Humanitarian “Aid” deathtraps: The Israeli-American horrifying new face of Israel’s Gaza genocide
Israel’s relentless slaughter and brutality against civilians in the region has led to Israel’s demise: it is hated around the world and has lost its victim card permanently.
My latest, first published on RT.com, June 30, 2025
*The republished version here is longer. Warning: graphic photos & videos
For over 630 days, the world has watched the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, primarily by bombing, sniping, and starvation. Off-camera, we’ve read about the rape and torture of Palestinian hostages, including the torturing to death of three doctors from the enclave.
For the last 100 days, Israel has reinforced a full blockade on Gaza, depriving starving Palestinians of food, drinking water, medicines, and fuel – meaning ambulances cannot function. This is following prior blockades last year, and the overall blockade of the strip, which has lasted over 17 years.
Since late May, we’ve been seeing horrific video footage of skeletal Palestinians lined up hoping for food aid being gunned down by US mercenaries and Israeli soldiers.
Every imaginable crime, Israel has done it to Palestinians: bombed, invaded, destroyed hospitals, abducting doctors and patients; bombed churches, schools, UN centres and tents housing displaced Palestinians—in supposed “safe zones” where they were ordered by the Israeli army to flee to; killed over 200 journalists; deliberately killed medics; even decapitated babies…The list of crimes is too long to summarize here.
I myself documented or took testimonies on many such crimes by the Israeli army in their 2008/2009 war on Gaza, and in their 2012 war on Gaza, including the Israeli army targeting and killing of medics, sniping assassination of infants, and use of white phosphorous. Over the course of 8 months in 2007, I documented numerous Israeli army and illegal colonists’ crimes against Palestinian civilians.
Suffice it to say that after seeing Israel for decades mete out murder and misery to civilians in neighbouring countries, when Israel came under the barrage of Iranian retaliatory missiles for 12 days, there was globally an unsurprising lack of sympathy.
When internet users saw updates about a few dozen Israelis suffering from panic attacks, they recalled the scenes of Palestinians being burned alive after Israel bombed the tents of displaced civilians. Israel has bombed displaced Palestinians tents not once, but endlessly. People remember this, too.
People also recall the grotesque videos of Israelis mocking murdered Palestinians, the videos of Israelis having barbecues near Gaza (and in Gaza) mocking starving Palestinians, the boat tours to view the destruction in Gaza…
Again, those who have been paying attention for longer than two years would also recall previous Israeli wars on Gaza, like in 2014, when Israelis gathered with drinks and snacks hillside to rejoice in the bombing of Gaza, or the 2009 tshirts, celebrating sniper killing pregnant women, with the phrase “one shot, two kills”.
In 2010, when writing about a traumatized 10 year old I’d met who could no longer walk normally nor speak after the terror of having Israeli tanks shelling his home, I cited a study by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme which stated that “91.4 percent of children in Gaza displayed symptoms of moderate to very severe PTSD.”
That was fifteen years and numerous Israeli wars on Gaza ago.
The US-Israeli “humanitarian” death traps
The killing of Palestinians in Gaza didn’t stop when Israel attacked Iran. The most insidious new invention is the recently-created US-Israeli “aid” group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The Israeli authorities accuse Hamas of stealing aid, and based on this unproven accusation, have deemed that long-established UN aid agencies could no longer operate in Gaza, insisting instead that a group staffed with armed combat veterans (mercenaries is a better word) is better equipped to ensure that food reaches famished Palestinians.
*Recall that prior to this, in 2024 Israel accused UNRWA employees of complicity with Hamas, leading to many Western nations to immediately cut critically needed funding.
It is outrageous that in spite of some media coverage, Israel has been allowed to for months (over a year, really) block the entrance of thousands of aid trucks amassed outside of Gaza, only to then dictate that hired gunmen would be in charge of “distributing aid.”
The massive irony and duplicity is that even Israeli and Western media have reported on the actual thieves of aid in Gaza: not Hamas, but an ISIS-linked group under the protection of the Israeli army.
As the independent media outlet The Cradle reported, the group’s leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, “is a known leader of armed gangs linked to ISIS and involved in looting aid under Israeli protection… Multiple reports, including from Haaretz and The Washington Post, confirm that these gangs have been seen looting in full view of Israeli forces, who neither intervene nor prevent the theft.”
In a subsequent post, The Cradle cited the Israeli Army Radio as reporting: “Israel has transferred weapons to members of the militia…The militia operates mainly in the Rafah area, which the Israeli army has occupied and cleared. The militia’s tasks include preventing humanitarian aid from entering Gaza and fighting Hamas.”
