“Judy, please get me out of here. I’m exhausted.”

“Judy, do you have any updates?”

Those were the last texts my cousins, Wadea, 23, and Ahmad, 22, sent me the day before they were killed on 27 April 2025.

By then, it had been 568 days since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza – a genocide that uprooted the lives of millions and killed thousands of innocent civilians, including two of the people I loved most in the world.

I was one of their few relatives in the so-called land of dreams and opportunity. But instead of offering them hope or safety, the United States funded our nightmares.

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It was a Sunday afternoon when they went to a nearby cafe along the Nuseirat beach with friends to charge their phones and access the internet. Minutes later, an Israeli drone hit the cafe, leaving the building intact but killing everyone inside.

Six young men – Mohamad al-Jabdi, Hashem al-Saftawee, Salameh al-Saftawee, Ibrahim Washeh, Ahmad al-Safeen and Wadea Ziada – lost their lives in the attack.

They were young men, just beginning their lives – not numbers or symbols, but sons, brothers and my best friends

News of their brutal deaths quickly went viral.

Photos showed them seated around a table, frozen in their final moments. Strangers online remarked on Ahmad’s “peaceful” expression, as his mother wept over his body.

That image was everywhere, but it told nothing of who they were.

They were young men, just beginning their lives – not numbers or symbols, but sons, brothers and my best friends.

All I could think about was the first time I met my cousins. I write this to honour their memory, and so the world remembers how they lived, before their futures were mercilessly taken from them.

Long before October

I visited Gaza for the first time in 2013 to see my dying grandfather.

I was only nine years old, and can barely recall most of the trip. But I remember the kindness of Wadea and the warmth of his father.

I remember being squished into a small room with my cousins, the air swinging between laughter and arguments over which movie to watch. I remember going to the beach, swimming, and playing in the park.

Israel’s victims in Gaza are nameless in western media. These are their names Read More »

The following summer, during Israel’s 50-day war on Gaza in 2014, Wadea’s father was killed.

I was back in the US, watching the horror unfold from a distance.

In an instant, the joy and innocence of the moments I had spent with them were violently stripped away, becoming inseparable from grief.

His murder changed the trajectory of Wadea’s life. From that point on, he committed himself to making his father proud and worked tirelessly to become a doctor.

When I returned to school that autumn, I noticed that none of the other students or teachers seemed to realise what had just happened in Gaza.

That was when I knew I wanted to become a journalist. Even at a young age, I could see that the media wasn’t simply failing to report Israel’s crimes against Palestinians – it was helping to bury them.

I wanted to tell the story of the kind man who took us out for ice-cream on the beach, but I also wanted to make visible the violence that killed him, and the systems that erased it from view.

A meaningful life

I returned to Gaza six years later to visit my grandmother, whose health was rapidly deteriorating.

This time, I was older – wiser, I thought – but still more naive than I realised. I tried to talk about Palestine – about its history, its future – as if I truly understood it. My family happily indulged me. It was more than they expected from most Americans.

It was during this visit that I reconnected with my cousins. I especially bonded with Wadea, who, like me, loved to spew nonsense about everything and nothing. After that, we spoke constantly, sharing our hopes and dreams with each other.

The author’s cousins, Wadea Ziada, left, and Ahmad al-Safeen, pictured before the war on Gaza; both were killed in an Israeli drone strike, and their uncle Yahya al-Saafein, back left, was killed a week later (Supplied)

Wadea was a hopeless romantic. He loved pop culture and would rewatch television shows – everything from the widely popular Syrian drama Bab al-Hara to Friends – and argue with me about whether Ross and Rachel were really “on a break”.

He also took pride in his athletic achievements. He had a black belt in karate and consistently ranked highest in his tournaments, but was never allowed to compete outside of Gaza due to Israeli restrictions.

Our conversations would always go back to how much we resented the political forces that confined his family in Gaza and kept mine out entirely, rooted in Israel’s occupation and siege and sustained by US policy.

By 2023, I was studying political science, and Wadea was studying pharmacology – both of us pursuing the plans we made nearly a decade earlier.

Then the war began.

Unimaginable loss

When Israel launched its genocidal assault in October 2023, we were terrified. Wadea knew he had to get out of Gaza.

After his death, I couldn’t stop thinking that I should have done more. I couldn’t afford to bring Wadea and his family out, and I didn’t have the connections to save them. I was just a student, but that didn’t stop my overwhelming guilt.

All I could do was stay in regular contact and check in as often as possible.

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But as electricity became scarce, our conversations grew shorter. Snapchat became our only way to quickly message – a way for him to let me know he was OK. We kept in contact whenever he had power or internet.

While trying to help others in the family, I also began speaking more with Ahmad. Each time I asked about his wellbeing, he would end with a joke – often too dark for anyone outside Gaza to appreciate.

Ahmad had worked various jobs since he was 13, including selling things on makeshift stands by the beach – partly for money, but mostly because he hated being idle.

Even during the war, he continued to search for work, moving from one place to the next whenever a shop was bombed or forced to close due to supply shortages. He was supposed to graduate this year, pursuing his dream of becoming an interior designer.

Every time I spoke to my cousins, I could hear their voices growing more weary and strained. In their photos, they consistently appeared to have lost weight.

They relied on their friends and each other to stay sane. Jobs were hard to find, and food was even scarcer. They hated asking for help, but there came a point when the war seemed to have no end.

Ahmad and Wadea were both supporting their siblings and relatives, so whatever money they made quickly disappeared. The first time Ahmad received ramen – a food I had taken for granted in college – was months after the war began.

Despite everything, Wadea and Ahmad always asked about my day and insisted I share my problems. I would talk about mundane things like finishing my schoolwork or resolving a conflict with a friend.

Wadea was brutally honest, telling me to toughen up, while Ahmad would laugh and tell me to be patient. We never ran out of things to talk about – our families, the future, God and spirituality, even Instagram influencers.

I never imagined they would die.

Honouring their memory

Like all people, Palestinians in Gaza want to live. My cousins were so full of life – they wanted nothing more than to survive this war of extermination and continue building their futures.

There is no pause to grieve, no space for healing. Our loved ones are still being hunted, even in mourning, even in starvation

I made some connections and got a job to save up and help them. But they didn’t really need my help. Ahmad was working nonstop. Wadea had completed his degree just four months before he was martyred, fulfilling his father’s dying wish.

What they needed most was an end to the war – a permanent ceasefire.

Following their murder, videos of Wadea’s interviews resurfaced, speaking to his perseverance as a student under siege. He spoke about trying to study through air strikes and power cuts, refusing to let the destruction around him derail his path.

Meanwhile, Ahmad’s peaceful face, as his mother wept over him, captured the hearts of millions. These viral moments offer only a glimpse of who they truly were.

My cousins were hardworking, kind, funny, brilliant – and alive. They didn’t want to die. They wanted to live free of the violence and oppression imposed on them by an occupation they never chose.

Blood or bread: Surviving Israel’s vicious hunger regime in Gaza Ahmed Abu Artema Read More »

Wadea and Ahmad leave behind parents, siblings, relatives, and friends who must still endure the horrors of genocide while grieving their loss.

