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BREAKING
Political aide to the governor of Gilan Province in northern Iran: Air defenses in Rasht shot down a small hostile drone flying over the city
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Israeli media: Between 14 and 16 soldiers were injured in the incident, which reportedly involved two separate units at the brigade and division level

Humanitarian aid, sans humanity

  • Taylor Miller Taylor Miller
  • Source: Al Mayadeen English
  • 28 May 2025 13:01
12 Min Read

In part one of this three-part essay series, we begin scratching at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; this newly-created group positioned to oversee the distribution of “aid” across Gaza, even as the genocide continues to ravage the land and its people.

  • x
  • We are writing into, sharing, and shrieking against a present-future catastrophe, al-nakba al-mustamirra. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab El-Hajj)
    We are writing into, sharing, and shrieking against a present-future catastrophe, al-nakba al-mustamirra. (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab El-Hajj)

We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn't stopping us. There are pressures. There are those who attack [us]; they are trying to [make us] stop; they are not succeeding. You know why they aren't succeeding? Because we are navigating [the campaign] responsibly and wisely, and that's how we'll continue to do [it].

- Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich

 

Not even the rubble they made is safe from their destruction. Not concrete, steel, or stone could hide what remains of their memory of us. Echo itself was seen fleeing.

- Fady Joudah

 

For over ten months, I’ve worked to detangle the purposely-opaque plans of nongovernmental organizations such as FogBow and the Maritime Humanitarian Aid Foundation – parsing through murky language and stock-image riddled websites – painting (band) aid initiatives in massive, ultimately futile strokes (futile, as the entirety of Gaza is still enduring manmade starvation and totalizing blockade of all lifegiving goods, services, and what remains of movement across the besieged enclave). Promises, words, dulled if not wholly stripped of their meanings: aid… rubble… rescue… looming… ceasefire. Vacuous protests, promises and policies that ultimately have only further exacerbated this famine and prolonged this worlds-ending “-cide”, by every name, across Gaza–now nineteen months long and counting.

When I awoke Tuesday morning – friends spanning multiple time zones already (re-, re-reposted): "Thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of imminent death after a nearly three-month total Israeli blockade on the besieged enclave, which has spread famine, the United Nations relief chief warns. That has put 14,000 babies at risk of dying in the next 48 hours, Tom Fletcher said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday."

By the time this essay posts, that timeline will have passed.

Similarly, Al Mayadeen English posted on May 22, "UNRWA Director of #Health Akihiro Seita warned on Tuesday [May 20] that malnutrition rates in Gaza have increased during Israel's 11-week blockade and could surge exponentially if food shortages persist. Seita said data through April shows rising malnutrition, warning the situation could become uncontrollable if current shortages continue."

We are writing into, sharing, and shrieking against a present-future catastrophe, al-nakba al-mustamirra (The ongoing Nakba). The point “beyond their control” is what news anchors and most journalists, analysts, and scholars lack the spine[1] to say: This is "Israel’s" version of the Final Solution. Live Streamed. And unstoppable.

If you’re reading this, I’m not explicitly saying you haven’t tried. But what I’m saying is, a march on a Saturday, for 80+ straight weeks – when the London and New York Stock Exchanges are closed and the shareholders are on holiday in Kennebunkport and the munitions manufacturers are playing 18 holes – is being drowned out by the incessant hum of the Forever War machine.

When I say “Final Solution,” I’ll point directly to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, that, recounting the SS horrors and use of gas chambers at length, discusses the tempo of atrocities as Nazis voraciously hunted and exterminated their victims.

  • The occupation drops leaflets
    “The occupation drops leaflets reading: ‘Rafah is only the beginning’… In the image: a map of Gaza almost entirely under occupation, except for a small strip called Al-Mawasi — where over two million people are crammed into hunger, thirst, and displacement.” (May 20, 2025 via eye.on.palestine on X)

It is this same tempo – in this very moment – that we cannot overlook nor tolerate. But see, tolerance is a wasteland –here, meaning, that the machinations of this highly strategized US and IOF-led campaign of annihilation operate in plain sight. You and I move through and past it every day, and these are our varying degrees of complicity in and complacency with this system, this new status quo. And know that this next phase of totalizing ruination of Gaza and its people is just as much about the Zionist settler colonial businessmen, as the bombs.

