Photo: On Wednesday, May 28, Palestinians travelled long distances to the aid distribution point controlled by the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Relief Foundation’ in the southern Gaza Strip (Abdallah F.s. Alattar/Anadolu via Getty Images).
It’s been a week since the Israeli government launched a widely condemned aid scheme, circumventing the UN to take control over the distribution of aid across Gaza. In the days since, Israeli forces have opened fire multiple times on starving Palestinians queuing for aid, massacring over 100 people.
The Israeli government is using starvation as a tool of genocide, and deliberately manufacturing conditions meant to bring about the destruction of the Palestinian people. In its cruelty and scale of annihilation, the Israeli government’s war crimes increasingly resemble Nazi tactics.
“Death traps”
Under the new U.S.-Israeli aid scheme, starving Palestinians are forced to travel to the far south of Gaza. They queue in the thousands under the open sun, as armed private contractors, among them U.S. mercenaries, stand guard. Israeli quadcopter drones hover overhead.
After three months of total blockade, over two million Palestinians in Gaza are on the brink of full-blown famine. Last Tuesday, thousands of desperate Palestinians descended on one of the Israeli aid distribution sites in Gaza’s far south — one of only four such sites established across all of Gaza to date. The Israeli military opened fire, killing several people. Others went missing in the chaos that followed. At least one man who came alone to collect food for his family was abducted by Israeli forces.
“When I arrived at the site, I saw hundreds of people lining up in front of iron gates surrounded by security fences topped with surveillance cameras”
Dozens more were killed in the following days. On Sunday, Israeli forces opened fire on men, women, and children queuing for aid near Rafah, killing at least 31 people. Some Palestinians dubbed it the “Witkoff Massacre” — after Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. Less than 48 hours later, another massacre: 27 killed by the Israeli military while trying to collect aid at the same distribution site. Eyewitnesses say some were shot while carrying boxes of food. “Aid distribution has become a death trap,” UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini wrote on X.
“They killed my mother — and before that, my brother. I urge everyone: do not go to the American aid distribution points”
Aid as a tool of genocide
Last month, the Wire broke down Israel’s plan for controlling aid distribution across Gaza. Under that plan, the so-called U.S.-backed “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” has been charged with distributing what little aid Israel is now allowing into Gaza, at sites primarily in the territory’s far south. This so-called “humanitarian” organization, hastily founded in February, “has employed at least 300 American contractors, all heavily armed, who have been given ‘as much ammunition as they can carry.’”
From the moment Israel’s government declared its plan to take over aid distribution, its genocidal aims were abundantly clear.
Throughout the genocide, the Israeli government has openly used starvation as a tool of annihilation, targeting humanitarian workers and restricting aid to a trickle or blocking it entirely for months on end as Palestinians across Gaza starved to death.
Now, Israeli leaders are using their new aid distribution scheme as a means to depopulate Gaza before they take control of the entire territory: corralling desperate Palestinians to Gaza’s far south — where they are surveilled, abducted, and killed, with plans to forcibly remove those that survive to what the Israeli government calls “third countries.”
Echoes of the past
The echoes of the past are not lost on us. The haunting images of desperate and starving Palestinians fleeing gunfire and forced to crowd into metal cages for hours on end as they await aid invoke the suffering to which many of our own families were subjected during the Nazi Holocaust.
Nazi soldiers tightly controlled access to food in the ghettos, where Jews, disabled people, queer people, and others deemed “undesirable” were sealed off from the outside world and deliberately starved: forced to risk their lives, including smuggling or queueing for hours in the freezing cold, in the hopes of feeding their families. The bodies of the dead littered the streets. Clean water was scarce. Disease was rampant.
As anti-Zionist Jews, we have a moral imperative to draw attention to those parallels. Never again is now
Tweet at the media: Do your jobs. Call it a genocide.
The Israeli government is implementing the final stages of its genocide in Gaza — promising to “destroy everything,” ethnically cleanse over two million starving Palestinians, and take complete control of the territory.
And yet, U.S. and Western media continue to shamelessly obfuscate what is actually happening, refusing to name what UN experts, major human rights organizations, and leading scholars have unanimously recognized as genocide. Use our click-to-tweet tool to send a message right now.
What we’re reading: “a step toward their displacement from Gaza”
Rasha Abu Jalal reports from Gaza on the thousands of Palestinians risking their lives to collect aid under Israel’s new U.S.-backed aid distribution scheme.
“We need the food to reach us through international organizations—not to walk long distances under dire conditions just to get it.”