As Gaza faces starvation, a new plan weaponises humanitarian aid — what can be done? - ABC Religion & Ethics

Australia Broadcast Center

22-05-2025

On 19 May, the Israeli Prime Minister's office announced that, after blocking all food from entering Gaza for eleven weeks, it would allow a limited amount of 'basic food' into the besieged territory. Earlier in May, the authoritative multi-agency Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) stated that Gaza's 'entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity, with half a million people (one in five) facing starvation'.
But it was not humanitarian concern that evidently motivated Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to allow some food to reach Gaza's starving people: the move, he said, was necessary because 'a famine crisis' would interfere with 'the operational need to enable the expansion of the intense fighting to defeat Hamas'.
The food announcement came at the end of a week in which more than 370 Palestinians were killed by Israeli bombardment, adding to the more than 53,000 people killed so far during Israel's military response to the events of 7 October 2023. It came hours after Israel's military began a new round of 'extensive ground operations' in Gaza aimed at 'total victory'. Here, the 'humanitarian' gesture of allowing food into Gaza was directly tied to the military objective of continued devastation and occupation. Which is to say, Gaza's people would be prevented from starving so that they can continue to be forcibly displaced from one part of the besieged territory to another — and ultimately, according to some in the Israeli government, out of Gaza altogether.
Siege warfare and international support
In the nineteen months since Israel began its military campaign in Gaza, food has become a battleground and a weapon of war. Back in October 2023, Retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland argued that Israel should present the people of Gaza with two choices: 'to stay and to starve, or to leave'. Eiland, a former head of the Israeli National Security Council who was then an advisor to Israel's Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, proposed that Israel should impose a complete siege on the territory and destroy its water facilities; if people don't leave, he wrote, 'they will starve not because of the Israeli bombs but because there will be no water in Gaza'. As he wrote:
I believe that the only effective way to achieve that strategic goal is to impose a dramatic, continuous, and strict siege over Gaza … In order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza … People might ask whether we want the people of Gaza to starve. We do not. Therefore, the people of Gaza will have to leave — either temporarily or permanently — via the border with Egypt. When the people have evacuated, and the only ones left in Gaza are Hamas, and when food water has run out … then at some point Hamas will either be completely destroyed or surrender or agree to evacuate Gaza … Any other measure short of this will not be effective.
For months, the media debated the merits of what was euphemistically referred to as Eiland's 'controversial proposal'. His stark defence of the possibility of starving civilians as part of what could be considered an ethnic cleansing campaign conflicted with the claims of Israel's government and its supporters that Israel was facilitating aid to civilians while preventing Hamas from commandeering it. Even as Israel's Defence Minister Yoav Gallant imposed a 'complete siege' of the Gaza Strip, Western leaders either gave Israel the benefit of the doubt or were non-committal.
Asked on 10 October 2023 whether Israel's complete siege was justified, Foreign Minister Penny Wong reaffirmed Australia's stance of 'solidarity' with Israel and reiterated 'its right to defend itself'. When pressed whether 'that right to defend itself' extends 'to what looks like collective punishment', she answered:
Well, I think it's always very difficult from over here to make judgements about what security approach other countries take. We've said Israel has a right to defend itself. We call for all hostages to be released. But we also have a principal position which we would advocate to all nations and all groups in all situations, which is we would urge for the protection of civilian lives and restraint, which ensures, as far as possible, that that occurs.
Even as major human rights and humanitarian NGOs and UN figures concluded that Israel was using starvation as a method of warfare, and the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for, among other things, 'the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare', many Western politicians persisted in characterising Gaza's suffering as a 'tragic' situation.
In May 2024, former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Congress that he did 'not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance' into Gaza, despite the State Department's own Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration having concluded the opposite. The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen noted in January 2025 that the 'humanitarian situation remains grim in Gaza', but continued to provide what the genocide scholar William Schabas has termed 'very unconditional support for Israel'.
Throughout 2024, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese repeatedly stated that Australia is 'deeply concerned about the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza'. But while he called for 'safe, unimpeded and sustained access for humanitarian supplies', he did not explicitly single out Israeli for blocking that access in the first place.