Not long after, Israeli forces killed our uncle, Yahya al-Saafein, as he delivered supplies to their surviving relatives. He leaves behind four young children.

There is no pause to grieve, no space for healing. Our loved ones are still being hunted, even in mourning, even in starvation.

That is why I write – to preserve their memory and to tell the world, which only knew them in death, about the full, meaningful lives they lived.

May God grant them the highest level of heaven, and give their loved ones patience. And may He grant us not only a ceasefire, but the will to end this genocide – and never again look away.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Abed Al Rahman, just a boy, carried the weight of his family’s hunger as he stepped into the streets of Gaza in search of bread. He had his father’s money, but when he saw the tide of people pushing towards a food distribution site in Rafah, hunger pulled him into their flow.

Almost immediately, the site descended into chaos. Gunfire. Drones. Then in a flash, shrapnel from a tank shell ripped through his little body. When I met him at a hospital in Khan Younis – where painkillers, like food, are scarce – the 13-year-old was in agony. “I have shrapnel inside my body that they couldn’t remove,” he told me. “I am in real pain; since 6am I have been asking for a painkiller.” As he recounted the chaos, his father’s composure shattered, and tears rolled down his face. Was he going to lose his son simply because Abed Al Rahman wanted his family to eat?

Abed Al Rahman had been trying to get food from a new private and militarised distribution site in Gaza. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is funnelling aid through a handful of southern sites guarded by private contractors and Israeli soldiers. With so few distribution points, those who can make the trek are forced to travel long, dangerous distances – risking their lives for grossly inadequate amounts of supplies.

In the first week of the GHF’s operation, there were five mass-casualty events in the vicinity of distribution sites as desperate civilians were met by gun and tank fire. Children have been killed. The UN’s aid chief, Tom Fletcher, said the sites made “starvation a bargaining chip” and were “a fig leaf for further violence and displacement”. A system that bypasses the UN has, in fact, bypassed humanity. Indeed, politicised aid distribution is unsafe for everyone involved – last week, the GHF said eight of its local team members and volunteers had been killed.

And while it’s critical that there is a focus on this lethal lack of aid for Palestinians, the daily killing and maiming of children has become an afterthought. This is my fifth mission to Gaza since the horrors of 7 October, and in all that time almost nothing has been done to stop the world’s deadliest conflict for children in recent memory. There have been more than 50,000 children reported killed or injured in 20 months. Fifty thousand.

On the same morning I met Abed Al Rahman, I spoke with 24-year-old Sheima, also hospitalised. She, too, went to one of the GHF distribution sites. Different day, same story: her family was denied humanitarian aid for months. Consumed by hunger, her father too sick to travel, Sheima reached a site. Again, gunfire. Boxes of food thrown to the dirt. “I saw dead bodies on the ground,” she told me. “People stepping over them, just trying to get some food.” In the mayhem, Sheima became entangled in wire – her leg and arm torn open as she tried to flee. She didn’t get any food. “Even though I almost died, I would go again,” she said. “I’m the eldest in my family – we need food to survive. I wish to die with a full stomach, not from starvation.”

These raw testimonials reinforce two critical questions. First, when UN and international non-governmental organisations warehouses outside Gaza are jam-packed with lifesaving supplies, why is there still a lethal lack of humanitarian aid in Gaza? And second, will these few sites run by private contractors solve the crisis?

On the first point, after a total blockade on all supplies going into Gaza from early March until 19 May, Unicef and the World Food Programme are now permitted to bring in limited quantities of only a few selected items. Meanwhile, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warned last month that all 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza are facing life-threatening food insecurity. Lack of access to clean water has been pushed to lethal levels.

Amid incessant bombardments, drastic aid restrictions and mass displacement of the civilian population, the risk of famine is not just possible, but increasingly likely for families in Gaza. From the end of the ceasefire to May this year, malnutrition admissions among children aged under five surged by nearly 150%, with a steep rise in severe cases. This isn’t just a trend – it’s an urgent warning.

And to the second question, can the GHF prevent famine? The reality is, far too little aid is being distributed from far too few distribution points, all amid concerns that families travelling from northern Gaza to reach sites in the south will not be allowed to return.

This is not how you avert famine. Before the collapse of the most recent ceasefire, the UN operated a highly effective aid delivery system in Gaza. And during the ceasefire, we were delivering assistance from more than 400 distribution points across the territory. Access to food, safe water, medicines and shelter skyrocketed. Unicef even went door-to-door to reach malnourished children.

Unicef continues to call for a ceasefire, protection of children, the release of hostages and full aid access. We know what it takes to deliver for children in emergencies – it is the same in every crisis and every conflict since the second world war. Children need nutritious food at scale, safety, clean water and dignity. Not security operators. Not indiscriminate fire. Not chaos.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. We delivered aid at scale during the ceasefire, and we can do it again. We just need to be allowed to do our jobs.

Abed Al Rahman died of his injuries on 17 June 2025, after this article was written.

It was Tuesday, June 10 when Khalil heard from neighbors that an aid truck had arrived a few kilometers from where he lived in Deir al Balah, Gaza. By then he had already lost about 45 pounds since the war began in 2023.

With his brothers and a friend, Khalil set off on foot. On the walk over, the 26-year-old could hear intermittent shelling, but the promise of food, he felt, was worth the risk. “Hunger has become stronger than fear,” said Khalil, who agreed to speak on the condition that his last name not be published.

When they arrived around 6:30 a.m., a huge crowd was gathering at the aid point in Netzarim. “People start heading there before sunrise because the lines get impossibly long,” Khalil said. Thousands had clearly gotten the same tip. The sheer amount of desperate, hungry people was overwhelming. Khalil said, “I hadn’t eaten properly in days. I was dizzy and weak.”

The distribution site was run by a new aid provider active in Gaza for only a few weeks. Khalil quickly noticed military presence. “We saw the Israeli soldiers in full military uniform standing next to their armored vehicles. We arrived knowing the place was dangerous. But, there was no clash, no threat to them,” Khalil said. (The Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories bureau did not respond to written requests for comment for this article.)

“I got closer to death that day than a piece of bread”

He stood in line with hundreds of others. There were children, women, and elderly men. “Some were barefoot, some had been waiting since the night before,” he recalled.

As his group inched closer to the point where they hoped they would be able to grab a parcel of items, gunshots rang out. Khalil ran for his life.

“They began shooting directly at unarmed civilians,” he said. “The bullets were chasing us as if we were targets on a shooting range, and not just hungry people. We scattered under a hail of bullets. I got closer to death that day than a piece of bread.”

Khalil survived that quest for food — alive to starve another day instead. But at least 36 Palestinians did not, and 207 more were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Since Israel broke its ceasefire with Hamas in mid-March, more than 875 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food.

Reporting from inside Gaza over the last few months, The Intercept observed a famine that is manufactured and an aid distribution system seemingly designed to cause more suffering and death. Amid the war, Israel has rendered Gaza inaccessible to the foreign press; American journalist Afeef Nessouli accessed the Strip by volunteering as an aid worker for a medical nonprofit and reporting in his off-hours.

