Food Aid in Gaza Has Become a Horror

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1. Hussein Ibish: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broke the last cease-fire in the Gaza war on March 18 by launching air strikes that killed more than 400 Palestinians in 36 hours, a reported 183 of them children. He had also imposed a total blockade on March 2, allowing no aid whatsoever into the Strip from March until late May. The resulting situation was untenable. But the Israeli government did not trust any of the international institutions with experience in humanitarian-aid distribution, so together with its U.S. backers, it cooked up an alternative: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a nonprofit registered in Delaware and funded with $30 million from the Trump administration. 

   “… GHF began operations on May 26 in the south of Gaza, near Rafah. Since then, it has operated four main aid-distribution centers (compare this to the more than 400 that the UN and other traditional aid agencies once ran). The aid boxes themselves have been described by Palestinians as woefully inadequate as Gaza continues its slide toward outright famine.

   “The food-distribution points have practically become shooting galleries. Israeli troops told reporters from the newspaper *Haaretz* that they had been ordered to open fire on Palestinians with live ammunition as a means of crowd control. The newspaper quoted one soldier as describing the zones as a ‘killing field.’ The report singled out Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, commander of Division 252, which operates in northern Gaza. Vach reportedly told his men that ‘there are no innocents in Gaza.’ Some suggested that using live fire to disperse crowds in northern Gaza, for fear they would rush UN aid trucks, was Vach’s policy more than that of the Israeli military command or government. But reports have also circulated about U.S. contractors deliberately shooting Palestinians and boasting about direct hits. Israel refuses to allow outside journalists into Gaza, making these and other related accounts difficult to confirm or disprove.

   “What is indisputable is that GHF has an effective monopoly on delivering humanitarian aid into an ever more desperate Gaza Strip. Virtually all of the traditional distributors of aid have been barred by the Israeli authorities. And by most accounts, the results are ghastly.

   “… Far from ameliorating Gazans’ suffering, GHF has instead established a system that presents them with an impossible dilemma. Palestinians are drawn in desperation to four centers, where they must risk their lives in order to gain the supplies they need to live. Many also walk away disappointed but uninjured. There is no evidence that GHF, its founders, or its backers intended to create death traps rather than alternative distribution centers. But for many weeks, this is how the sites have functioned, and GHF’s response has been to simply carry on as before.”

   Read more: [https://theatln.tc/nkWDGhFU](https://theatln.tc/nkWDGhFU)

2. Very bad blowback on soft power and global hegemony caused by this humanitarian failure

3. In retrospect, banning outside journalists has made atrocities a lot more likely. I don’t know if it was planned that way, but it is a factor.

4. The horror is and always was a scam…how do you get free goods/food/whatever for sale in markets, when your population is ‘starving’?

   On a totally unrelated note, if 85% of your population is dependent on that aid and wouldnt have existed, if none of it came in the first place, is it a good policy to have more children than can be supported? 1, 2, 4, 9, 15..all of them are dependent. Maybe if you dont want 85% of your population on aid(well, you do if you run things cuz you make bank off it), dont continually have more children than you can take care of? None of the ‘starving’ peopel would be there since long ago, they wouldnt have had the never ending (You know what they call ever other 2nd/3rd/4th generations born in other countries? citizens. Palestinians? no, no, that is revenue to be counted so they are called Palestinians despite never living there, living there entire life somewhere else, having kids somewhere else, adopting kids, those adopted kids having kids(guess what adopted is Palestinian too, this too funny really). Totally unrelated of course, just interesting to think about.

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