Amid ongoing uncertainty about the future of a controversial, Israel-approved aid distribution scheme, on Monday one of its lead contractors said it will keep working in the region.

The statement from UG Solutions hints at a continued presence for U.S. private military contractors in Gaza, despite pushback from Palestinian political parties and the international aid community.

The firm’s employees, many of them U.S. special forces veterans, have provided security at four aid distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation since May. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed along the routes to the foundation’s aid sites under Israel Defense Forces gunfire, according to the United Nations.

“The situation in Gaza may be tenuous for the short to mid-term as the remnants of Hamas and clans vie for control of neighborhoods, cities, and the Gaza Strip as a whole,” a company spokesperson wrote in a statement released Monday. “UG stands ready to continue its work with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation or any other international organizations or local nongovernmental organizations that believe that an increased security posture would better protect their staff, aid supplies, and logistics lines.” 

Critics said that in addition to violating humanitarian principles by deployed armed guards, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation served as a tool of Israeli policy by forcing Palestinians to make mileslong treks to southern Gaza.

As the foundation began distributing food at four sites, hundreds of U.N. sites were kept shuttered. Dozens of aid organizations decried the situation in a July statement, where they said that Palestinians faced “an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families.”

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“The humanitarian system is being deliberately and systematically dismantled by the Government of Israel’s blockade and restrictions, a blockade now being used to justify shutting down nearly all other aid operations in favour of a deadly, military-controlled alternative that neither protects civilians nor meets basic needs,” the groups said.

UG Solutions, in particular, fell under intense scrutiny when The Intercept and other outlets reported on the background of some of its private military contractors in the Infidels Motorcycle Club.

Palestinians speaking to The Associated Press on Sunday said that at least three GHF aid sites had been abandoned as a condition of the ceasefire and hostage handover between Israel and Hamas. In a statement to the news outlet, however, the foundation cast the closure of the sites as a temporary pause.

For its part, UG Solutions told The Intercept that it is planning to redeploy in Gaza soon. The company said that one site in the Netzarim Corridor is “no longer sustainable” with the withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces, but other sites near Gaza’s border with Egypt “remain active” despite a temporary pause.

“We anticipate these sites, plus additional site(s), reactivating or launching this week. UG Solutions remains eager to assist the people of Gaza by providing secure distribution sites where NGOs and international organizations can provide aid and services,” the company spokesperson said.

Even if the company’s work for GHF does not resume, its statements suggest that it is interested in working with other nonprofits in Gaza. The company says that it has stepped up the “vetting and training” of new employees in anticipation of added demand. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C. it has hired a lobbying firm closely associated with Donald Trump’s administration.

In its statement, UG Solutions said that its “connections back to the U.S. Department of War and allied nations’ militaries and security services can enable seamless coordination between the soon to be established multinational forces and the humanitarian community.”

“Our cadre of American veterans each have decades of experience in areas facing civil unrest, terrorist threats, and limited to no governance,” the company’s statement reads. “Their knowledge of Gaza and what is likely forthcoming is second to none and positions UG as the go-to security firm to help those focused on rebuilding and delivering aid in the second phase of the peace plan.”

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“A Purely Manmade Famine”: How Israel Is Starving Gaza

Critics warn that UG Solutions’ work in Gaza could entrench the politicization of international aid, where food and medicine are used as even more naked tools of government policy than in past distribution arrangements — and traditional principles, such as neutrality, impartiality, and independence, are cast aside.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator who has become a fierce critic of Israel’s war on Gaza and serves as president of the U.S./Middle East Project, said that he believes the GHF will only resume operations as part of a “recooked colonial governance structure” imposed on Gaza by the U.S., or in concert with Israeli-backed Palestinian militias.

He expressed optimism that “there is now an acknowledgement, an understanding that is built into this agreement that it is the UN agencies that know how to deliver aid at scale in a humanitarian fashion — not as a tool of displacement, not as an act of cruelty — but it is those UN agencies who have shown their capacity to do so that are going to be trusted with delivering the vast majority of aid,” Levy said. “One can anticipate that Israel is going to make that as difficult as possible.”

But he found the agreement’s lack of accountability for mass killing and starvation in Gaza disappointing.

“There also needs to be accountability when a private sector organization is set up in a way that turns humanitarian aid delivery into a weapon of war, which guarantees more killing, which is the story of the GHF,” he said.

Another Gaza Humanitarian Foundation contractor also said Monday that it planned to keep operating in Gaza. Since the nonprofit’s start, a company founded by a former CIA employee and incorporated in Wyoming, Safe Reach Solutions, has served as its lead contractor.

