The ‘chaos’ of aid distribution in Gaza is not a system failure. The system is designed to fail.
A widely circulated image of starving Palestinians in Rafah at an aid distribution site run by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, 27 May 2025
Abdaljawad Omar writes in Mondoweiss on 30 May 2025:
We are not witnessing a rupture with how things used to be. What is unfolding today in Gaza, where food aid falls from the sky like ordinance and “humanitarian corridors” double as kill zones, is not the collapse of humanitarianism, but its logical consummation under conditions of settler-colonial necropolitics.
It is tempting to read these scenes — the parachute that failed, the sacks of flour soaked in blood — as tragic malfunctions. They are not. They are the grammar of a system that has long sutured humanitarian concern to military logistics, relief to surveillance, and aid to domination.
But something has shifted — not in content, but in form.
For decades, Israel maintained an uneasy but instrumental alliance with the architecture of humanitarianism. In the long expanse between the years following the Nakba and the siege and destruction of Gaza, this alliance operated as a double gesture: securing international legitimacy through the performance of restraint, while choreographing violence within the idiom of “security” and “self-defense.” The Red Cross, UNRWA, and a chorus of NGOs served as both witnesses and enablers, simultaneously limiting and legitimizing the occupation’s machinery.
In this war, humanitarianism is no longer simply absorbed and weaponized. It is being bypassed, discarded, and cannibalized.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), Israel’s new model for aid delivery, signals this shift with brutal clarity: aid is no longer mediated through international law or the optics of neutrality, but flows through private American contractors under military command.
The new aid plan is being used by Israel as part of its demographic war in Gaza: by orchestrating aid flows into selected zones, primarily in the south, Israel is working to condense the population into increasingly narrow and governable enclaves. This forced concentration is not a consequence of war — it is the war’s strategic aim.
In other words, aid is a tool for soft transfer, pushing Palestinians into regions that can be more easily monitored, controlled, and eventually severed from any claim to the land. Starvation and desperation are not side effects, but intended effects, forcing displacement through need.