The head of the aid organisation picked by Israel to distribute aid to Gaza has stepped down, saying he is not prepared to compromise on humanitarian principles.
Jake Wood, the executive director of the private Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), announced his resignation on Monday after being chosen to run the Israeli-led and American-approved project three weeks ago.
He said it would be “impossible to implement the plan” without compromising on “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence”.
Wood’s resignation coincided with conflicting reports about whether Hamas had agreed to a US proposal for a ceasefire with Israel. A new plan from President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, would allow the release of ten living Israeli hostages in “two groups” and 70 days of truce, with a “partial withdrawal from the Gaza Strip”, a Palestinian official close to the group told Reuters. The official is thought to have confirmed Hamas had accepted the deal.
Witfkoff, however, said that what he had heard from Hamas had been “disappointing and completely unacceptable”, according to Axios.
While there was no immediate comment from Israel, a senior official rejected the idea his country had agreed on a deal. One source quoted by Reuters said: “The proposal received by Israel cannot be accepted by any responsible government.”
An aid truck is checked before entering Gaza from Israel at the Kerem Shalom border crossing on Monday
AMIR COHEN/REUTERS
Speaking on Sunday, Trump said: “We want to see if we can stop [the war]. And Israel, we’ve been talking to them, and we want to see if we can stop that whole situation as quickly as possible.”
White House officials concede that the president is growing frustrated by Israel’s renewed push in Gaza and the worsening humanitarian situation in Palestinian territory.
The Trump administration has backed Israel’s plan to hand out desperately needed supplies to the besieged population in the Gaza Strip, using the GHF. The territory has been under intense bombardment and has lacked basic food and medicine for more than a year and a half.
The organisation said on Monday they had started operations, despite facing serious criticism from international organisations who refused to back the plan and said that it “weaponised” aid.
• Here in Gaza, babies are skin and bone. I fear mine will be too
In a statement, GHF said: “More trucks with aid will be delivered tomorrow [Tuesday], with the flow of aid increasing each day.” As its new interim executive director, the group named John Acree, a long-time former employee of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which has been subject to deep cuts by the Trump administration.
Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has been facing “critical” famine, according to the UN, which has said that Israel’s strategy to allow limited supplies on to Palestinian land after two months of total blockade has barely scratched the surface.
Hamas’s interior ministry urged Gazans “not to co-operate” with GHF and claimed that Israel was planning use the organisation to implement “displacement plans”.
Dozens of people, mostly children, were killed by an Israeli strike on school sheltering displaced people in Gaza City on Monday, rescuers said
OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Wood said the aid proposal was merely a “loose concept” of a security plan that it was not feasible to implement, urging Israel to expand the flow of supplies into the coastal territory by all available means. The strategy is to distribute aid from designated points in the north and south of the strip.
Over the course of the war, international organisations and donor countries have attempted various ways of getting supplies into the narrow strip of land, including a temporary pier off the coast that fell apart, and dropping aid from the skies, which led to several deaths.
Israel has total control over all entry and exit into Gaza. The only other land border, with Egypt, has been closed for much of the war and there has been a full-scale military occupation surrounding the buffer zone and the nearby Gazan city of Rafah.
• Israel will allow ‘basic’ food into Gaza after strikes kill more than 100
Israel has lifted the total siege on the strip under pressure from the US administration, but according to civilians and aid organisations, supplies are only trickling in. The resignation of Wood and his comments about the feasibility of the strategy raises the question of how Gaza will be fed.
In a rare rebuke from Germany, Friedrich Merz, the chancellor, claimed that the harm being inflicted upon Gaza’s population could “no longer be justified”. Germany is one of Israel’s closest European backers and, because of the horrors perpetrated against Jews by the Nazis, has been reluctant to openly criticise it. “Frankly speaking, I no longer understand what the goal of the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip is,” Merz said on Tuesday.
A woman surveys the damage at the school hit by Israeli strikes on Monday
OMAR AL-QATTAA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
An Israeli delegation is expected to arrive in Cairo for ceasefire negotiations, on hiatus since last week. Israel has called on Hamas to release the 58 hostages it has held since October 7, 2023, to disarm and for its leaders to go into exile in order to end the war. Hamas, which has been designated a terror organisation by the UK, has called for a full Israeli withdrawal from the strip.
Israel has entrenched its forces deep inside the devastated Palestinian territory, widening the buffer zones on its borders, estimating that it will occupy 75 per cent of the entire land within two months, and plans to corral the population into civilian-only zones.
In Jerusalem’s Old City, ultranationalist groups of young Jewish people chanted “Death to Arabs” and sang “May your village burn” as they made their way through Muslim areas on Monday.
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Before an annual contentious Flag March, marking Israel’s conquest of the eastern part of the city, volunteers from pro-peace organisations tried to position themselves between the marchers and Muslims. Police said they had detained a number of people.
Another small group of protesters, including a member of the opposition Yisrael Beitenu party, stormed a compound in east Jerusalem belonging to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, to protest against what it sees as the government’s inability to “assert its sovereignty” over the compound. Malinovsky previously sponsored a bill that in effect curtailed UNRWA’s activities in Gaza and the West Bank.