Usually during war, the distribution of medical care and food to a besieged population would not be administered by any party waging war against it, much less by an illegally occupying military. And in most situations, aid operations would closely involve established organizations already active in the area.

But that’s not the case in Gaza. Israel has effectively banned the biggest and longest-running aid group in the region: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. And by gutting the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, a critical funding vehicle for aid groups including UNRWA, U.S. President Donald Trump has strangled international aid in Gaza.

Israel and the U.S. have instead rolled out a new scheme centered around a fledgling U.S.-based nonprofit that operates alongside the same Israeli military responsible for killing more than 230 journalists, 1,400 health care workers, and 17,000 Palestinian children in the last two years.

With a few small exceptions, all aid reaching Gaza since May has moved through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was established in Delaware in February. The organization has received tens of millions from the U.S. to distribute aid in Gaza — and, reportedly, some $100 million from an unnamed country. GHF did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story.

Since it started operations, the number of locations in Gaza where residents could receive aid has plummeted from around 400 to four sites.

“Sometimes only one hub is actually operating,” said Hanya Aljamal, the senior project coordinator at the aid group Action for Humanity, who is based in Deir al Balah. Sometimes, Aljamal said, the sites are closed for security reasons, other times for maintenance. Khalil corroborates this: “I went a few days ago and it wasn’t open.” He says now he checks the GHF’s Facebook page, which informs people of the schedule. Aljamal says she believes “they operate semi-daily for only two hours a day.”

Arriving in Gaza in late March just as Israel broke the ceasefire, The Intercept witnessed firsthand what happened to Gaza’s most vulnerable after the U.S. defunded USAID and UNRWA and turned those agencies’ work over to the Israeli military and GHF.

Famine has been a problem in Gaza since the early days of the war. But when Israel and Hamas announced a ceasefire on January 19, 2025, access to goods became easier. “Meat, vegetables and chicken — and even snacks — were reachable, albeit at a slightly expensive price,” Aljamal said. “But we had options.”

When the holy month of Ramadan began on February 28, it wasn’t hard to find a simple meal of rice or lentils for dinner, or labneh and za’atar for suhoor before fasting for the day.

But on March 2, Israel cut off food imports to Gaza when it imposed a blockade. On March 18, Israel shattered the ceasefire when it restarted its campaign of airstrikes. Even after Eid, which marked the end of the Holy Month, one meal a day remained standard practice — if not a luxury.

At the time, community kitchens like Shabab Gaza were running low on food. But they were still delivering what they could to areas the Israeli military referred to as “red zones”— swaths of land Israel has evacuated and banned aid from entering, such as Khan Yunis. By spring, 70 percent of Gaza was considered a “red zone.”

Shabab Gaza, “the youth of Gaza” in Arabic, was making meals of rice so people could break their fast at sundown. Inside a makeshift kitchen housed in a tent, the men, fasting themselves, worked in groups to cook the rice in vats. They packaged it quickly to deliver to the surrounding area, but neighbors also showed up with pots and pans, ready to grab the food for their families, or ready to eat themselves.

The Shabab Gaza community kitchen in Al Qarara, Khan Yunis, Gaza, seen on June 1, 2025.

Photo: Afeef Nessouli

There were about 170 operational community kitchens before the crossings closed in early March. Just two months later, dozens had ceased operating.

The blockade halted the entry of vital goods for months, resulting in scarcity and price hikes. It was made worse by the resumption of fighting between Israel and Hamas, which restricted access to domestic produce “because of new evacuation orders from the north, Rafah, and areas in Khan Yunis where new crops were cultivated,” Aljamal said.

At the market, produce was fresh but limited. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, onions, and sometimes potatoes were for sale, grown on the shards of Gazan farmland remaining. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported that Israel has destroyed 83 percent of Gaza’s agricultural cropland and restricted access to some of what remains, rendering less than 5 percent of cropland “available for cultivation.”

“It used to be that three kilos of these onions were just $3,” an older woman said in her makeshift kitchen in eastern Khan Yunis. By April, an onion cost a dollar apiece. Flour became incredibly expensive, with a single bag selling for hundreds of dollars. Because nearly every bank branch and ATM remain inoperable in Gaza, people cannot find cash to pay for even a single bag of flour. They are reliant on an unregulated network of cash brokers to get money for daily life with commissions hovering around 40 percent.

Even domesticated chickens have been laying fewer eggs than usual, one international aid worker said. “Food isn’t available for them, neither are supplements or animal feed that provide stuff like calcium, which is essential to egg production,” the worker said. And like humans, chickens also experience stress. The Israeli military’s bombs and quadcopters are loud.

As of July, OCHA reports that 100 percent of the population in Gaza was projected to face high levels of acute food insecurity. That includes 1 million people facing “emergency” levels of food insecurity, and 470,000 facing “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity.

“I have lost nearly 37 kilos,” said Basel, one of the men at Shabab Gaza’s community kitchen. He showed pictures of himself from 2023, back when he used to weigh 247 pounds. Basel is bald with blue eyes, with a 6-foot, 2-inch frame. Now 165 pounds, he looks thin, his face gaunt. Several men showed pictures of this kind of transformation. They described the indignity of going hungry every day and how weakened they feel.

“Look at what they are doing to us. We are so tired,” Basel explained. “By God, it has been almost two years, really we are so hungry,” he said.

Basel on July 17, 2023, on the left, and on July 12, 2025 on the right. Photo: Courtesy of Basel Lehya

Nessouli, the Intercept reporter, volunteered in Gaza with Glia, a medical nonprofit, from late March to early June. With other medical workers, he ate once per day — usually rice or lentils. Sometimes there would be tomatoes or peppers, occasionally canned tuna. During that time, he lost 12 pounds.

People begging for food at the market, rushing international aid workers’ cars on the seaside road, or even knocking on doors looking for flour became commonplace.

“Now we are reduced to one meal per day,” Aljamal, the aid worker, explained, which usually consists of “a variation of the same thing: lentils.” Lentils can take the form of soup or falafel, be steamed, or cooked into a gravy. But sometimes, Aljamal said, the sole meal of the day consists of “bread, plain bread.”

UNRWA was set up in 1949 to provide humanitarian relief to Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Originally, it was intended to provide jobs on public works projects and direct relief. It grew to offer education, health care, and social services to wide swaths of Palestinian society, even serving more than 5 million registered Palestinian refugees and their descendants in the diaspora.

The Palestinian Authority has been a recipient of UNRWA’s services and support as it has governed the West Bank since 1993 and Gaza until the U.S.-monitored election of 2006, in which Hamas gained power.

At its height, UNRWA employed over 30,000 staff, 99 percent of whom were Palestinian. Most of UNRWA’s funding came from European countries and the United States, but this largely disappeared after Israel accused UNRWA employees of participating in the October 7 attacks. (A U.N. investigation cleared most of the accused UNRWA workers but found that nine of the 13,000 people who worked for the organization in Gaza may have participated in the attacks.)

