DAILY TRIFECTA: Weaponizing Food
Meanwhile in Gaza...
THE SET-UP: Every morning I plug “gaza killed aid” into Google and every morning I get a new batch of stories detailing the double-digit deaths suffered by hungry aid-seekers over the last day. It’s the same story over and over again. Shots ring out, people panic, a tank is said to have fired on the crowd and dozens are cut down.
Early on, the IDF always started-out by denying involvement. When reporting finally contradicted their initial denial, they’d claim IDF soldiers were approached or menaced by potentially threatening individuals … and that they’d fired “warning shots” and chaos ensued. Now, though, I’ve noticed more examples of cutting out the middleman—they just go straight to being menaced and firing at the supposed threat. Of course, they always end with “the IDF is investigating.”
This recycled obfuscation is almost a tacit admission of what anyone who’s paying attention already knows—from the murder of World Central Kitchen’s relief workers to the story or Reem Zeidan (see the EXCERPT below), the IDF’s rules of engagement encourage these killings. Those wide open rules were exposed months ago by Haaretz, 972+ and The New York Times. The violence isn’t indiscriminate. It’s purposeful. The IDF has demolished the society, its culture and its education system. They’ve destroyed the healthcare system, the water and sewage systems. These broken systems are nothing compared to the broken children—amputees and orphans—who will carry this experience with them wherever Israel forces them to go. Until then, they will have to go hungry because Israel has turned access to food into a weapon of war.
It’s all been by design.
In the case of the US/Israeli-run aid scheme, Yaakov Garb of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev found that the location of aid distribution is “predominantly responsive to Israeli military strategy and tactics rather than aimed at a broad humanitarian relief intervention.” Simply put, aid is being used tactically and strategically as a weapon of war. Just today, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said, per Jurist News, the “recent killing of Palestinians trying to retrieve food from aid hubs may constitute a war crime” and that the IDF has “weaponized hunger.”
As if repeated forced displacements, contaminated water and a barely functioning medical system weren’t enough … accessing what little food aid there is means risking your life in a kill zone. I think it is fair to categorize all of the above as something more than collective punishment or “mowing the grass,” as Israel likes to call its periodic cull of Gaza’s Palestinians.
It’s all made more incriminating by the clever, hyper-targeted pager attack on Hezbollah and the low civilian casualty count of what was a wide-ranging attack on Tehran, a city of nearly 10 million people. If Israel seeks only to kill the leaders of an organization or nation, they can do it. If they want to be surgical in their strikes, they can. If they don’t want wholesale destruction, it won’t happen.
They’ve done exactly what they intended to do in Gaza.
In Gaza, nuclear families were wiped out in apartment bombings. Mothers, fathers and children … gone. Entire extended families were exterminated by bombs. All it took was the suspicion of a suspected member of Hamas being holed-up in a basement or entering a building or they had some intel indicating they might be in the area. Really, everyone from ambulance drivers to pedestrians walking along a road was a potential member of Hamas. Their loose rules of engagement aren’t rules at all. They are unspoken orders.
If it’s not clear what this is now, it will be if—and that’s a big “if”—Israel ever allows foreign journalists or a peacekeeping force into the crime scene that is Gaza. - jp
TITLE: She walked for hours in hope of getting food. Israeli forces killed her, family says.
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/middle-east/gaza-aid-death-food-shot-israel-palestinian-family-idf-rcna211975
EXCERPTS: It was 8 p.m., just after sunset, when Reem Zeidan, 42, set off for an aid distribution site with two of her eight children, Mervat, 20, and Ahmad, 12. Zeidan wanted to get a bag of flour to make bread. Her 5-year-old daughter, Razan, was hoping for biscuits. Zeidan brought a blue backpack to carry whatever she might be able to bring home.
Distribution wouldn’t open until the next morning, June 3, but the walk along a sea route, from Khan Younis, where they were sheltering in a tent, to Rafah, where the aid site was, would take hours. On the first day the distribution site opened, Zeidan had arrived at 9 a.m., too late to collect any food. Another day, she turned back when she heard there was gunfire near the site.
By then, there had already been multiple incidents in which Palestinians were reported to have been killed while seeking aid in Gaza after a new distribution program was launched just over a week before, led by a recently founded U.S.- and Israel-backed group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Zeidan would soon join the dozens killed as they struggled to secure food, underscoring the pitfalls of a new aid system in which tens of thousands of Palestinians must walk long distances — often through areas controlled by the Israeli military — to have a chance of getting a fraction of the limited aid being handed out.
After walking for about five hours, Zeidan, Mervat and Ahmad had reached a seaside area north of Rafah known as “Fish Fresh.”
A thriving fish farm before the war, Fish Fresh had become an informal gathering place for thousands waiting to be allowed to enter the aid distribution site during tightly controlled opening hours.
Outside of those hours, much of the areas surrounding GHF’s aid sites are considered combat zones, according to the Israel Defense Forces. GHF has repeatedly warned Palestinians to stay away from the sites before food distribution starts, a near-impossible directive for many traveling long distances to reach the areas before food runs out.
