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Al Jazeera
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Gaza aid sites branded ‘human slaughterhouses' under deadly Israeli fire
At least 13 Palestinians have been killed and more than 150 injured after Israeli troops and American security contractors opened fire on crowds waiting for food near two aid distribution sites in Gaza, one east of Rafah and another near the Wadi Gaza Bridge. Sunday's killings are the latest in a series of attacks on civilians seeking food at aid centres operated by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-led initiative backed by Israel in Israeli-controlled zones. More than 130 people have now been killed and more than 700 wounded by Israeli troops while desperately trying to access meagre food parcels for their hungry families from the aid sites since the GHF programme began on May 27. At least nine people are still missing. In a statement, Gaza's Government Media Office condemned the distribution sites as 'human slaughterhouses', accusing Israeli forces of luring desperate civilians to their deaths. 'These are war crimes and crimes against humanity,' the statement said, urging an independent international probe and an immediate suspension of GHF's delivery model. The drive backed by Israel and the United States has faced growing criticism from human rights organisations and the United Nations for violating basic humanitarian standards and bypassing organisations that have decades of experience distributing aid to the entire population of the besieged enclave. The latest bloodshed reportedly began around 6am local time (03:00 GMT), as hundreds of Palestinians stalked by starvation gathered near the aid point in the al-Alam area of Rafah. Witnesses said people had started forming queues as early as 4:30am, desperate to get food before the site became overwhelmed. 'After about an hour and a half, hundreds moved toward the site, and the army opened fire,' said witness Abdallah Nour al-Din. The Israeli military later said its troops opened fire on individuals who 'continued advancing in a way that endangered the soldiers', and claimed the area had been designated an 'active combat zone' at night. However, survivors insist the shooting took place after sunrise. 'This is a trap for us, not aid,' said Adham Dahman, speaking to the Associated Press from Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza with a bloodied bandage on his chin. He said a tank fired towards the crowd, and people were left scrambling for cover. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said that 13 wounded individuals and one person who was dead on arrival came to its clinic in the al-Mawasi area of southern Khan Younis today. MSF said the injured and dead were 'carried in donkey carts, on bicycles, or on foot'. The wounded were all men between the ages of 17 and 30. The victims said they were shot in the Shakoush area while travelling to a food distribution site in Saudi village. Footage from outside the hospital showed mourning families weeping over blood-soaked shrouds, as emergency workers rushed to treat the wounded. UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese called the GHF operation 'humanitarian camouflage' and 'an essential tactic of this genocide'. In a post on social media, Albanese blamed 'the moral and political corruption of the world' for enabling the destruction of Gaza. Al Jazeera's correspondent Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said the GHF's delivery model has proven woefully inadequate. 'Today's deadly attacks in the south show that the GHF is insufficient in the way it's running aid delivery,' he said. 'In the north, living conditions are becoming even more difficult. People are not just spending hours searching for water and food — they are spending the entire day. By the end of it, many are completely exhausted and dehydrated, simply because they could not find anything.' An unnamed GHF official claimed there has been no violence in or around its aid distribution sites, all three of which delivered food on Sunday, according to The Associated Press. The violence comes as Gaza's Health Ministry reports that the total death toll from Israel's ongoing war has reached 54,880, with more than 126,000 injured since October 7, 2023. Since Israel ended a ceasefire on March 18, 4,603 Palestinians have been killed and more than 14,000 injured. In just the last 24 hours, Israeli strikes have killed at least 108 people and wounded nearly 400 more across the besieged enclave, the ministry said. Hospitals are overwhelmed and on the brink of collapse, the ministry said. Rafah's Red Cross Field Hospital has declared 12 mass casualty emergencies in just two weeks, with more than 900 wounded arriving during that period — 41 of them already dead. Most of those treated had been trying to reach food distribution sites when they were shot or injured. A spokesman at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah warned that fuel supplies for Gaza's health facilities may run out within 48 hours, leaving patients without care. 'The hospital's artificial kidney department is out of service due to the occupation's attacks,' he told Al Jazeera. Meanwhile, the director of al-Shifa Hospital told Al Jazeera that the lives of 300 kidney failure patients hang in the balance. 'We are facing a real disaster in the hospital if electricity is not provided,' he warned.
