Distant and few distribution centers were rushed by waves of a "human tsunami" that got out of control, which is why the humanitarian fund failed - and why IDF soldiers are forced to shoot at the crowd. The cabinet is responsible for the moral-conscious failure and Israel's catastrophic image in the world. This is what happens when people who don't understand security make the decisions.
Ron Ben Yishai
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The IDF insists there is no hunger in the Gaza Strip
and that
"The false starvation campaign"
It is a Hamas consciousness initiative that does not describe the reality on the ground. Nevertheless,
More than 20 countries published this week
- Most of them are friendly to Israel, such as Britain, France, Canada and Australia - a joint statement in which they declared that they condemn the"inhumane killing of civilians trying to obtain food and the trickle-down aid" by Israel.
These countries are calling for an immediate end to the war that Israel is waging in Gaza, but what is even worse than the delegitimization of our right to defend ourselves are the photographs, videos, and testimonies of Western doctors and journalists who are in Gaza - which prove that there are children and babies dying of hunger in the Strip in unbearable numbers.
6 Viewing the gallery
Crowds of Palestinians carrying humanitarian aid in the northern Gaza Strip, this week (Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas)
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, which is under Hamas control, during the first two weeks of June, 1,648 children were hospitalized with acute malnutrition, and since the beginning of the year, about 19,000 children have been hospitalized for the same reason. Even if these numbers are greatly exaggerated and intended to serve Hamas propaganda, and even if only half of these children are hungry, this is still a moral problem that we as Jews cannot live with - and it has already become the most serious catastrophe that has happened to us in terms of our standing on the international stage since the massacre of October 7, 2023.
Not only is the State of Israel losing the international legitimacy that the IDF has to operate in the Gaza Strip to protect the security of its residents, but it has also become a leper state in the eyes of world public opinion, and the soldiers who fight in its defense are persecuted as war criminals. All of this is because the plan to prevent Hamas from looting food and humanitarian aid now gives factual validity to the"starvation campaign," which was false when Hamas began it - and is now a terrible moral and propaganda reality from an Israeli point of view.
This is how the humanitarian fund failed
Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF)
It is a project of several senior reserve officers who served in the Southern Command, and are now businessmen who were alerted to the fact that Hamas is looting the aid entering Gaza, selling it on the market, and thus financing the recruitment of new fighters into its ranks to replace those the IDF kills. The terrorist organization also finances other operations, which, among other things, allow it to hold hostages and conduct lengthy negotiations in order to exhaust Israel.
The plan was approved by Defense Minister Israel Katz and received the blessing of US President Donald Trump. This is evidenced by the fact that the humanitarian fund is registered as a non-profit organization in the US state of Delaware, and is managed by American businessman Johnny Moore, a devout evangelist who was a senior figure in Trump's election campaign. This fund hired an unknown security company from the state of Wyoming to secure the food distribution using security guards who were former US military personnel.
The IDF set up the distribution centers, and according to the plan, the fund distributes dry food packages, each weighing 19 kilograms, which are supposed to be enough for a family of five to have three meals a day for five days. In the 22 days since it began operating, the fund has distributed 31 million such meals to Gaza in millions of packages that have reached the Gazans, according to the fund's data. However, what actually happened on the ground achieved the opposite results than what its founders and the State of Israel, which finances most of its budget with taxpayer money, had hoped for, and
IDF soldiers secure the distribution centers from the outside
While the American security guards are supposed to maintain order from the inside.
The planning, as mentioned, was full of good intentions - but the reality is that
Hundreds of people were killed while trying to get food at distribution centers.
Some were killed in "distance shooting" carried out by IDF soldiers, dozens of others were run over by the crowd, and the American security guards are unable to carry out an orderly distribution. Instead, what takes place on the ground is"grab as much as you can" by the strong. The weak, sick Gazans, children and women return from the distribution centers empty-handed - and watch with tearful eyes as shrewd merchants display the food looted from the distribution centers for sale in baskets laden with all sorts of goodies, at exorbitant prices in the markets of Gaza or Deir al-Balah.
Young people carry the humanitarian aid. Not all Gazans are able to get their hands on the supplies (Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas)
(Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas)
Spokespeople for the Coordinator of Operations in the Territories and the IDF are constantly trying to prove, using numbers and statistics, that there is no reason for there to be hunger in Gaza. Sometimes they imply that the pictures, which find their way into the international media, are of starving children from Yemen and not from Gaza. These claims are an insult to intelligence, mainly because testimonies from doctors, and even from IDF soldiers who spoke to Israeli journalists, indicate that Palestinian children are dying of hunger in Gaza - and that they are firing live ammunition at Palestinians who come to food distribution centers in self-defense.
A "human tsunami" that rushes and crushes anyone who stands in its way
What is the reason for this situation? First, the amount of food provided by the Humanitarian Fund to Gaza is simply not enough, and certainly does not provide all the nutrients, including animal proteins, for the hundreds of thousands of Gazans who rely on it; but the main reason is the small number of food distribution points on behalf of the Fund, and their location far from population centers.
The fund, which began operating about two months ago, has established distribution centers in the southern Gaza Strip: four between Khan Yunis and Rafah and one south of the Netzarim highway. These distribution centers, surrounded by fences, are far from the places where most of Gaza's population of about 2.1 million people is currently concentrated. This population is concentrated in about 25% of the Gaza Strip's territory near the seashore in the Gaza City area, in the central camps (mainly Deir al-Balah) and in the Mawasi area west of Rafah.