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On Monday, May 19, 2025, nine trucks were cleared to enter the ‘Kerem Shalom’ border crossing – as circulated on social media, only five entered… two of them packed with burial shrouds. The following day, the United Nations “received permission from Israel” for “around 100” trucks of “aid.” Images of the trucks, shared by the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) were captioned: “93 UN trucks carrying humanitarian aid, including flour for bakeries, food for babies, medical equipment, and pharmaceutical drugs were transferred today (Tuesday) via the Kerem Shalom Crossing into the Gaza Strip. All aid was transferred only after a thorough security inspection.” A closer look at the contents of these trucks reveals goods barely filling half of each trailer; pallets of low-quality, highly processed white flour that would hardly prove enough to fill one American grocery store, let alone a forcibly starved population of two million.[2]

  • Barely-filled trailers in an ostentatious performance of “aid”, May 20, 2025 (via COGAT on X)
    Barely-filled trailers in an ostentatious performance of “aid”, May 20, 2025 (via COGAT on X)

Track the whiplash: one hour after COGAT’s post, the Associated Press reported “UN says no aid has reached Palestinians, two days after new supplies began entering Gaza.” Ten hours earlier, Maariv Online shared, “Moshe Feiglin on Channel 14: 'Every baby in Gaza is an enemy.'" Let’s consider the quality of that baby formula.

On May 21, the Gaza Government Media Office, “A total of 87 trucks carrying various types of aid have entered the Gaza Strip so far, allocated to several international and local organizations.”

How many hours in that 48 have passed since I began writing this?

Tempo, right. Tell me what a room full of US Marines-turned-Venture Capitalists know about the timing, the rhythm of a newborn infant’s hunger… how and when it needs colostrum – a mother’s very first servings of breastmilk. How their tiny hands unclench when they’re satiated. How their cognitive development thrives from the scent of their caregivers’ bodies, from quiet and undisturbed 24-hour cycles of sleeping, eating, playtime, learning. Of course, they know nothing, they are diametrically opposed to caregiving (giving!)… to nurturing… to cultivating patience, and all that is the sanctity of life. These Marines-now-Bankers/Realtors, predators at every stage, first did the pillaging and bombing themselves (as “boots on the ground”) – and now they coordinate the destruction from their desks in Manhattan and DC and move with rapidity and rabidity at a pace only productive of death.

This week, a firestorm of press brought the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) into the spotlight; the group, sans any website or social media (at time of writing), was ‘founded’ in Geneva, Switzerland on February 11, 2025, as listed in Swiss Commercial Register. In its publicly accessible memo on proposed operating models and governance, the group pitches four “Secure Distribution Sites” (SDS) to purportedly serve Palestinians in Gaza “pre-packaged rations, hygiene kits, and medical supplies,” as these items “move through tightly controlled corridors, monitored in real time to prevent diversion.”

Now, I am not mathematically inclined, but as I read through the 14-page document, I noted some confounding equations:

  • GHF notes that each SDS will be built to “continuously serve 300,000 people–1.2 million Gazans in the initial phase, with capacity to expand past 2 million.” Prior to October 7, 2023, there were approximately 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza; on July 5, 2024, The Lancet estimated “85,750 deaths…by Aug 6, 2024.” More than nine months on from that macabre forecast, how do we math this all-encompassing obliteration of the land and its people? Is GHF saying the most horrific part out loud–that one million Palestinians have been slaughtered in Gaza, and, because international media, doctor convoys and humanitarian monitors are all but entirely banned from the territory, that “official” count has yet to circulate, but is known by the US and IOF militaries?

 

  • The GHF operating model cost breakdown is $1.30 per meal, which, they say, includes “procurement, logistics, distribution and security…”[3] and indicating that each meal will be 1,750 kcal. Here–we can consider prison nutrition policy; we can also consider The Warsaw Ghetto Hunger Study by Jewish doctors imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto (1942) which indicated that the Nazis, intent on starving the ghetto within months, allowed no more than a daily intake of 180 calories per prisoner, while withholding vaccines and medicine that would be necessary to prevent the spread of disease in the dense ghetto.