In January 2025, a six-week ceasefire was negotiated between Israel and Hamas that would see dozens of hostages returned to Israel and humanitarian aid pour into Gaza. This ended on 2 March, when the Netanyahu government once again imposed a blockade to prevent all food, medicine and fuel from entering Gaza. preventing the entry of all food. This time, however, a devastated Gaza had far less capacity to withstand the siege.
Over the previous year and a half, Israel had destroyed much of the infrastructure that sustains life in Gaza: bakeries, food, stores, agricultural land, flour mills, orchards, fishing boats, water tanks, hospitals, homes, ambulances and the electricity generators and solar panels that fuel water sanitation plants and sewerage treatment facilities. In May 2025, a long list of UN experts stated:
Not only is delivering humanitarian aid one of Israel's most critical obligations as the occupying power, but its deliberate depletion of essential necessities, destroying of natural resources and calculated push to drive Gaza to the brink of collapse further corroborates its criminal responsibility. These acts, beyond constituting grave international crimes, follow alarming, documented patterns of genocidal conduct …
The world is watching. Will Member States live up to their obligations and intervene to stop the slaughter, hunger, and disease, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity that are perpetrated daily in complete impunity?
As the threat of mass civilian deaths from starvation grew imminent and UN agencies warned that their food supplies had run out, criticisms mounted even among those nations who had stood by Israel thus far. On 13 May, French President Emmanuel Macron described Israel's blocking of aid and continued bombing as 'shameful' and 'unacceptable'. On 17 May, leaders of Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovenia, Spain and Norway announced in a joint statement that they 'will not be silent in front of the man-made humanitarian catastrophe that is taking place before our eyes in Gaza'.
While the United States has not criticised Israel's siege, President Donald Trump has at least acknowledged that 'a lot of people are starving' in Gaza. It was against this background that Netanyahu announced the restoration of some food access.
From humanitarian camouflage to militarised humanitarianism
In announcing the resumption of some aid into Gaza, Prime Minister Netanyahu indicated that 'Israel will act to deny Hamas the ability to seize control of the distribution of humanitarian aid in order to ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas terrorists'. Israel's security cabinet has thus approved a new militarised aid delivery system that would displace the existing aid infrastructure — especially the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which Israel has long accused of perpetuating the idea of the Palestinian right of return, and has sought to destroy, including, most recently, by banning it from all territory it controls.
Instead, Israel has announced it will rely on a body called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Established in January and headquartered in Geneva, the GHF's marketing materials claim it will restore a 'vital lifeline' for Gaza's civilians while preventing 'aid diversion'. It proposes to establish four 'secure distribution sites', each capable of providing 300,000 people with pre-packaged food rations and hygiene kits. Israeli officials have said that civilians would be able to go to the sites to receive weekly aid packages, and the GHF has committed to making the plan operational by the end of May 2025, claiming it will provide 300 million meals over 90 days.
There have been numerous such initiatives over the past nineteen months. The Biden administration air-dropped packaged meals into north Gaza, and spent $230 million on a floating 'humanitarian pier' which operated for a total of around twenty days before the US dismantled it, claiming it had 'achieved its intended effect'. These initiatives provided what the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Francesca Albanese, called 'humanitarian camouflage', which has the effect of avoiding the central problem of Israel's siege and shielding Israel from accountability for its consequences.
Israel's latest plan is more dystopian than these earlier initiatives. On the one hand, Netanyahu has been quite explicit about the fact that provision of 'basic food' is necessary to bolster support for Israel's brutal military campaign. He said that US senators, some of whom are 'our best friends in the world', had told him that scenes of desperate hunger in Gaza risked draining support and bringing Israel to 'a red line, to a point where we might lose control'. 'It is for this reason', Netanyahu stressed, 'in order to achieve victory, we have to somehow solve this problem.'
His coalition partner, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was even more explicit: 'we have been striking Hamas and reducing Gaza to ruins unprecedented in modern warfare — and yet the world has not stopped us'. Israel would now ensure 'that only the most essential supplies reach civilians, primarily to prevent international accusations of war crimes and avoid halting our military campaign'.