USAID also once provided financial support to the Palestinian people for various development and humanitarian projects. Since 1994, the United States has steered more than $5.2 billion in aid to Palestinians. This funding dried up after Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised in March to cut USAID’s foreign grants by 83 percent before shuttering it entirely on July 1.

Ending USAID, a Cold War tool of soft power founded in 1961 as “an independent executive branch agency responsible for administering foreign aid and economic development assistance outside the US,” has been a signature policy of Trump’s second administration. For decades, the agency has played a key role in treating HIV/AIDS and in providing lifesaving care to LGBTQ+ people, including in Gaza. One study estimates the USAID cuts will result in the deaths of 14 million people by 2030.

Over the decades, most international aid to Gaza has been run through either UNRWA or USAID partners, though Qatar too has been a key funder, providing over $1 billion in reconstruction funds and stipends for poor Palestinians between 2014 and 2019.

Much of the Strip’s economic activity has been reliant on aid infrastructure, with UNRWA specifically playing a critical role in the distribution of food even before the war began.

“UNRWA has been the backbone that held Gazan society together,” Aljamal said. “As a child I went to UNRWA schools and was offered the best possible education available with the smallest of resources. When me or any of my siblings got sick or needed medical attention, we rushed into subsidized UNRWA clinics that even provided us with the needed meds, too. When it comes to food, lots of refugee families relied on their three-month dry ration distributions,” which consisted of “flour, cooking oil, sugar, rice, lentils, chickpeas per family member for three months.”

For years, this program helped ensure food security in the region. “We often held great pride in the fact that wherever you went and however bad it had gotten, you wouldn’t possibly sleep without food,” she said.

Community kitchens also played a critical role in aid distribution in Gaza. Glia’s head of mission, Moureen Kaki, a Palestinian American, moved from Texas to Gaza more than a year ago to help; she never left. She also volunteers at Shabab Gaza in Khan Yunis.

Kaki, who switches breezily throughout her day between Palestinian Arabic and English with a slight Texas lilt in her voice, notes that when she arrived, community kitchens across Gaza were producing 250,000 meals a day, feeding about 800,000 people — about 45 percent of the Strip’s population. Back then, community kitchens were able to reliably source food via donations and USAID. But now, it is extremely difficult to operate.

Today, community kitchens still exist, but their capacity has dropped from 250,000 meals a day to about 25,000, Kaki says, because they simply cannot source supplies.

The current famine, she says, is “the worst I have seen, hands down.”

Moureen Kaki speaks to a man at Shabab Gaza community kitchen on June 1, 2025, in Al Qarara, Khan Yunis, Gaza. Photo: Afeef Nessouli

World Central Kitchen — founded by chef José Andrés and one of the most recognized food distributors in Gaza, and whose workers were killed in a 2024 Israeli airstrike — ceased operations in May after it ran out of supplies; it resumed operations recently. Smaller mutual aid organizations like the Sameer Project have continued to churn out as many meals as they can, even after their camp coordinator Mosab Ali was killed.

Shabab Gaza’s capacity dropped from 15,000 meals a day to 3,000 in June — and by July had to stop operations because rice became too expensive. The group hopes to resume as soon as possible.

As long-standing aid providers languish in Gaza, Israel and the United States have embraced a new approach: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

According to the New York Times, Israeli officials, military leaders, and businesspeople began discussing the concept of an Israeli-backed food distribution system in December 2023, and had brought a former CIA agent-turned-private security contractor on board by the summer of 2024. The new program was announced on May 19, 2025, as a U.S.-led initiative, with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee saying it was “wholly inaccurate” to characterize it as an Israeli plan. By June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the initiative had in fact originated in Israel.

Unlike prior aid distribution systems, GHF planned to use a small number of distribution hubs in southern Gaza that would be secured by private U.S.-backed contractors, with the Israeli military keeping watch “at a distance.” The aid would be prepackaged, filled with a hygiene kit, medical supplies, and food rations. Each meal was budgeted to cost only around $1.30 each.

Soon after it launched, officials said the GHF system would attempt to screen people for involvement with Hamas by using facial recognition or biometric technology, violating a core tenet of addressing hunger: that no political litmus test can be imposed for access to human rights like food and water.

The United Nations rejected the new U.S.-backed distribution plan and sayings that it did not meet its long-held principles of “impartiality, neutrality and independence.” The U.N. aid chief said the new system would force further displacement, expose people to harm, and restrict aid to one part of Gaza. Oxfam and 240 other nongovernmental organizations called for immediate action to end the Israeli distribution scheme.

In late June, Israeli soldiers corroborated what Palestinians had been claiming about the GHF aid distribution sites: Commanders explicitly ordered soldiers to shoot unarmed civilians. Massacres were a result of soldiers doing what they were told to do.

Video obtained by Afeef Nessouli

One video shows thousands of people crowded all around at GHF distribution site in Rafah, according to Al Jazeera. The phone camera pans to the left, and the sound of gunshots hitting a mound of earth about 200 meters in front of the crowd is piercing. The video shows sand kicking up in a whirl upward from the bullets as people crawl on their knees trying to dodge the gunfire.

“Imagine if Toronto was starving,” Dorotea Gucciardo hypothesized at a press conference at the Canadian Parliament in June. Gucciardo is the director of Glia, the NGO Nessouli volunteered with in Gaza, and with whom he and reporter Steven Thrasher have also worked to deliver antiretroviral medication into Gaza since reporting on AIDS in the Strip in January.

In this Canadian analogy, Gucciardo said, “The U.N. system would deploy over 1,300 distribution sites. The GHF model? Ten. In Montreal, the U.N. would open 850 sites, while GHF’s version? Six.”

“And in Gaza, the UN. .had a well-maintained system of 400 aid sites,” she said. “GHF has replaced those with only three.”

Glia was founded in 2015 with a focus on providing low-cost medical supplies using 3D printing technology, beginning with a stethoscope design. Over the years, its services have expanded. Since 2017, the group has rotated doctors, nurses, and other personnel into Gaza to support local health care workers.

“Aid is distributed by gunpoint by American mercenaries.”

Glia doctors operating in Gaza’s incredibly damaged health care system have been treating malnourished patients throughout the war. Since GHF began operating on May 26, “20 to 50 Palestinians have been killed per day at the aid distribution sites,” Gucciardo explains. They are treating an ever-rising number of malnourished patients injured waiting for food. “Everybody my medical team treats is skin and bones,” Gucciardo said.

Gucciardo called the switch to the GHF program an engineered starvation. “Aid is distributed by gunpoint by American mercenaries. It is inhumane, degrading, dangerous, and it violates every principle of humanitarian law,” she says.

The AP has reported that GHF contractors have shot live ammo at aid sites, allegations that GHF denies. GHF has also denied that multiple violent incidents have even occurred near their aid distribution sites, regularly blames outside agitators for the incidents it does acknowledge, and stated that “GHF remains focused on its mission: to safely, quickly and effectively feed as many people as possible, every day.”