 

  • How does a population–purposefully maimed, dehydrated, starved, diseased… violently displaced and without options to leave…stay, return…safely, reach one of the four SDS sites? Why are people weakened by their occupiers and ignored by the international community expected to travel to survive? On foot? (What of amputees? What of the feeble or bedridden?) By car? (No fuel or mechanical parts enter Gaza, and not just since 10/07/23 but see also: By train, or bicycle? Virtually all infrastructure across Gaza is devastated.[4] How many calories would be expended, searching for a 1,750-calorie meal?

 

In a press release titled, “Leading Aid and Human Rights Organisations Condemn the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as a Dangerous, Politicised Sham,” several prominent human rights organizations unequivocally reject GHF’s project deeming it “a deeply flawed and dangerous attempt to rebrand the delivery of aid in Gaza while the Israeli government continues to impose a blockade, bomb civilians, and block life-saving assistance. Aid does not need rebranding. It needs to be allowed in.” This brief states what we need all be shouting, “If the strategy knowingly includes failing to feed an entire segment of the population, that is not humanitarianism. It is a crime.”

This series will expand on the corruption of GHF’s so-called Governance Structure in forthcoming installments, but for now it begs questioning: What would prevent the belligerent IOF, using weapons from the US, UK, France, Germany, and more, from directly attacking these “Secure Distribution Sites”? We’ve seen this atrocity ad nauseam: aid distribution sites, community kitchens, gardens, fishers risking their lives for a catch in the poisoned sea, our feeds filled with blood-stained pita and weevil-infested grain… detonated booby-trapped canned foods shredding hungry children’s bodies to bits… families tiled on tables in makeshift morgues after another mosque another iftar another hospital another school-as-shelter destroyed. How–how–can GHF claim “we don’t take sides” while concurrently claiming “coordination with IDF/COGAT for access and de-confliction”?

Maybe an underlying question is… how is this group paying themselves? Rather, what are the funding schemes, and how are the warmongers circling their wagons, attempting to feign efficacy here? Who… in this strategy, profits? Parts two and three of this inquiry work to disaggregate these parts of this puzzle.

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Sharif Kouddous circulated data from the Gaza Ministry of Health, updated May 19, 2025: a thousand page document listing 52,959 Palestinians killed in Gaza. Though those of us highly attuned to the ground reports, testimonials, and mappings of bombings, evacuation orders, and disease and malnutrition’s ravages know–this death count is exponentially higher.

[2] In a DropSite News post on X covering UK Parliament affairs (May 20, 2025): “We are now entering a dark new phase… Netanyahu’s government is planning to drive Gazans from their homes… Minister Smotrich even spoke of Israeli forces cleansing Gaza… We must call this what it is,” UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy told Parliament today. As MPs shouted “Call it a genocide!” Lammy didn’t. He called it “extremism… dangerous, repellent, monstrous”, but stopped short of calling it what it is. In a forceful 13-minute speech, Lammy condemned Israeli officials and warned of mass displacement—but fell short of accurately naming Israeli crimes.

[3] From their overview: “The cost breakdown is as follows: $0.58 per meal for commodity procurement and $0.67 for logistics, security, distribution, and other overheads. This structure is consistent with industry benchmarks - procurement generally ranges from $0.50 to $0.80 per meal, while 60–80 percent of total

humanitarian-operation spending typically covers logistics and related costs.”

[4] @BayanPalestine: “Everywhere I go there is destruction around me. I no longer walk the streets of #Gaza city, I now climb them, and hardly. I have seen so much rubble in this city to the point where I currently hate the color “gray”.”  (June 14, 2024)

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Mayadeen’s editorial stance.
  • war on Gaza
  • Palestine
  • Humanitarian aid
  • Israel
  • Gaza
Taylor Miller

Taylor Miller

A researcher and photographer based in Tucson, Arizona. She earned her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Arizona and holds an MA and BFA in Art & Visual Culture Education from the University of Arizona.

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