But the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation represents something more alarming than humanitarian camouflage. Israel's aid plan is to weaponise 'humanitarianism' in the service of the displacement and possible permanent expulsion of the residents of Gaza from their territory. The Executive Director of the GHF, Jake Wood, is a US marine corps veteran and a former sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan. With a board of directors comprised of people with expertise in finance, US national security, corporate law and (in one instance) humanitarianism, GHF claims it will offer 'principled action and operational discipline' while operating 'in strict adherence to humanitarian principles'.
Despite being established on the initiative of the Israeli government, the GHF has attempted to distance itself from Israel's military and its destruction of Gaza by claiming that Israeli military will not be stationed in the vicinity of the distribution hubs. Instead, it says the aid distribution sites will be secured by 'experienced professionals, including personnel who previously secured the Netzarim Corridor during the recent ceasefire'.
The so-called Netzarim Corridor, which Israel established to sever northern Gaza from southern Gaza, was secured by the private security company 'UG Solutions', which is based in North Carolina, managed by former US Special Forces soldier Jameson Govoni and staffed by contractors with US special forces backgrounds. Initial reports state that the same firm will guard the GHF's aid distribution sites, alongside another private military company, Safe Reach Solutions, which is run by former CIA paramilitary head Philip Reilly.
Moreover, there are reports that Israel's cabinet has approved plans to subject Palestinians to biometric screening as a condition of receiving aid. And Netanyahu has said the distribution sites will be in 'a sterile area under IDF control'. Here, we see the apotheosis of military humanitarianism, in which private companies subordinate the provision of food to the military imperatives of a government that leading human rights, humanitarian and UN experts and leading genocide scholars all contend is carrying out a genocide.
The United States has thrown its support behind Israel's plan to by-pass the existing humanitarian system, with its Ambassador to Israel saying that Trump believes it is urgent to ensure that food is 'distributed safely inside Gaza and Hamas shouldn't be able to steal it'. Israeli media has described the aid plan as a 'US-Israeli initiative' and Trump's Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, reportedly briefed the UN Security Council on the plan and warned that the United States would withdraw funding from UN agencies that rejected the plan. Trump himself has said that the US will 'help the people of Gaza get some food', but that 'Hamas is making it impossible because they're taking everything that's brought in'.
The existing humanitarian community, in contrast, has condemned the plan. Both the UN Secretary General and the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator announced that they will not cooperate with it. In early May, the UN's aid coordination office rejected Israel's proposal to distribute aid through militarised hubs as 'a deliberate attempt to weaponise the aid'. The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief CoordinatorTom Fletcher gave a blunt message to those proposing such initiatives: '[L]et's not waste time. We already have a plan.' Fletcher stressed that the UN had the necessary people, distribution networks and trust of communities in Gaza. 'And we have the aid itself — 160,000 pallets of it — ready to move. Now.' Israel's plan, he said, 'makes starvation a bargaining chip' and provides 'a fig leaf for further violence and displacement'.
Jens Laerke, head of the UN's aid coordination office, noted that 'Israeli officials have sought to shut down the existing aid system run by 15 UN agencies and 200 NGOs and partners'. A joint statement by the Humanitarian Country Team — which brings together heads of UN entities and humanitarian NGOs — said that the plan 'contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic — as part of a military strategy'. They warned of the dangers of 'driving civilians into militarised zones to collect rations' and argued that this risked lives, including those of humanitarian workers themselves.
Given that Israel has repeatedly bombed areas it has previously designated as humanitarian zones, and that the death toll of aid workers in Gaza had reached a staggering 408 by April 2025, these fears are well-founded. The announcement of the new aid plan comes only a month after Israeli troops killed fifteen relief workers and buried them alongside their shredded ambulance in a shallow grave. Launched at the very time that Israel has intensified its military assault on Gaza and ministers proclaim the intent to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian territory, there are very good grounds to fear that aid distribution centres will be a means to displace Palestinians to areas from which they can then be expelled.
