
“As of 21 July, we have recorded 1,054 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food,” U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman Thameen Al Kheetan said Wednesday. “766 of them were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites and 288 near UN and other humanitarian organizations’ aid convoys.”
Journalists live under constant threat of harm or death in Gaza, turning the war-torn territory into an information vacuum.
“We don’t really have hard data because agencies like the United Nations don’t have a complete picture, and then the other complicating factor is … Gaza has become one of the deadliest locations for someone to practice journalism,” Katulis said. “I find it hard to rely on any of the metrics that are out there.”
Witnesses to the weekend massacres claim that the Israeli military fired indiscriminately into the crowd after groups began running toward the distribution site.
The Israeli military itself has acknowledged multiple incidents in which soldiers were forced to fire “warning shots” after being charged by Palestinians refusing orders to halt, but it has denied that personnel have fired directly at civilians.
Further complicating the story, the GHF has confirmed some incidents and outright denied others. The group claims to have received “death threats targeting aid groups supporting humanitarian operations at GHF’s Safe Distribution Sites.”
Hamas-run organizations accuse the Israeli military of mislabeling civilians as combatants to justify military strikes and failing to acknowledge war crimes.
The Israeli military notably loosened its rules of engagement following the Oct. 7 attacks, giving commanders a broad authority to strike low-priority targets believed to be connected to Hamas with generous allotments for collateral damage.
Israel accuses Hamas’s ministry of inflating casualty reports and manufacturing civilian deaths to spur international outrage.
The Israeli military also claims that Hamas intentionally mingles its military personnel and weapons infrastructure with civilian crowds and residential buildings, utilizing Palestinians as human shields and their deaths as political capital.
“It’s just is an awful situation where it does point to, yes, Hamas still using the population as a shield and trying to weaponize death so civilians,” Katulis told the Washington Examiner. “But then also, whatever the rules of engagement are that the [Israeli military] has in trying to help distribute this aid or because a humanitarian foundation distributes aid, simply are not adequate for the protection of human life.”
While accounts differ on motivation and intention behind the shootings, they appear to agree on one reality: The GHF system is overwhelmed by the Palestinians it is ostensibly supposed to be helping.
“Israeli troops are being killed almost every day in Gaza by Hamas,” Abrams told the Washington Examiner. “So when a crowd approaches a group of Israeli soldiers, they have no way of knowing how many people in that crowd, if any, are actually armed Hamas terrorists. So, [Israel and the U.S.] tried and failed to set up a system where they tell people, ‘You can’t approach here, you can’t go beyond here.’ And this is, I think, the fair criticism of both the [Israeli military] and the GHF.”
Video documentation of GHF activities remains sorely lacking, and greater accountability could help the Israeli military refute what it claims are mischaracterizations of its “warning shots.”
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“If you’re going to set up four main distribution points, then why not have that monitored not only by still cameras, but also … you could have drones and things like that surveilling,” Katulis said.
The GHF claims to have offered a partnership with the U.N. to distribute aid, but says the organization has shot down the proposal.