Israel’s arrangements for allowing aid into Gaza are not just inadequate, but are a smokescreen for continuing its genocide and ethnic cleansing, argues Zahid Rahman

Throughout the duration of its almost twenty-month-long genocide, Israel had severely restricted the flow of aid into Gaza. Since 2 March 2025, Israel has imposed a complete blockade of food, fuel and medicine into Gaza.

However, beginning on 27 May, after eleven weeks of total siege and under pressure from an increasingly impatient West, Israel has allowed an obscure group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to begin distributing aid.

This group is a private entity based in Delaware and was set up in February 2025. The GHF’s sources of funding have not been disclosed, while it is widely paraded by the American and Israeli governments as a humanitarian alternative to the already established agencies on the ground in Gaza. Its credentials were immediately put in doubt when the foundation’s executive director, Jake Wood (a former US Marine), resigned late on Sunday, 25 May, claiming his job is in contradiction with ‘humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence.’

The pressure on Israel

Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed in August 2024, ‘We bring in aid because there is no choice … Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral.’ This sickening principle still resonates with Israel’s actions in Gaza months afterwards.

After the perpetual and wholesale slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza watched by millions across the world, Western politicians who earnestly supported the genocide in Gaza are now displacing the pressure they face from their public onto Israel to allow, or at least be seen to allow, humanitarian aid into Gaza. 

No better example of this hypocrisy exists than Keir Starmer’s public backpedalling on the genocide. In October 2023, when asked (on national radio) if Israel could cut off food, fuel and water to Palestinians, his immediate reply was, ‘Israel does have that right’. However, in recent days, Starmer’s government, along with those of Canada and France, have threatened ‘concrete actions’ while condemning the conditions placed on Palestinians as ‘intolerable’.

Hence, Israel has resolved to allow in some humanitarian aid. The arrangements made to deliver humanitarian relief are more than theatre; they’re designed to support Israel in its goals of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The management of distribution

The plan to distribute humanitarian aid involves the private security contractors UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions. The head of UG Solutions was a member of the US special forces who served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. The founder of SRS was a former CIA officer who served as station chief in Kabul. The involvement of these two mercenary groups with connections to the American military establishment should inevitably bring into question the impartiality and purpose of the aid-distribution system.

This system has been criticised as too centralised and inefficient. Only a designated family member may pick up a 20kg box of supplies from one of only four distribution centres in the Gaza Strip. Provisions aren’t made for the elderly, orphaned or the injured, who would find it harder anyway to access food in Gaza.

The Palestinians who manage to arrive at the aid-distribution centres face long, degrading lines that include biometric and facial-recognition checks operated remotely by the IDF. The Palestinians in those lines are packed into an area flanked by fences described by UNRWA’s Sam Rose as ‘cattle pens’ in a Channel 4 interview. The images of those fences and the bundled-in Palestinians are nothing short of dystopian. Humiliation is not incidental in Gaza, it is an intentional characteristic of genocide and occupation.

The aid being distributed is mainly rice, pasta, flour, beans and canned goods. This is opposed to ready-to-eat meals, which are currently vital for Palestinians who lack the clean water and fuel needed to cook. Again, this is likely to be a calculated act by the Israeli government, intended to continue to starve Gazans whilst aid-washing in a theatre of humanitarianism.

Even more outrageous are the reports that some of the food received by Gazans is Israeli-branded. If true, it suggests that Israeli firms are profiting from the humanitarian crisis created by their own government.

Moreover, North Gaza lacks a distribution site. The concentration of the sites, three in the south and one in the centre, is almost certainly a deliberate attempt to move starved Palestinians southwards in the direction of the Egyptian border. A reality conveniently in line with Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing, articulated by Netanyahu when he added the implementation of Trump’s plan as a condition for ending the war.

The aid-distribution management system of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation seems to continue to advance Israel’s war aims in Gaza. Palestinians face immense difficulty in retrieving aid. Even with the aid given, Palestinians may lack the means to prepare their food, and those who choose to remain in the north would most likely starve.

The assault on UNRWA

For decades, Israel has been attacking the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA). The agency was set up in 1949 to provide relief and assistance to Palestinian refugees who were displaced in the Nakba.

UNRWA has been described as the ‘backbone’ of the humanitarian effort in Gaza. The Israeli government’s facilitation and encouragement of the GHF, coupled with a hostile stance towards UNRWA, are clear attempts to sideline the UN agency. Politically, Israel has seen it as an upholder of the Palestinians’ right of return and sees the abolition of UNRWA as a means to end the right of return for Palestinians and their descendants who were made indefinite exiles from their land. Whilst Palestinian rights aren’t morally dependent on the existence of UN agencies, this form of thinking is common within Israeli politics.

It is absolutely clear that Israel continues to deny Palestinians the minimum necessities of life in Gaza. The current aid-distribution system is not a lifeline to the whole of Gaza but a mask that provides Israel with cover to continue its extermination of Palestinians. This is all done within a framework designed with opaque actors and funding, the concentration of aid centres in the south of Gaza, and even the use of mercenaries. Aid is still being weaponised to empty Gaza, coupled with attempts to marginalise UNRWA in an effort to bring about the end of the Palestinians’ right of return. Although the cynical and calculated evil being committed by the Israeli government is likely to be shrugged off by many in the media and the political class, as Israel is being seen to allow aid, it is important to know that the GHF is merely a means to help Israel achieve its strategic objectives.