They were resting at Fish Fresh, Ahmad and Mervat later told NBC News, when they came under fire.
“Suddenly, the snipers started shooting. The artillery began shelling. The tanks were firing too,” Ahmad said. He heard drones and quadcopters hovering overhead. “There was nothing left untouched, not even the sea. They were bombing there too.”
NBC News was not able to independently verify his account, though the IDF acknowledged that an incident had occurred that day in which forces fired shots “near” suspects they said were moving toward them and deviating from “designated access routes” to aid sites.
The three took cover. When the shooting subsided, they began walking. Mervat grasped Ahmad’s hand, and Ahmad held Zeidan’s.
At around 4 a.m., they were about half a mile from the aid site, walking among a crowd in the darkness, wary of more gunfire. They were crouched low and turning a street corner, when Mervat said she heard a girl scream behind her. She turned around and saw her mother falling to the ground. Mervat thought she had fainted, but when she turned her over, Zeidan’s face was covered in blood.
“I was in shock, unable to say or do anything, just watching my mother lying in a pool of blood,” she said.
Still in shock and struggling to absorb what was happening, Mervat kept trying to wake her mother. “Mom, get up, the tanks are coming. I’ll help you. Mom, Mom...”
Mervat pressed herself against her mother’s chest, to see if her heart was still beating, and asked her to say the shahada prayer, but Zeidan didn’t respond. Gunfire started to break out wildly, Mervat said, and the crowd became more frantic. Mervat and Ahmad ran for safety.
Zeidan was one of the nearly 30 people the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza alleged were killed on June 3 after Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd of people trying to reach the GHF distribution site.
In a statement shared on Telegram that same day, the IDF said troops had identified “several suspects” moving toward them and deviating from “designated access routes” to the aid distribution site in Rafah. They began to shoot “warning fire,” the IDF said, but after the people “failed to retreat,” additional shots were fired “near a few individual suspects.”
TITLE: Israel is arming gangs to fracture Gaza’s society from the inside
https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/first-person/2025/06/25/israel-arming-gangs-fracture-gazas-society-inside
EXCERPTS: Armed criminal gangs have been unleashed on the Gaza Strip by Israeli policy. On 5 June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly confirmed that Israel is arming these criminal factions and clans, admitting something us in Gaza already knew to be true. The goal? To reduce the number of casualties among Israeli soldiers – and to further fracture Palestinian society from the inside.
The results have been catastrophic. The presence of these gangs, many of whose members were imprisoned before this war for crimes against their own people, has added a new and terrifying layer to our suffering. We are no longer only afraid of the sky – but also of our neighbours, of the people walking among us. We don’t just fear hunger or bombs anymore. We fear betrayal.
Some of the people Israel is arming and empowering, such as Yasser Abu Shabab, were previously jailed for murder, drug trafficking, and other very serious crimes – even for spying for Israel. They were released from jail at the beginning of this war because keeping them imprisoned while Israel has starved and razed Gaza to the ground would have been cruel.
The gangs range in size from big and very dangerous to small groups of opportunists, and they are especially located in areas where aid is entering or being distributed. They loot UN trucks, selling the food at inflated prices – or sometimes the food just disappears altogether. They also steal food directly from people who risk their lives to get aid from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s deadly distribution centre.
The so-called aid hubs of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that are supposed to feed us are death traps. More than 400 people have been killed and 1,000 wounded since they opened on 27 May while trying to get assistance. The most desperate civilians – displaced from their homes, living in tents, starving – risk their lives walking hours to reach them. When they arrive, they are often met by sniper fire, armed looters, or stampedes triggered by chaos and fear.
These are not accidents. They are deliberate killings. In Rafah, and other areas in the Strip, dozens of people – unarmed civilians, fathers, teenagers, children – have been shot in the back, head, or chest while trying to grab a sack of flour. Their corpses are often left in the street for hours, unreachable, because those who try to help risk being shot too.
How is it that in 2025 a father can be executed for trying to bring home bread to his family? How do we live in a world where the richest nations send “help” that kills – and then wash their hands clean of responsibility? How do you sleep knowing your taxes pay for the bullets that are killing my neighbours as they wait in line for rice? And what do we call this – if not genocide?
For us in Gaza, this is not just a war. It is annihilation.
TITLE: Gaza Without Gazans
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/gaza-without-gazans
EXCERPTS: As the world’s attention has been diverted by the so-called 12-day war between Israel and Iran and the decision of the United States to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, it is especially important not to lose sight of Israel’s rapidly unfolding plan for Gaza and Gazans. Under the Geneva Conventions, a forced exodus from an occupied territory would be considered a war crime. It would not only condemn Palestinians to exile but condemn the Israelis who crafted and carried out the policy. They would bear responsibility for a criminal act that would, in addition, probably mean sacrificing the remaining Israeli hostages. But with the right combination of international pressure—especially from the United States, which has so far been more of an enabler of this Israeli government’s excess than a restraint—this outcome might still be prevented. There may not be much time left. As Israeli military reporters have noted, the process is already underway; it is approaching at speed.
