‘American death zones': Trump admin announces $30m for Gaza aid program where dozens have been killed trying to get food

Independent

5 hours ago

The Trump administration has approved $30 million in funding for a controversial American non-profit to deliver aid in Gaza, even after hundreds of Palestinians have been reported killed trying to get food at its sites in recent weeks.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a U.S.-based non-profit now run by an evangelical preacher who was a White House adviser during Donald Trump's first term, launched operations in May following a months-long Israeli blockade of nearly all food and aid.
But Gaza's health ministry says that more than 500 Palestinians have been killed since then while attempting to get food at GHF sites and other aid points run by the United Nations in the north of the territory.
In response to a question about the high death toll, a State Department spokesperson denied the 'false allegations' of killings at GHF sites, telling The Independent that 'most incidents are occurring at non-GHF aid sites that operate near GHF. And none of this would be happening if Hamas would lay down their arms.'
'Hamas will stop at nothing to stay in power and disseminated false propaganda in order to do so,' they added.
But testimony collected by The Independent from Palestinians whose family members have been killed at the sites paints a picture of chaos and death. Some have described them as 'American death zones' because of the contractors who patrol them.
Salwa Al-Daghma, 50, told The Independent that her brother Khaled, a 36-year-old father of five, was killed earlier this month while trying to get food for his family.
'Hunger is the reason. There is no food. He went to feed his wife and children. He went to provide them with food, but he left and never returned,' she said. 'When relatives came to tell me something, I assumed it was my son. They told me it was my brother, so I started screaming and crying.'
'This aid is a morsel of food soaked in blood. They don't want to help us; they are actually killing us,' she added.
Iyad Abu Darabi, a 48-year-old father of six, said his son was killed when he went to get rice from a GHF distribution point.
'My son went to get some flour for his family, but came back in a coffin and a death shroud,' he said.
'This aid is a trap. It's in a barren land surrounded by fences, and the gates are opened for tens of thousands to fight over without any order. They leave people fighting each other over food,' he added.
Almost all aid that has entered Gaza since Israel lifted a total blockade now runs through the GHF, which operates four food distribution sites that are overseen by American private security contractors and situated alongside Israeli army positions, which provide security at the perimeter.
Israeli soldiers have described the sites as 'killing fields' and said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed civilians in shocking testimony released this week.
"Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire," one soldier told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
"We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces," the soldier added.
The soldier quoted by Haaretz said he was 'not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons," at the sites.
The story includes testimony from an Israeli army officer who said his unit fired machine guns, mortars and threw grenades at civilians approaching the aid distribution centers because 'a combat brigade doesn't have the tools to handle a civilian population in a war zone.'
Despite the dozens of deaths, the U.S. State Department has continued to back the GHF politically, and on Thursday said it would fund the group to deliver aid in Gaza.
'This support is simply the latest iteration of President Trump's and Secretary Rubio's pursuit of peace in the region," State Department deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott told reporters at a regular news briefing.
It is unclear why the Trump administration has decided to deliver aid to Gaza exclusively through the GHF, but former officials from the U.S. state department and USAID who have worked on emergency aid delivery described the new system as 'grotesque', 'dangerous' and part of a larger plan to use aid to control the movement of Palestinians.
'What is so infuriatingly tragic about this is that it's playing out exactly as any experienced humanitarian could have predicted,' said Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw famine relief for three years during the Obama administration and is now president of Refugees International.
'When you have an aid distribution model that is premised on forcing huge crowds of desperately hungry people to cluster directly adjacent to IDF military installations, you're going to get massacres,' he added.
Mr Konyndyk said it was 'not a coincidence' that most of the distribution sites were in the south of Gaza, at a time when the Israeli army was trying to force Palestinians out of the north of the territory.
'A basic principle of humanitarian response is you move the aid as close to you can to where the people are. They're doing the opposite of that, the diametric opposite of that, which suggests that they want to draw people to the south,' he said.
'I think that is highly suggestive of the longer-term agenda here,' he added.
Stacey Gilbert, who resigned from the state department in 2024 over the Biden administration's failure to hold Israel accountable for blocking aid to Gaza, also believes the sites are located primarily in the south to draw Palestinians away from the north.
'This is trying to draw them all to one area, to get them away from the area that Israel doesn't want them in,' she said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz hit out at the Haaretz story in a joint statement, describing the testimonies as 'contemptible blood libels.'
'These are malicious falsehoods designed to defame the IDF, the most moral military in the world,' the statement said.
The IDF said it is 'operating to allow and facilitate the distribution of humanitarian aid by the American 'Gaza Humanitarian Foundation' (GHF), and to secure the routes leading to the distribution centers, in order to allow the aid to reach the civilians rather than Hamas.'
It added that it 'strongly' rejected the accusations raised in the Haaretz article.
'The IDF did not instruct the forces to deliberately shoot at civilians, including those approaching the distribution centers. To be clear, IDF directives prohibit deliberate attacks on civilians,' it said in a statement.
The GHF's Interim Executive Director John Acree said in a statement provided to The Independent that 'there have been no incidents or fatalities at or in the immediate vicinity of any of our distribution sites.'
'However, IDF is tasked with providing safe passage for aid-seekers to all humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza, including GHF. GHF is not aware of any of these incidents but these allegations are too grave to ignore and we therefore call on Israel to investigate them and transparently publish the results in a timely manner,' he added.
Acree said the GHF was 'grateful for the support from President Trump and his administration in getting life-saving aid directly into the hands of the Palestinian people in Gaza'.
The GHF's current leader, Johnnie Moore, an evangelical preacher who was a White House adviser in the first Trump administration, said in a post on X on Thursday that the group has delivered more than 46 million meals to Gazans since it began its operations in May.
Israel imposed a full blockade on aid into Gaza when a ceasefire collapsed in March, pushing the population to the edge of famine. When aid is finally permitted to enter, many convoys are overwhelmed by hungry families and civilians in desperation, and armed gangs have reportedly exploited the chaos on occasion to steal the aid.