Corporate records in Wyoming show that the company was “administratively dissolved” on October 7 for failing to have a registered agent on file. In a statement, the company described that as a “clerical error” that would be corrected and said it continues to work for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Update: October 13, 2025, 6:33 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a comment from Daniel Levy of the U.S./Middle East Project.

The post We Aren’t Finished in Gaza, U.S. Military Contractors Say appeared first on The Intercept.

The temporary suspension of travel is the latest in a crushing set of restrictions that Israel has used to sever Gaza’s contact with the outside world, compounding food, fuel, and medical care shortages for a population subjected to more than two years of genocide. Large backlogs of patients in Gaza need specialized treatments and surgeries, so volunteer medical specialists come with much-needed supplies to relieve some of the demand.

“When you do something like this, it throws all of that to the wayside and we struggle with our ability to treat those patients,” said Dr. Thaer Ahmad, a Chicago-based physician who has previously volunteered in Gaza. “This continues to have really profound implications on Gaza’s most vulnerable people.” 

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Ahmad, who volunteered in early 2024 at Nasser and Al-Aqsa hospitals, has witnessed similar restrictions at other moments of high tension — past Israeli offensives against Iran, the collapse of past ceasefire deals, or the Israeli military’s siege of Gaza City last September. He has been denied entry into Gaza by the Israeli government four times since his medical mission, including in May 2024, when he and other doctors were turned away in Egypt as the Israeli military took over the Rafah border. 

The restrictions in Gaza are set to be lifted next Tuesday, according to messages United Nations aid coordinators sent Wednesday announcing the blockades to dozens of NGOs, two of which confirmed to The Intercept the border closures were affecting their medical teams. Physicians who remain trapped inside the territory have cast doubt on whether the dates will be honored given the multiple postponements. 

“There’s uncertainty around when we’re going to leave, are we going to leave? Are they going to try to push the dates even further?” said Dr. Salman Khan, an infectious diseases physician at Columbia University, who is among the trapped doctors.

Khan and six other American doctors were scheduled to return to the U.S. on March 10 following a two-week medical mission at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. The group has been blocked twice from leaving the territory, with Israel’s border security officials citing a “security assessment” without further explanation. The physicians also expressed frustration with the World Health Organization, noting that the international body was partly responsible for coordinating the doctors’ safe passage.

Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, the Israeli military unit that controls the borders between Palestine and Israel, confirmed it had closed crossings into Gaza “due to the ongoing missile threat” and said the restrictions are temporary and meant to protect people’s safety. It refuted claims that it was blocking doctors from leaving Gaza to harm its civilian population.

The World Health Organization did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

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“A Purely Manmade Famine”: How Israel Is Starving Gaza

Since the start of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the military has weaponized blockades, preventing aid from entering the Strip, including food and medical supplies. In addition to systematically killing and imprisoning aid and medical workers throughout the war, the Israeli government has also blocked the movement of international medical missions, further straining an already decimated economy and health care system. Palestinians in the West Bank have also seen similar wartime blockades, including the lockdown of entire cities. 

Despite the October deal between Israel and Hamas, the Israeli government has continued to impose limits on food and medical supplies from entering the Strip. In February, the government reopened its Rafah border crossing into Egypt, allowing some Palestinians to seek medical care outside of Gaza. 

Once the U.S. and Israel began their war on Iran, the Israeli government once again shut all aid crossings into Gaza. Food has been allowed through a single border entry point — the Kerem Shalom crossing — but the amount of aid allowed in is well below what is needed, according to the United Nations. The Israeli government had already barred some NGOs earlier this year, such as Doctors Without Borders, from accessing Gaza after the organization refused the government’s new requirements of handing over lists of Palestinian employees due to concerns the government would target the workers. 

Dr. Mimi Syed, an emergency room physician based in Olympia, Washington, also knows these restrictions firsthand. In August 2025, she was prevented from entering Gaza while waiting for approval in Jordan for her third medical aid trip. During her previous medical trips to the Strip, she witnessed entire convoys of international doctors who were barred from leaving Gaza. 

The unpredictable and indefinite nature of the Israeli government’s restrictions hamper future medical missions, Syed said. 

“Healthcare workers like myself have jobs in the US that are full-time and we have to get back to our jobs/families,” Syed told The Intercept. “It creates another form of logistical difficulties and prevents and discourages many of us from returning or even attempting to go in.”

The Palestinian American Medical Association, which is facilitating Khan’s trip to Gaza, and Humanity Auxilium, a Texas-based NGO that also organizes medical missions, told The Intercept the recent border closures have hurt their ability to move medical supplies and teams in and out of the territory.

“It really puts us in a limbo in figuring out when to deploy surgeons who cannot take off for weeks,” said Faiza Hussain, executive director of Humanity Auxilium.

Khan, who remains inside Gaza, said he’s had to cancel his patients’ appointments at Columbia’s Irving Medical Center in New York due to the delays. 