Presented with such criticisms, the GHF Executive Director Jake Wood gave an ultimatum to the existing humanitarian community:
The community is going to face a choice. This is going to be the mechanism by which aid can be distributed in Gaza. Are you willing to participate?
When asked if he had evidence for the claim that Hamas has commandeered aid on a significant scale — which is the premise of GHF's operation and appears repeatedly in its marketing material — Wood responded 'it doesn't really matter':
Israel controls access to Gaza, and if, if it is their belief that there is a large percentage of aid that is being interdicted by Hamas and other non-state actors … then we have no choice but to create a mechanism which operates in that construct and in that framing.
That framing, however, is one in which the provision of humanitarian relief is an accessory to a brutal military campaign, used to move starving people from one part of the destroyed territory to another in order to receive food.
This may not matter to 'humanitarian' mercenaries, but it should matter deeply to anyone who cares about the traditional humanitarian goal of alleviating human suffering. Famine expert Alex De Waal has described the plan as 'an individualised version of late colonial counterinsurgency', in which militaries pushed civilians into villages in which they would be fed, while starving those outside. De Waal mentions Britain's brutal counterinsurgency in Malaya in the 1950s. This was one of many situations that prompted national liberation movements and diplomats from post-colonial states to revise the laws of armed conflict in the 1970s, and ultimately to adopt the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibited the starvation of civilians as a method of war.
Breaking the siege
What opportunities are there to challenge Israel's siege? Against fatalism, there are those who have continued to resist both Israel's framing of the problem and its control over the entry of food to the territory. In early May, a 'Freedom Flotilla' that attempted to break the blockade and deliver aid to Gaza was attacked by drones in waters outside Malta, breaching its hull and causing a fire. The attack recalled Israel's 2010 attack on a previous Gaza aid flotilla, the Mavi Marmara , which was attempting to deliver ten thousand tonnes of aid to break Israel's long siege of the territory. Nine people were killed in that attack.
In May 2025, Palestinian human rights and civil society organisations — including the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the respected human rights organisation Al Haq — issued a call for a Diplomatic Humanitarian Convoy to Gaza. The call, which has now been signed by over 700 human rights and humanitarian organisations worldwide, asks states to 'reject the weaponisation of aid and Israel's planned distribution mechanisms, which militarise relief efforts and bypass UN agencies and humanitarian actors'. Instead, it calls on states to publicly commit to joining a 'humanitarian convoy' by sending 'official diplomatic missions to accompany the aid trucks into Gaza via the Rafah Crossing'. In the face of the weaponisation of aid, such a convoy, according to the call, 'would mark a historic step to break the siege, end the starvation, and affirm the world's rejection of hunger as a weapon of war.'
As Israel seeks to control and instrumentalise humanitarian aid as a weapon in Gaza, and the UN warns that '14,000 babies will die in the next 48 hours' without food aid, this call is more important than ever. On 19 May, Australia signed on to a joint donor statement calling on Israel to 'allow a full resumption of aid into Gaza immediately and enable the UN and humanitarian organisations to work independently and impartially to save lives, reduce suffering and maintain dignity'. The statement goes on:
Israel's security cabinet has reportedly approved a new model for delivering aid into Gaza, which the UN and our humanitarian partners cannot support. They are clear that they will not participate in any arrangement that does not fully respect the humanitarian principles. Humanitarian principles matter for every conflict around the world and should be applied consistently in every war-zone. The UN has raised concerns that the proposed model cannot deliver aid effectively, at the speed and scale required. It places beneficiaries and aid workers at risk, undermines the role and independence of the UN and our trusted partners, and links humanitarian aid to political and military objectives. Humanitarian aid should never be politicised, and Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change.
This is an important if awfully belated step. But it will take more than statements to prevent Israel from weaponising humanitarian aid. Any state that is 'deeply concerned' about Gaza's humanitarian situation should heed the call for a Diplomatic Humanitarian Convoy and take concrete action to break the siege.
Jessica Whyte is a Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She researches human rights, humanitarianism and economic sanctions.