When GHF’s original executive director, American veteran and entrepreneur Jake Wood, announced he was stepping down after just a couple of months, one reason he cited was because it was impossible to fulfill GHF’s “plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”

“From the outset, they were placed in active red zones — especially in southern Gaza, in Rafah,” said Majed Jaber, a Palestinian volunteer emergency room doctor who has worked at several hospitals in the southern part of Gaza.

“We saw far too many headshots to ever call it random.”

“At Nasser and the Red Crescent hospitals, where I worked during those distributions, we regularly received 50 to 100 wounded people in a single day. Dozens arrived already dead or died shortly after,” he said. “Every other day, the number would spike. The injuries were horrific. Limbs blown off by high-caliber bullets. Vital organs pierced — hearts, aortas, lungs. We saw far too many headshots to ever call it random.”

Tarek Loubani, a Canadian doctor in Gaza and the medical director of Glia, observed a similar pattern of wounds in those killed or injured at GHF distribution sites. “Today, I saw patients with gunshots to the head, gunshots to the neck … the gunshots to the head and neck are almost always targeted. Usually shot by snipers,” he said.

When there are shots to other parts of the body, Loubani explained, it’s usually from “a machine gun being used to shoot on the crowd.” For its part, GHF acknowledges the dangerous proximity of the Israeli military to its distribution centers, writing on Facebook, “Our dear precious residents of Gaza, We ask you not to be near our centers between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m., for your safety, due to the possibility of the IDF conducting military operations in the area.”

[newsetter][/newsletter]

Amal, a trans woman who lives in Gaza City, sent The Intercept a picture of her bandaged arm on WhatsApp in early June. Amal gave The Intercept a pseudonym for safety.

“Do you see what happened to me?” Amal said in her voice note. Her voice was trembling and angry, but still soft.

“Yesterday, I went to the GHF distribution point to pick up some aid to get a bag of flour,” she said. “I finally got a bag after a really hard time, I was exhausted. And then after all of that, thieves stole my bag and stabbed me with a knife.”

Hunger is painful, Amal said. She complained of joint pain, stomach pain, and a lack of concentration. “I faint and fall,” said Amal, who stands 6 feet tall and weighs just 119 pounds. “I do not want anything, I only want to eat.”

Despite the Trump administration axing thousands of USAID awards (and firing the accompanying officers who managed these funds), GHF does not seem to lack for funds. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the State Department is considering giving GHF an additional $500 million. Zeteo reported that GHF requested $30 million dollars from USAID.

The group’s social media accounts regularly publish accusations against international aid groups and journalists. GHF has denounced the U.N. and Oxfam for standing “by helplessly while their aid is looted,” and allege that The Associated Press’s “Middle East bureau has sadly devolved into a propaganda vehicle — amplifying unverified claims, omitting critical context, and publishing narratives that serve a designated terrorist group.” Its belligerent posts have a Trumpian quality, down to the use of all caps (“let’s go through the history of how we got here in the first place. … HAMAS IS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION WITH AN ACTIVE PROPAGANDA ARM”) and are marked with denial of any problems with their approach (“Scenes like this prove the GHF model is working”).

“People have been comparing it to ‘Squid Game’ or ‘Hunger Games.’”

On June 17, reports emerged that Israeli tanks had killed over 50 Palestinians as they were waiting for aid trucks in Khan Yunis in the southern part of the Strip. On July 16, over 20 Palestinians were killed at a GHF distribution site in southern Gaza. Most of the victims were reported to have died in a stampede. Many Palestinians in Gaza who have limited supplies refuse to go to the new aid sites.

“We don’t go to GHF aid points because they’re death traps,” says E.S, a 28-year-old restrained to a walker because of complications due to his HIV status. “I can’t fight through the crowds because of my disability plus we all know the whole situation is messy,” he continues. “There is no line and there is no distribution method at all, they offload everything into a big arena, in fact, people have been comparing it to ‘Squid Game’ or ‘Hunger Games,’” E.S explains. “It becomes a battle because everyone is desperate for food.”

The number of people reportedly killed by Israeli gunfire at GHF aid distribution sites continues to climb, as the people of Gaza face starvation. The Gaza Health Ministry has counted 1,021 people killed and another 6,511 wounded at GHF sites since the program was put in place, including at least 38 killed by Israeli fire this past weekend. A newborn baby died of malnutrition at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Saturday, and Palestinian journalists have been posting image after image of people dying of starvation.

More than 20 countries, including the U.K., France and Canada, released a statement Monday saying that “the suffering of civilians has reached new depths,” and calling for the war in Gaza to end now. “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity,” the statement continued. “We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”

On Monday morning, Israel also began a new military invasion of Deir al Balah, where Nessouli was based in June. As Israeli tanks moved into the dense area, packed with many thousands of displaced people, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a water desalination plant, killing five more people in the blast.

Israel is accused of the gravest war crimes – how governments respond could haunt them for years to come

8 June 2025 Share Save Jeremy Bowen • @BowenBBC International Editor Share Save

BBC

Even wars have rules. They don’t stop soldiers killing each other but they’re intended to make sure that civilians caught up in the fighting are treated humanely and protected from as much danger as possible. The rules apply equally to all sides. If one side has suffered a brutal surprise attack that killed hundreds of civilians, as Israel did on 7 October 2023, it does not get an exemption from the law. The protection of civilians is a legal requirement in a battle plan. That, at least, is the theory behind the Geneva Conventions. The latest version, the fourth, was formulated and adopted after World War Two to stop such slaughter and cruelty to civilians from ever happening again. At the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva (ICRC) the words “Even Wars Have Rules” are emblazoned in huge letters on a glass rotunda. The reminder is timely because the rules are being broken.

AFP/ Getty Images An estimated 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by January this year, according to Unicef

Getting information from Gaza is difficult. It is a lethal warzone. At least 181 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war started, almost all Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Israel won’t let international news teams into Gaza. Since the best way to check controversial and difficult stories is first hand, that means the fog of war, always hard to penetrate, is as thick as I have ever experienced in a lifetime of war reporting. It is clear that Israel wants it to be that way. A few days into the war I was part of a convoy of journalists escorted by the army into the border communities that Hamas had attacked, while rescue workers were recovering the bodies of Israelis from smoking ruins of their homes, and Israeli paratroopers were still clearing buildings with bursts of gunfire. Israel wanted us to see what Hamas had done. The conclusion has to be that it does not want foreign reporters to see what it is doing in Gaza.