Al Jazeera
28-05-2025
- Business
- Al Jazeera
Gaza's aid system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed
On May 27, thousands of Palestinians surged towards an aid distribution site in Rafah – desperate for food after months of starvation – only to be met with gunfire from panicked private security contractors. What the world witnessed at the Tal as-Sultan aid site was not a tragedy, but a revelation: The final, violent unmasking of the illusion that humanitarian aid exists to serve humanity rather than empire. Marketed by Israel and the United States as a model of dignity and neutrality, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's new distribution hub disintegrated into chaos within hours of opening. But this was no accident. It was the logical endpoint of a system not designed to nourish the hungry, but to control and contain them. As starving people in Gaza – made to wait for hours under the scorching sun, tightly confined in metal lanes to receive a small box of food – eventually began to press forward in desperation, chaos broke out. Security personnel – employed by a US-backed contractor – opened fire in a failed attempt to prevent a stampede. Soon, Israeli helicopters were deployed to evacuate American staff and began firing warning shots over the crowd. The much-advertised aid site collapsed completely after only a few hours in operation. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had promised something revolutionary with this initiative: Aid free from the corruption of Hamas, the bureaucracy of the UN, the messiness of Palestinian civil society. What it delivered instead was the purest distillation of colonial humanitarianism – aid as an instrument of control, dehumanisation, and humiliation, dispensed by armed contractors under the watchful eye of the occupying military. The problem with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's failed initiative was not only the dehumanising and dangerous way in which it attempted to deliver aid at gunpoint. The aid itself was humiliating in both quality and quantity. What people were given was not enough to survive on, let alone to restore any sense of human dignity. The boxes handed out contained just enough calories to prevent immediate death – a calculated cruelty designed to keep people alive on quarter-full stomachs while their bodies slowly consume themselves. No vegetables for nutrition. No seeds for planting. No tools for rebuilding. Just processed food, engineered to maintain a population in permanent crisis, forever dependent on the mercy of their destroyers. Photos from the distribution centre – showing desperate human beings visibly worn down by hunger, disease, and relentless war, corralled into metal lanes like livestock, waiting for scraps as they stared down the barrel of a gun – drew comparisons with well-known images of suffering and death from the concentration camps of the last century. The similarity is not accidental. The 'aid distribution centres' of Gaza are the concentration camps of our time – designed, like their European predecessors, to process, manage, and contain unwanted populations rather than help them survive. Jake Wood, the foundation's executive director, resigned days before the collapse of the Tal as-Sultan operation, stating in his resignation letter that he no longer believed the foundation could adhere to 'the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence'. This was, of course, a damning example of bureaucratic understatement. What he meant – though he could not say it outright – was that the entire enterprise was a lie. An aid initiative to help an occupied and besieged population can never be neutral when it coordinates with the occupying army. It cannot be impartial when it excludes the occupied from decision-making. It cannot be independent when its security depends on the very military that engineered the famine it is trying to address. Tuesday's choreographed humiliation was months in the making. Of 91 attempts the UN made to deliver aid to besieged North Gaza between October 6 and November 25, 82 were denied and 9 were impeded. Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, accused Israel of conducting a 'starvation campaign' against Palestinians in Gaza as early as September 2024. In a report to the UN General Assembly, he warned that famine and disease were 'killing more people than bombs and bullets', describing the hunger crisis as the most rapid and deliberate in modern history. Between May 19 and 23, only 107 aid trucks entered Gaza after more than three months of blockade. During the temporary ceasefire, 500 to 600 trucks were needed each day to meet basic humanitarian needs. By that measure, over 40,000 trucks would be required to meaningfully address the crisis. At least 300 people, including many children, have already died of starvation. But the bastardisation of 'aid' and transformation of 'humanitarianism' into a mechanism of control did not begin on October 7, either. Palestinians have been living this lie of 'aid' for 76 years, since the Nakba transformed them from a people who fed themselves into a people who begged for crumbs. Before 1948, Palestine exported citrus to Europe, manufactured soap traded across the region, and produced glass that reflected the Mediterranean sun. Palestinians were not rich, but they were whole. They grew their own food, built their own homes, educated their own children. The Nakba did not merely displace 750,000 Palestinians – it engineered a transformation from self-sufficiency to dependency. By 1950, former farmers were lining up for UNRWA rations, their olive groves now feeding someone else's children. This was not an unfortunate side effect of war but a deliberate strategy: To break Palestinian capacity for independence and replace it with a permanent need for charity. Charity, unlike rights, can be withdrawn. Charity, unlike justice, comes with conditions. The United States, UNRWA's largest donor, simultaneously provides most of the weapons destroying Gaza. This is not a contradiction – it is the logic of colonial humanitarianism. Fund the violence that creates the need, then fund the aid that manages the consequences. Keep people alive, but never allow them to live. Provide charity, but never justice. Deliver aid, but never freedom. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – and the tragic spectacle it created on Tuesday – was the perfection of this system of colonial humanitarianism. Aid delivered by private contractors, coordinated with occupying forces, distributed in militarised zones designed to bypass every institution Palestinians have built to serve themselves. It was humanitarianism as counterinsurgency, charity as colonial control – and when its obscene operation predictably collapsed, Palestinians were blamed for their desperation. Palestinians have long known that no Israeli or US-backed aid initiative would truly help them. They know that a dignified life cannot be sustained with food packages distributed in concentration camp-like facilities. Karamah – the Arabic word for dignity that encompasses honour, respect, and agency – cannot be air-dropped or handed out at checkpoints where people wait in metal lanes like cattle. Of course, Palestinians already possess Karamah – it lives in their steadfast refusal to disappear, in their insistence on remaining human despite every effort to reduce them to mere recipients of charity meant to keep them barely alive. What they need is true humanitarian aid – aid that provides not just calories, but a chance at a future. True humanitarian aid would dismantle the siege, not manage its consequences. It would prosecute war criminals, not feed their victims with just enough to die slowly. It would restore Palestinian land, not try to compensate for its theft with boxes of processed food handed out in cages. Until the international community understands this simple truth, Israel and its allies will continue to dress instruments of domination as relief. And we will continue to witness tragic scenes like the one in Rafah yesterday, for years to come. What happened in Rafah was not a failure of aid. It was the success of a system designed to dehumanise, control, and erase. Palestinians do not need more bandages from the same hands that wield the knife. They need justice. They need freedom. They need the world to stop mistaking the machinery of oppression for humanitarian relief – and start seeing Palestinian liberation as the only path to dignity, peace, and life. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
