#aid weaponisation

Since the end of May, the Israeli army has killed more than 350 unarmed Gazans desperately walking or running to food distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The so-called charity was founded in February. Now, massacres occur every day at GHF food stations. Israel first totally blocked, then brutally controlled all food entering Gaza. Until the end of March, there were 25 bakeries in the enclave making bread with World Food Program (WFP) flour. Until early May, there were dozens of community soup kitchens supported by the WFP and by the World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity, whose workers Israel has attacked twice. These soup kitchens were providing approximately half of Gaza’s population with a meager diet that just barely allowed them to survive. From March 2, Israel strangled the WFP, the WCentralK, and other aid organizations, exhausting their food stocks. Israel is using starvation as part of a policy of forced population transfer and mass murder. In mid-May, Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We must not reach a point of starvation — both as a matter of fact but also as a diplomatic issue.” A week earlier, Amit Halevi of the prime minister’s Likud party told a doctor in the Knesset, “I’m not sure you’re speaking for us when you say we want to treat every child and every woman … When fighting a group like this, the distinctions that exist in a normal world don’t exist.” The Israeli and U.S. governments transferred responsibility for food aid to the GHF in late May. The supposed charity promised to create four sites to distribute food, medicine, and soap to the Gazan population of over two million people, claiming that private security guards, not the Israeli army, would control these stations. In reality, the GHF is an excuse for shutting down organizations that actually aided the population — a fig leaf to which U.S. and European media could extend enough willful credence. At the end of May, the GHF opened two stations in the rubble of Rafah, in the extreme south, and one more in Israel’s militarized Netzarim Corridor across the center of the Strip — equivalent to promising to feed Houston with three grocery stores. This scheme forces the population to move southward. American armed guards place limited quantities of forty-pound boxes of food on the ground inside wire fences. Crowds are herded in and out, so they have to compete for their families’ survival. This has the effect of particularly starving elderly, sick, wounded, and disabled people, single mothers, and orphans.