Getty Images On 7 October 2023 Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1,200 people, many of them at the Nova Music Festival site

To find an alternative route through that fog, we decided to approach it through the prism of laws that are supposed to regulate warfare and protect civilians. I went to the ICRC headquarters as it is the custodian of the Geneva Conventions. I have also spoken to distinguished lawyers; to humanitarians with years of experience of working within the law to bring aid to Gaza and other warzones; and to senior Western diplomats about their governments’ growing impatience with Israel and nervousness that they might be seen as complicit in future criminal investigations if they do not speak up about the catastrophe inside Gaza. In Europe there is also now a widely held belief, as in Israel, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war not to safeguard Israelis, but to preserve the ultra-nationalist coalition that keeps him in power. As prime minister he can prevent a national inquiry into his role in security failures that gave Hamas its opportunity before 7 October and slow down his long-running trial on serious corruption charges that could land him in jail. Netanyahu rarely gives interviews or news conferences. He prefers direct statements filmed and posted on social media. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declined a request for an interview. Boaz Bismuth, a parliamentarian from Netanyahu’s Likud party, repeated his leader’s positions: that there is no famine in Gaza, that Israel respects the laws of war and that unwarranted criticism of its conduct by countries including the UK, France and Canada incites antisemitic attacks on Jews, including murder. Lawyers I have spoken to believe that there is evidence that Israel followed war crimes, committed by Hamas when it attacked Israel, with very many of its own, including the crime of genocide.

BBC / Matt Goddard The latest version of the Geneva Conventions, pictured, was formulated after World War Two to stop cruelty to civilians

It is clear that Israel has hard questions to answer that will not go away. It also faces a legal process alleging genocide at the International Court of Justice and has a prime minister with limited travel options as he faces a warrant for arrest on war crimes charges issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Rival politicians inside Israel accuse Netanyahu of presiding over war crimes and turning Israel into a pariah state. He has pushed back hard, comparing himself – when the warrant was issued – to Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer wrongly convicted of treason in an antisemitic scandal that rocked France in the 1890s.

Evidence in the numbers

The evidence of what is happening in Gaza starts with the numbers. On 7 October 2023 Hamas broke into Israel, killing 1,200 people. More than 800 were Israeli civilians. The others were members of Israel’s security forces, first responders and foreign workers. Around 250 people, including non-Israelis, were dragged back into Gaza as hostages. Figures vary slightly, but it is believed that 54 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 31 are believed to be dead. Collating the huge total of Palestinian casualties inside Gaza is much more difficult. Israel restricts movement inside Gaza and much of the north of the strip cannot be reached. The latest figures from the ministry of health in Gaza record that Israel killed at least 54,607 Palestinians and wounded 125,341 between the 7 October attacks and 4 June this year. Its figures do not separate civilians from members of Hamas and other armed groups. According to Unicef, by January this year 14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world.

Anadalou/ Getty Images Gaza’s civilians had some respite during a ceasefire earlier this year but negotiations on a longer-term deal have failed

Israel and the US have tried to spread doubt about the casualty reports from the ministry, because like the rest of the fragments of governance left in Gaza, it is controlled by Hamas. But the ministry’s figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country’s own intelligence services. When the work of the ministry’s statisticians was checked after previous wars, it tallied with other estimates. A study in medical journal The Lancet argues that the ministry underestimates the numbers killed by Israel, in part because its figures are incomplete. Thousands are buried under rubble of destroyed buildings and thousands more will die slowly of illnesses that would have been curable had they had access to medical care. Gaza’s civilians had some respite during a ceasefire earlier this year. But when negotiations on a longer-term deal failed, Israel went back to war on 18 March with a series of huge air strikes and since then a new military offensive, which the prime minister says will finally deliver the elusive “total victory” over Hamas that he promised on 7 October 2023. Israel has put severe restrictions on food and aid shipments into Gaza throughout the war and blocked them entirely from March to May this year. With Gaza on the brink of famine, it is clear that Israel has violated laws that say civilians should be protected, not starved. A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger “as a weapon of war”. The Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, said openly that the food blockade was a “main pressure lever” against Hamas to release the hostages and accept defeat. Weaponising food is a war crime.

A failure of humanity

War is always savage. I was in Geneva to see Mirjana Spoljaric, the Swiss diplomat who is president of the ICRC. She believes it can get even worse; that there is no doubt that both parties are flouting the Geneva Conventions, and this sends a message that the rules of war can be ignored in conflicts across the world. After we walked past glass cases displaying the ICRC’s three Nobel peace prizes and handwritten copperplate reproductions of the Geneva Conventions, she warned that “we are hollowing out the very rules that protect the fundamental rights of every human being”. Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC We sat down to talk in a room with one of Europe’s most serene views: the tranquillity of Lake Geneva and the magnificent sprawl of the Mont-Blanc massif. But for Ms Spoljaric, constantly aware of the ICRC’s role as custodian of the Geneva Conventions, the view beyond the Alps and across the Mediterranean to Gaza is alarming. She has been in Gaza twice since 7 October and says that it is worse than hell on earth. “Humanity is failing in Gaza,” Ms Spoljaric told me. “It is failing. We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It’s surpassing any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction, the level of suffering.”

Anadalou/ Getty Images A British government minister told the BBC that Israel was using hunger “as a weapon of war”

More importantly, she says, the world is watching an entire people, the Palestinians, being stripped of their human dignity. “It should really shock our collective conscience… It will haunt us. We are seeing things happening that will make the world an unhappier place far beyond the region.” I asked her about Israel’s justification that it is acting in self-defence to destroy a terrorist organisation that attacked and killed its people on 7 October. “It is no justification for a disrespect or for a hollowing out of the Geneva Conventions,” she said. “Neither party is allowed to break the rules, no matter what, and this is important because, look, the same rules apply to every human being under the Geneva Convention. “A child in Gaza has exactly the same protections under the Geneva Conventions as a child in Israel.”

BBC / Matt Goddard Swiss diplomat Mirjana Spoljaric, who is president of the ICRC, said “humanity is failing in Gaza”

Mirjana Spoljaric spoke quietly, with intense moral clarity. The ICRC considers itself a neutral organisation; in wars it tries to work even-handedly with all sides. She was not neutral about the rights all human beings should enjoy, and is deeply concerned that those rights are being damaged by the disregard of the rules of war in Gaza.

‘We will turn them into rubble’

On the evening of 7 October 2023, while Israel’s troops were still fighting to drive Hamas invaders out of its border communities, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a brief video address to the Israeli people and the watching world. Speaking from Israel’s military command centre in the heart of Tel Aviv, he chose words that would reassure Israelis and induce dread in their enemies. They were also a window into his thinking about the way that the war should be fought, and how Israel would defend its military choices against criticism. The fate of Hamas was sealed, he promised. “We will destroy them and we will forcefully avenge this dark day that they have forced on the State of Israel and its citizens. “All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble.” Netanyahu praised allies who were rallying around Israel, singling out the US, France and the UK for their “unreserved support”. He had spoken to them, he said, “to ensure freedom of action”.

AFP/ Getty Images It is believed that 54 hostages remain in Gaza, of whom 31 are believed to be dead

But in war freedom of action has legal limits. States can fight, but it must be proportionate to the threat that they face, and civilian lives must be protected. “You’re never entitled to break the law,” says Janina Dill, professor of global security at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School. “How Israel conducts this war is an entirely separate legal analysis… The same, by the way, is true in terms of resistance to occupation. October 7 was not an appropriate exercise [by Hamas] of the right of resistance to occupation either. “So, you can have the overall right of self-defence or resistance. And then how you exercise that right is subject to separate rules. And having a really good cause in war legally doesn’t give you additional licence to use additional violence. “The rules on how wars are conducted are the rules for everybody regardless of why they are in the war.”

The headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva

What a difference time and death make in war. Twenty months after Netanyahu’s speech, Israel has exhausted a deep reservoir of goodwill and support among many of its friends in Europe and Canada. Israel always had its critics and enemies. The difference now is that some countries and individuals who consider themselves friends and allies no longer support the way Israel has been fighting the war. In particular, the restrictions on food aid that respected international assessments say have brought Gaza to the brink of famine, as well as a growing stack of evidence of war crimes against Palestinian civilians. “I’m shaken to my core,” Jan Egeland, the veteran head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and former UN humanitarian chief, told me. “I haven’t seen a population like this being so trapped for such a long period of time in such a small, besieged area. Indiscriminate bombardment, denied journalism, denied healthcare. “It is only comparable to the besieged areas of Syria during the Assad regime, which led to a uniform Western condemnation and massive sanctions. In this case, very little has happened.”

But now the UK, France and Canada want an immediate halt to Israel’s latest offensive. On 19 May, prime ministers Sir Keir Starmer and Mark Carney, and President Emmanuel Macron, stated, “We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism. But this escalation is wholly disproportionate… We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions.” Sanctions may be coming. The UK and France are actively discussing the circumstances in which they would be prepared to recognise Palestine as an independent state.

War and revenge

Netanyahu quoted from a poem by Hayim Nahman Bialik, Israel’s national poet, in his TV speech to the Israeli people on 7 October as they wrestled with fear, anger and trauma. He chose the line: “Revenge for the blood of a little child has yet been devised by Satan.” It comes from In the City of Slaughter, which is widely regarded as the most significant Hebrew poem of the 20th Century. Bialik wrote it as a young man in 1903, after he had visited the scene of a pogrom against Jews in Kishinev, a town then in imperial Russia and now called Chişinǎu, the capital of present-day Moldova. Over three days, Christian mobs murdered 49 Jews and raped at least 600 Jewish women. Antisemitic brutality and killing in Europe was a major reason why Zionist Jews wanted to settle in Palestine to build their own state, in what they regarded as their historic homeland. Their ambition clashed with the desire of Palestinian Arabs to keep their land. Britain, the colonial power, did much to make their conflict worse. By 1929 Vincent Sheean, an American journalist, was describing Jerusalem in a way that is grimly familiar to reporters there almost a century later. “The situation here is awful,” he wrote. “Every day I expect the worst.” He added that violence was in the air, “The temperature rose – you could stick your hand out in the air and feel it rising.” Sheean’s account of the 1920s illustrates the conflict’s deep root system in the land that Israelis and Palestinians both want and have not found a way, or a will, to share or separate.

Getty Images Palestinians see a direct line between the Gaza war and the destruction of their society in 1948 when Israel became independent

Palestinians see a direct line between the Gaza war and the destruction of their society in 1948 when Israel became independent, which they call the Catastrophe. But Netanyahu, and many other Israelis and their supporters abroad connected the October attacks to the centuries of persecution Jews suffered in Europe, which culminated with Nazi Germany killing six million Jews in the Holocaust. Netanyahu used the same references to hit back when Macron said in May that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was “shameful” and “unacceptable”. Netanyahu said that Macron had “once again chosen to side with a murderous Islamist terrorist organisation and echo its despicable propaganda, accusing Israel of blood libels”. The blood libel is a notorious antisemitic trope that goes back to medieval Europe, falsely accusing Jews of killing Christians, especially children, to use their blood in religious rituals. After a couple who worked for the Israeli embassy in Washington DC were shot dead, the gunman told police, “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.” Netanyahu connected the murders with the criticisms of Israel’s conduct made by the leaders of the UK, France and Canada. In a video posted on X, he declared: “I say to President Macron, Prime Minister Carney and Prime Minister Starmer: When mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers thank you, you’re on the wrong side of justice. You’re on the wrong side of humanity, and you’re on the wrong side of history. “For 18 years, we had a de facto Palestinian state. It’s called Gaza. And what did we get? Peace? No. We got the most savage slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”

BBC / Matt Goddard

Netanyahu has also referred to the long history of antisemitism in Europe when warrants calling for his arrest, along with his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, who was defence minister for the first 13 months of the war, were issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The court had also issued arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar, considered the mastermind behind 7 October. All three have since been killed by Israel. A panel of ICC judges decided that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant bore criminal responsibility. “As co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” In a defiant statement, Netanyahu rejected “false and absurd charges”. He compared the ICC to the antisemitic conspiracy that sent Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, to the penal colony on Devil’s Island for treason in 1894. Dreyfus, who was innocent, was eventually pardoned but the affair caused a major political crisis. “The antisemitic decision of the International Criminal Court is a modern Dreyfus trial – and will end the same way,” the statement said. “No war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza since October 7th 2023, when the Hamas terrorist organisation launched a murderous assault and perpetrated the largest massacre against the Jewish People since the Holocaust.”

The legacy of persecution

British barrister Helena Kennedy KC was on a panel that was asked by the ICC’s chief prosecutor to assess the evidence against Netanyahu and Gallant. Baroness Kennedy and her colleagues, all distinguished jurists, decided that there were reasonable grounds to go ahead with the warrants. She rejects the accusation that the court and the prosecutor were motivated by antisemitism. “We’ve got to always remember the horrors that the Jewish community have suffered over centuries,” she told me at her chambers in London. “The world is right to feel a great compassion for the Jewish experience.” But a history of persecution did not, she said, give Israel licence to do what it’s doing in Gaza.

BBC / Matt Goddard British barrister Helena Kennedy KC said a history of persecution did not give Israel licence to do what it’s doing in Gaza

“The Holocaust has filled us all with a high sense of guilt, and so it should because we were complicit. But it also teaches us the lesson that we mustn’t be complicit now when we see crimes being committed. “You have to conduct a war according to law, and I’m a firm believer that the only way that you ever create peace is by behaving in just ways, and justice is fundamental to all of this. And I’m afraid that we’re not seeing that.” Stronger words came from Danny Blatman, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust and head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Prof Blatman, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, says that Israeli politicians have for many years used the memory of the Holocaust as “a tool to attack governments and public opinion in the world, and warn them that accusing Israel of any atrocities towards the Palestinians is antisemitism”. The result he says is that potential critics “shut their mouths because they’re afraid of being attacked by Israelis, by politicians as antisemites”.

EPA Lord Sumption believes Israel should have learned from its own history

Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, believes Israel should have learned from its own history. “The terrible Jewish experience of persecution and mass killing in the past should give Israel a horror of inflicting the same things on other peoples.” History is inescapable in the Middle East, always present, a storehouse of justification to be plundered.

