‘Death traps’: How Israeli massacres at GHF sites in Gaza are deliberate policy
Palestinians carry wounded people who were shot by the Israeli army an aid massacre at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation site in central Gaza, 30 May 2025
Muhammad Shehada writes in The New Arab on 1 July 2025:
The near-daily killings at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) food distribution points – where over 550 civilians have been killed and over 4,000 maimed in a month while trying to access food – are not unfortunate byproducts of war. Nor are they rogue acts by reckless soldiers and extremist commanders, or the consequences of loose rules of engagement.
Rather, they are a calculated tactic as part of a broader Israeli policy to weaponise humanitarian aid and starvation, impose forced displacement, and advance what many legal experts call a genocidal campaign.
A recent exposé by Haaretz confirmed what Palestinians and international observers have long raised an alarm about: Israeli soldiers have been given explicit orders to fire on unarmed civilians congregating at aid sites in southern Gaza.
These are not defensive actions; not a single one of those victims posed any threat, Israeli soldiers themselves say. The report, for example, includes testimonies from officers and reservists describing standard operating procedures that include shooting and bombing people who arrive early, late, or simply deviate from the Israeli military’s arbitrary and undisclosed rules while waiting in line for food.
What has emerged is a dystopian ‘aid’ operation that is in reality a mechanism of social control, one carefully engineered to cover up the weaponisation of starvation and inflict maximum deprivation under the guise of humanitarianism.
Four pillars of Israel’s manufactured hunger
Since the start of the genocidal war in October 2023, Israel has used starvation as a method of warfare in Gaza. This strategy continues today, through Israel’s opening of GHF hubs. Last week, the UN criticised Israel’s “weaponised hunger”, “forced displacement”, and “death sentence for people just trying to survive”. The head of the UN humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) Jonathan Whittall concluded, “it appears to be the erasure of Palestinian life from Gaza.”
Israel’s starvation policy is premised on four pillars. First, severely restricting humanitarian access, where Israel currently allows in at best less than 15% of what Gaza needs for basic survival (60-75 trucks per day instead of 500).
The second pillar is the Israeli IS-linked criminal gangs that the army unleashes to loot the majority of the very little aid it allows in under full protection from the military.
Third is a deliberate policy of engineering societal collapse, lawlessness, and destruction of civic order, so that even the handful of trucks that make it through the gangs would be looted by desperate crowds.
Israel has been systematically targeting law enforcement personnel, civil servants, volunteers, municipality workers, emergency committees, community leaders and anyone who works to maintain a rudimentary level of organised human existence and social cohesion in Gaza. Last week, some large Gazan families unaffiliated with Hamas stepped forward to protect aid trucks, prevent looting in northern Gazan, and ensure orderly distribution of food for the first time in months. As soon as they succeeded, Israel responded by immediately halting all aid to northern Gaza to punish them and carried out targeted assassinations against key players in that improvised system.