What is apparently happening is that starved Palestinians, after walking many kilometres to the distribution sites, are then corralled into tight enclosures and fired upon by the “aid” mercenaries and Israeli soldiers.
Norwegian doctor, Mads Gilbert, on June 8 published an appeal, stating:
“What we see in Rafah is that the Israeli Occupation army, with mercenaries from the US, are using food as a bait to attract starving people and then kill them. The majority of those killed are shot in the head and the chest, this is deliberate killing.
The Secretary General of the UN stated that the UN has the equivalent of 9000 truckloads with food, water and other needed (things) waiting outside of Gaza, and Israel has closed off the whole mechanism of distribution…they are using starvation as a tool to kill even more Palestinians.”
Jonathan Whittall, the Head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OCHA) described the situation as “conditions created to kill, carnage, weaponized hunger, a death sentence for people just trying to survive.”
In a clip posted on June 23, Whittall said, “Israeli authorities are preventing us from distributing through these systems that we’ve established and that we know work. We could reach every family in Gaza, as we have in the past, but we’re prevented from doing so at every turn.”
More recently, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres echoed Whittall, saying: “Any operation that channels desperate civilians into militarized zones is inherently unsafe. It is killing people.. People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence.” The UN’s own humanitarian efforts are being “strangled” by Israel, he said, and even the aid workers themselves are starving.
The aid-seeking civilians are reportedly being shot in the head and chest, in what looks more like execution than “warning shots” or “crowd control”.
The victims include an 18-month old girl whose X-ray shows a bullet lodged in her chest. According to Ramy Abdu, Chairman of the non-profit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the girl was shot while in her mother’s arms on the way to a GHF aid point.
Last July, following an article in the Lancet warning that the total number of Palestinian civilian deaths caused directly and indirectly by Israeli attacks since October 2023 could reach,“up to 186 000 or even more.” I wrote about this, also citing Dr. Mads Gilbert’s concern that the numbers of number dead or soon to die could be over 500,000.
Fast forward to a recent report by Yaakov Garb of Ben-Gurion University, published via the Harvard Dataverse. It describes the false aid distribution design as, “all adjacent to Israeli military installations… manned by armed combat veterans backed by Israeli soldiers. The design creates a ‘chokepoint’ or ‘fatal funnel’ – a predictable movement path from a single entry to a single exit with no cover or concealment.”
It is the graphic on page five which caught people’s attention. From a population of 2.2 million before the genocide, the graph only accounts for 1.85 million, leaving many asking, where are the remaining 350,000 people? This makes the concerns voiced a year ago more valid.
In his report, Yaakov Garb wrote, “The Israeli military has an obligation, as the occupying power in Gaza, to supply the population with humanitarian relief… If an attacker cannot adequately and neutrally feed a starving population in the wake of a disaster it is ongoingly creating, it is obligated to allow other humanitarian agencies to do so.”
But instead, every day we see new horrors of emaciated Palestinian civilians desperately braving death in hopes of securing food for their families… and being gunned down by the Israeli army and the mercenaries it backs.
Returning to the point I made earlier: Israel’s murderous actions (the government’s, the army’s, and the population who cheered for the raping, starving and murder of Palestinians) have finally caught up with Israel, meaning a lack of support for or trust in the state or its representatives, and a global demand for justice for Palestinians (among others).
To cite Craig Mokhiber, a human rights lawyer and former senior UN Human Rights official, who posted recently on X:
“We’ve known for decades that the Israeli regime was lawless & ruthless and capable of mass murder and mass destruction, and that corrupt Western governments are committed to its impunity.
The (Israeli) regime is on trial for genocide. Its leaders are indicted for crimes against humanity. Israel is isolated. The regime is now almost universally despised, just as the Nazi and apartheid regimes were despised. People across the world stand overwhelmingly with Palestine. You don’t come back from apartheid & genocide.”
My Related Writings:
–Israel is now killing Palestinians in Gaza by starvation–media downplaying this are complicit in these preventable deaths, March 2024:
“…the CEO of Medical aid for Palestinians, Melanie Ward, in an interview with CNN, named Israel as the cause of starvation in Gaza.
“It’s very simple: it’s because the Israeli military won’t let it in. We could end this starvation tomorrow very simply if they would just let us have access to people there. But it’s not being allowed. This is what they said [on October 9], ‘Nothing will go in’,”Ward said.
She described the starvation as “the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. What that means is that children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen. And we could finish it tomorrow, we could save them all. But we’re not being able to.”
–A massacre within a massacre: Israel is exterminating Palestinians in northern Gaza and killing Palestinian journalists reporting on it, November 2024
–The uncounted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza being killed by Israel, July 2024
–Neglect, abuse, torture: The West is ignoring the fate of Palestinians stuck in Israeli jails, April 2024
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