America: Israel’s vital ally

Israel could not wage war in Gaza using its chosen tactics without American military, financial and diplomatic support. President Donald Trump has shown signs of impatience, forcing Netanyahu to allow a few cracks in the siege that has brought Gaza to the edge of famine. Netanyahu himself continues to express support for Trump’s widely condemned proposal to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Mediterranean”, by emptying it of Palestinians and turning it over to the Americans for redevelopment. That is code for the mass expulsion of Palestinians, which would be a war crime. Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist allies want to replace them with Jewish settlers. Trump himself seems silent about the plan. But the Trump administration’s support for Israel, and its actions in Gaza, looks undiminished.

BBC / Matt Goddard Nobel peace prize medal at ICRC headquarters

On 4 June, the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an “unconditional and permanent” ceasefire, the release of all the hostages and the lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid. The other 14 members voted in favour. The next day the Americans sanctioned four judges from the ICC in retaliation for the decision to issue arrest warrants. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was protecting the sovereignty of the US and Israel against “illegitimate actions”. “I call on the countries that still support the ICC, many of whose freedom was purchased at the price of great American sacrifices to fight this disgraceful attack on our nation and Israel.” Instead the ICC has had statements of support and solidarity from European leaders. A broad and increasingly bitter gap has opened up between the US and Europe over the Gaza war, and over the legitimacy of criticising Israel’s conduct. Israel and the Trump administration reject the idea that the laws of war apply equally to all sides, because they claim it implies a false and wrong equivalence between Hamas and Israel. Jan Egeland can see the split between Europe and the US growing. “I hope now that Europe will grow a spine,” he says. “There have been new tones, finally, coming from London, from Berlin, from Paris, from Brussels, after all these months of industrial-scale hypocrisy where they didn’t see that there was a world record in killed aid workers, in killed nurses, in killed doctors, in killed teachers, in killed children, and all while journalists like yourself have been denied access, denied to be witnessing this. “It’s something that the West will learn to regret really — that they were so spineless.”

The question of genocide

The question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza outrages Israel and its supporters, led by the United States. Lawyers who believe the evidence does not support the accusation have stood up to oppose the case brought by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) alleging genocide against Palestinians. But it will not go away. The Netanyahu loyalist Boaz Bismuth answered the genocide question like this. “How can you accuse us of genocide when the Palestinian population grew, I don’t know how many times more? How can you accuse me of ethnic cleansing when I’m moving [the] population inside Gaza to protect them? How can you accuse me when I lose soldiers in order to protect my enemies?” It is hard to prove genocide has happened; the legal bar prosecutors have to clear has been set deliberately high. But leading lawyers who have spent decades assessing matters of legal fact to see if there is a case to answer believe it is not necessary to wait for the process started in January last year by South Africa to make a years-long progress through the ICJ. We asked Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, for his opinion. “Genocide is a question of intent,” he wrote. “It means killing, maiming or imposing intolerable conditions on a national or ethnic group with intent to destroy them in whole or in part. “Statements by Netanyahu and his ministers suggest that the object of current operations is to force the Arab population of Gaza to leave by killing and starving them if they stay. These things make genocide the most plausible explanation for what is now happening.”

BBC / Anastassia Zatopolskai Boaz Bismuth from Netanyahu’s Likud party, said: “How can you accuse me of ethnic cleansing when I’m moving [the] population inside Gaza to protect them?”

South Africa based much of its genocide case against Israel on inflammatory language used by Israeli leaders. One example was the biblical reference Netanyahu used when Israel sent troops into Gaza, comparing Hamas to Amalek. In the Bible God commands the Israelites to destroy their persecutors, the Amalekites. Another was Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s declaration just after the Hamas attacks when he ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Ralph Wilde, UCL professor of international law, also believes there is proof of genocide. “Unfortunately, yes, and there is now no doubt legally as to that, and indeed that has been the case for some time.” He points out that an advisory opinion of the ICJ has already determined that Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank was illegal. Prof Wilde compares Western governments’ responses to the war in Gaza to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “There has been no court decision as to the illegality of Russia’s action in Ukraine. Nonetheless, states have found it possible already to make public proclamations determining the illegality of that action. There is nothing stopping them doing that in this case. “And so, if they are suggesting that they are going to wait, the question to ask them is, why are you waiting for a court to tell you what you already know?” Helena Kennedy KC is “very anxious about the casual use of the word genocide and I avoid it myself because I do think that there has to be a very high level in law, a very high level of intent necessary to prove it”. “Are we saying that it’s not genocide but it is crimes against humanity? You think that makes it sound okay? Terrible crimes against humanity? I think we’re in the process of seeing the most grievous kind of crimes taking place. “I do think we’re on a trajectory that could very easily be towards genocide, and as a lawyer I think that there’s certainly an argument that is being made strongly for that.” Baroness Kennedy says her advice to the British government if it was asked for would be, “We’ve got to be very careful about being complicit in grievous crimes ourselves.”

Getty Images Even people who have seen many wars say they find it hard to grasp the extent of the damage in Gaza

Eventually, a ceasefire will come. It will not end the conflict, or head off the certainty of a long and bitter epilogue. The genocide case at the ICJ guarantees that. So do the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Once journalists and war crimes investigators can get into the Gaza Strip, they will emerge with more hard facts about what has happened. Those who have been into Gaza with the UN or medical teams say that even people who have seen many wars find it hard to grasp the extent of the damage; so many islands of human misery in an ocean of rubble. I keep thinking about something an Israeli officer said the only time I’ve been into Gaza since the war started. I spent a few hours in the ruins with the Israeli army, one month into the war, when it had already made northern Gaza into a wasteland He started telling me how they did their best to not to fire on Palestinian civilians. Then he trailed off, and paused, and told me no-one in Gaza could be innocent because they all supported Hamas.

Gaza worse than hell on Earth, Red Cross chief tells BBC

Jeremy Bowen

International editor, in Geneva

Image source, Getty Images

Gaza has become worse than hell on Earth, according to the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mirjana Spoljaric.

Speaking in a BBC interview at the ICRC headquarters in Geneva, Spoljaric says humanity is failing. States are not doing enough to end the war, end the suffering of Palestinians and release Israeli hostages, she adds.

Palestinians, she says, have been stripped of human dignity. International humanitarian law is being hollowed out.

What is happening in Gaza, she says, surpasses any acceptable legal, moral and humane standard.

The ICRC is an international organisation that operates in war zones. It has over 300 staff in Gaza, most of whom are Palestinians.

Its surgical hospital in Rafah, in southern Gaza, is the closest medical facility to the area where many Palestinians have been killed during chaotic aid distribution in the last few days near sites run by the Israel and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

The ICRC says that yesterday morning its Rafah surgical teams received 184 patients, including 19 people dead on arrival and eight others who died of their wounds shortly afterwards. It was the highest number of casualties from a single incident at the field hospital since it was established just over a year ago.

The ICRC is considered the custodian of the Geneva Conventions. The fourth, agreed after World War Two, is designed to protect civilians in wars.

The rules of war, Spoljaric says, apply to all parties.

The Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023 were no justification for current events, she says. Spoljarić says the ICRC is deeply concerned about talk of victory at all costs, total war and dehumanisation.