To reach the distribution centers, Gazans must walk or travel in donkey-drawn carts or on motorcycles, many kilometers away. They are not allowed to reach the distribution centers by car to prevent the danger of car bombs from IDF soldiers and American security guards, and also to prevent wholesale looting of the aid by Hamas and merchants, who have hired the services of armed clans, who loot the distribution centers for them. Most Gazans do not even have a cart or a motorcycle, and are forced to walk to the distribution centers.
Humanitarian aid arriving in Gaza (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Office)
Since the Gazans never know when the aid trucks will arrive at the distribution centers, they flock there in their thousands at night to get there early and be there before the trucks arrive. When the Foundation and IDF soldiers allow them to arrive, they literally storm the distribution centers, taking everything they can get their hands on and sometimes even pouring the contents of the food packages into sacks to make it easier for them on the way back, and they try to escape with their loot in hand.
But in this chaos, everything is getting bigger, and the crowds trying to get ahead and arrive before the division begins create huge"crowd surges" that move through narrow lanes, with people trampling each other, and the situation getting out of control. As a result, thousands of people moving the wrong way sometimes approach IDF soldiers, who are securing the aid center from a kilometer away.
The soldiers who feel they are being put in danger, even if they are sitting inside a tank, shoot at the crowd - and so there are deaths. In this case too, the Palestinian Ministry of Health is exaggerating the numbers, but the IDF admits that there are many deaths and injuries as a result of this"human tsunami," which rushes and crushes everything in its path, without control and without the ability to direct. These human surges are created mainly because the crowds need to come to the food, and the food does not come to them.
IDF forces in Khan Yunis. Soldiers sense danger in the distribution centers and fire at the crowd (Photo: IDF Spokesperson)
The idea was to place the distribution centers in a sterile place so that Hamas could not loot them, and so that every Gazan would receive his own food package. The first goal was indeed achieved, and Hamas really does not succeed in looting the food from the distribution centers - but not all Gazans manage to receive the food either. Those who have limited mobility, or are simply physically weak, such as children, women and the elderly, who cannot walk the many kilometers with 19 kg on their backs, and who cannot fight off the young men employed by the merchants who snatch the food packages from their hands, some of which also spills on the ground during the struggle - do not receive food and remain hungry. This is despite the fact that the stalls of the merchants who looted the food show abundance, at prices that most Gazans cannot afford to pay.
Some traders sell the food packages a few hundred meters from the distribution centers to those who were unsuccessful in the struggle. The fund's security guards and IDF soldiers stand helpless in the face of this chaos, and the soldiers are often forced to shoot to protect themselves from a surge of thousands rushing towards them. The security guards also use pepper spray, which leaves many Gazans, especially the sick, unable to breathe.
The Cabinet's unfortunate decision
What made this catastrophic situation even worse was the fact that 11 weeks before the fund began its activities in four different distribution centers, the State of Israel, by a cabinet decision, prevented the entry of any humanitarian aid into Gaza. As a result, the food reserves that were in Gaza for international aid organizations, and especially for the UN, were depleted, and now what is entering the Strip is not enough. Israel does indeed allow international humanitarian organizations, as well as UN organizations operating in Gaza, to bring aid into their distribution centers - but even this is not enough at the moment, and it does not reach the weak and the sick, but is divided between Hamas and the merchants.
What is upsetting is that the writing was on the wall. In May of this year, just days before the humanitarian fund began operating, the umbrella organization of aid agencies in Gaza published a statement in which it wrote, among other things:"Israeli officials attempted to disable the existing aid distribution system operated by the UN and its partner organizations, and to obtain our consent to deliver aid through Israeli logistics centers. According to the plan presented to us, large parts of Gaza, including the less mobile and more vulnerable and weak people, will remain without supplies - so it goes against basic humanitarian principles. The plan is dangerous because it sends civilians to military zones to receive food rations, thereby endangering human lives."
World headlines about the starvation in Gaza. A moral and cognitive failure (Photo: AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)
This prediction, which Israel dismissed with a dismissive shrug, has come true in full. The waves of the"human tsunami" rush daily toward the distribution centers because there are too few of them, or because they are far from the population centers. The UN, by comparison, has 400 aid and food distribution points throughout the Strip, in the heart of the population centers, and there the food, mainly infant formula (baby food substitutes), is distributed according to the records and certificates of those who hold it, and in more or less orderly lines of several dozen people in each line - and not a crowd that storms in and tramples everything in its path.
The idea designed to prevent aid looting by Hamas has allowed the terrorist organization to carry out a strategic awareness attack on the State of Israel, and it is consciously increasing the attacks on the fund's distribution points and the number of participants in them. Thus, following an unfortunate cabinet decision and with the approval of the Minister of Defense and the Prime Minister, Israel is being robbed twice - it is also accused of starving the residents of Gaza (and there is ample evidence that there is hunger), and IDF soldiers are also forced to shoot innocent people just so that the thousands moving towards them do not run them over, and so that Hamas cannot attach an explosive device to a tank under their protection. This is what happens when people who do not understand security make decisions, and people who are not professionals execute them with impunity.
This catastrophe needs to be stopped, whether there is a hostage deal or not. We need to go back to letting the UN and international organizations distribute the aid, even if Hamas cuts a coupon here and there, or alternatively find a way to spread dozens more humanitarian aid distribution centers in the Gaza Strip, which will be operated by the fund, and only the routes for the aid trucks to reach them will be secured by the IDF. What is certain is that the way it works now cannot continue.
And another word about