To grasp the extent to which Israel’s military operations in Gaza are now overwhelmingly focused on pressuring the civilian population, it is crucial to understand the various components of the revised war plan, called Gideon’s Chariots. One of them is control of food. Having already destroyed the farmland that supplied most of Gaza’s protein, fruit, and vegetables, Israel has now taken extraordinary action to limit the flow of civilian aid into Gaza.
At the beginning of March, the Netanyahu government imposed a total blockade of all food, medicine, and fuel for Gaza. This lasted for 80 days, bringing the population to the brink of starvation. In mid-May, responding to mounting international pressure, the government began to allow in a trickle of aid using the well-established independent distribution channels run by the UN and a variety of humanitarian organizations that have long sustained Gaza. That meant, at best, fewer than 100 trucks a day of supplies, compared with some 600 during the short-lived cease-fire from January to March this year. This minimal supply has been further reduced by widespread looting, often carried out in zones that Israel controls by gangs that, according to both Palestinian and official Israeli accounts, operate under Israeli protection.
In late May, Israel rolled out a controversial scheme that sidelines established routes and allows Israel to control and calibrate all aid delivery. In place of the international humanitarian organizations that have kept Gaza alive through the war so far, the bulk of food aid—and eventually all of it—will from now on, in theory, be provided by a newly formed private charity. The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, endorsed and promoted by the Trump administration and staffed on the ground by U.S. mercenaries, in practice functions as an arm of Israeli military operations. According to a New York Times investigation, GHF was conceived by Israeli officials and is being closely supervised by Israel. Neither the organization nor the Israeli government has disclosed the source of its funding. Its own documentation suggests that the GHF plans to supply only packaged foods, with no provision for medicines or other desperately needed supplies, at a target level of 1,700 calories per day—below medically established norms.
Thus far, the plan has proved disastrous. On the eve of the program’s launch, GHF’s American chief executive resigned, citing his organization’s inability to maintain minimum international humanitarian standards. His replacement, Johnnie Moore, is an evangelical Christian and public relations executive with no experience in humanitarian work, who has openly backed plans to expel Palestinians from Gaza. During its first month of operations, the foundation’s distribution points were repeatedly plunged into chaos, with more than 500 Palestinians shot dead by Israeli forces as they tried to reach them—killings that seem inexplicable and unprecedented in an aid-delivery context, even in a war zone.
According to the Israeli government, the new program is needed because Hamas had been siphoning off aid supplied through traditional channels. But international aid groups and Western officials—including David Satterfield, a career diplomat who served as the United States’ special envoy for humanitarian issues in Gaza during the Biden administration, and Cindy McCain, the American head of the World Food Program—have pointed out that Israel has not offered evidence to support this claim. In an interview shortly before GHF went into operation, a senior Western diplomat in Israel flatly dismissed the allegations as a lie.
As the UN has warned, the architecture of the new aid program also appears aimed at furthering the displacement of Gaza’s civilian population. With just eight fenced-in distribution points planned, GHF is replacing a decades-old aid distribution network that involved dozens of highly experienced agencies, hundreds of distribution sites, and thousands of workers spread over the entire territory. That model has been based on the international humanitarian principle that aid should be brought directly to the areas most in need. By contrast, the new system forces Gazans to walk long distances to reach isolated, heavily guarded sites where boxes of dry goods are left on trestle tables. GHF’s first feeding centers opened in the far south of Gaza, where Israel plans eventually to herd large numbers of people. The intent to use the operation as a carrot to encourage movement was made explicit by a report broadcast by Israeli army radio on May 29. The opening of a new distribution point in the Netzarim Corridor, a wide, flattened military access zone that bisects the strip at its waist, the radio report announced, was “designed to prompt the civilian population in Gaza City and elsewhere in the northern Gaza Strip to head south.”
In its direct impact on Gaza’s civilian population, the military component of Gideon’s Chariots is even more drastic. As limited aid distribution is luring Gazans into confined areas in the south and in coastal areas of the territory, bombs, rockets, tank fire, and drone attacks are driving them there as well.
According to UN estimates, 82.5 percent of Gaza is now either already occupied by the Israeli army or has fallen under evacuation orders and so lies in free-fire zones. Not all these areas have been fully abandoned yet, and some residents, mistrustful of Israeli orders or simply exhausted by endless displacement, are determined to stay. If the Israeli government succeeds in its goal, however, more than two million people will be confined to just one-fifth of Gaza’s area, a space the size of the island of Manhattan (which has a substantially smaller population). Israeli reporters who have been briefed by the army say that, in a future phase, the plan is to squash people into three even smaller enclaves, and then possibly to filter them through checkpoints into “Hamas-free” zones. The IDF itself has announced that it intends to displace “most of the population of Gaza.”