After enforcing a brutal blockade on Gaza for weeks, Israel is now sending a trickle of food and other essential aid into the besieged Palestinian enclave through a controversial organisation headquartered in the United States of America. But with Israeli aid come deaths. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed while trying to access bags of wheat and pasta from the few sites that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has set up. Eyewitness accounts and Gaza’s Hamas-led government claim that Israeli tanks opened fire on the gathering crowds, though Israel insists its soldiers did not shoot. What are undeniable are the deaths — and the pattern of Israel’s treatment of aid as a weapon of war and dehumanisation that can only result in the kind of tragedies that Gaza is currently witnessing. Right after the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel, in which nearly 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 others taken hostage, Israel announced it would not allow any food, water or medicines into Gaza, publicly announcing a policy of collective punishment. After weeks of growing global pressure, aid was allowed back in, but at levels lower than before the war, even as hunger and disease began to compete with Israeli missiles in killing civilians.
Meanwhile, Israel tried to delegitimise the work of the United Nations' main agency for Palestinian refugees, citing alleged links between a handful of its employees and the October 7 attack. The UN has a robust, internationally-approved mechanism to deliver aid to Gaza through sites across the enclave — a mechanism that involves Israeli vetting. Now, however, Israel is sidelining the UN in using the GHF to further increase its control of what aid goes into Gaza and where it reaches people. By forcing two million people to gather at a handful of sites by walking dozens of kilometres in the hope of feeding their starving children, Israel is ensuring mass displacement that could strengthen its goals of controlling who lives where in Gaza. In March 2024, 12 Palestinians drowned while trying to reach aid that was dropped into the sea. In March this year, more than 100 people were massacred by Israeli snipers while trying to get goods from an aid convoy. Now Palestinians are being asked to choose between death from hunger or a tank shell. In any other context, this would have been globally decried as criminal and illegitimate. Israel cannot be an exception.