“I was supposed to be back at work at my hospital today,” Khan said. “This is impacting people on the other side of the world.” 

Khan added that some of his colleagues were anxious to return to their children. One of them was running low on their personal medications, having only packed enough for two weeks. The group of doctors includes anesthesiologists Ashraf Abou El-Ezz of Indiana and Anas Rahim of Texas, neonatologist Ahmed Faisal Saleem of Arizona, emergency medicine physician Aizad Dasti of Maryland, and vascular surgeon Asad Choudhry of New Jersey. One other physician did not wish to disclose their identity. They are continuing their volunteer work at Nasser Hospital as they wait out the blockade.

Although Israel’s attacks on Gaza have slowed since the start of the war on Iran, the Israeli military continues to launch strikes in the territory, in violation of the so-called ceasefire deal. In the first week of Khan’s medical mission, he recalled receiving trauma patients from an Israeli bombing on an encampment one mile from Nasser Hospital. A four-year-old girl died at the hospital from her wounds, he said.   

After urging from Khan and advocates, the U.S. State Department had arranged flights for the doctors from Tel Aviv’s airport on Friday, Khan said, but has yet to clear a way for them to leave Gaza to make the flight. 

In a statement sent after publication, a State Department spokesperson said that the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem was coordinating with COGAT and “ready to assist” the doctors after the Israeli government gets them out of Gaza. “The Department of State’s current travel advisory, in place since October 2023, states that U.S. citizens should not travel to Gaza ‘for any reason due to terrorism and armed conflict,’” the spokesperson added.

Update: March 13, 2026, 3:15 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to include the names of more doctors stranded in Gaza.

Update: March 16, 2026

This story has been updated to include a State Department comment sent after publication.

The post Israel’s Deadly Blockade Traps 7 U.S. Doctors in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The military, which routinely dismissed health ministry figures as Hamas propaganda, is analyzing the data to distinguish how many are combatants and how many are civilians, according to Haaretz. The report confirms past stories from the Israeli website Local Call as well as Vice.

The ministry is part of a Hamas-controlled government in Gaza, but human rights advocates, a prestigious medical journal, and the United Nations have said for years that its tallies of the dead have been found to be accurate. The ministry also periodically releases names and other identifying information about those killed in Gaza.

Despite human rights advocates’ reliance on the figures, the White House, members of Congress, pro-Israel pundits, and legacy media institutions have all cast doubt on the running death toll kept by the Palestinian health ministry.

The doubts sewn over the loss of Palestinian life laid the groundwork for persistent genocide denial that has helped to shield Israel from accountability.

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“The Biden administration, Congress, and the U.S. media played along with Israel’s lies and deception about the horrific death toll in Gaza — over 80 percent civilians; over half, women and children — so that they could gaslight Americans into continued support for Israel,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of human rights group DAWN. She said that, along with other debunked Israeli claims about the war, the denials of the death toll helped “ensure Israel can continue its crimes and the U.S. can continue to arm it.”

Hani Almadhoun, co-founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, whose brother Mahmoud was killed by an Israeli drone in November 2024, said it was difficult to defend against officials and media outlets dismissing the death tolls as “Hamas numbers.”

“To every government spokesperson, every news anchor, and every celebrity who repeated that denial — I hope you never know what it feels like to lose your family and then be told your loss is ‘disputed,’” Almadhoun told The Intercept.

With media and NGO workers barred by Israel from entering the Strip, the Palestinian health ministry’s count has been the only reliable source of the death toll during the genocide.

The latest health ministry figure estimates at least 71,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, a number that is still growing while Israel continues to strike the besieged territory at a near-daily rate in violation of the so-called ceasefire.

Here is a brief accounting of the people and institutions who have denied the Palestinian death tolls in Gaza throughout Israel’s genocide.

Biden Administration

About two weeks after October 7, 2023, then-President Joe Biden told reporters that he had “no confidence” in the death tolls kept by the Gaza Health Ministry.

“I have no confidence in the number that Palestinians are using,” Biden said. At the time, the Gaza Health Ministry death tolls estimated 6,000 Palestinians, including 2,700 children, killed by the Israeli military. Biden’s National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby doubled down and said nothing from the health ministry, which he called “a front for Hamas,” could be taken “at face value.”

While the Biden administration later shifted toward confidence in the health ministry figures, their initial comments, which were widely reported, left lasting damage on the credibility of the Palestinian death tolls.

Congress

In June 2024, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Reps. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla.; Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J.; Joe Wilson, R-S.C.; Mike Lawler, R-N.Y.; and Carol Miller, R-W.Va., helped pass an amendment to a State Department spending bill that blocked the department from citing the Gaza Health Ministry data in its reports.

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Later that year, Congress passed a defense spending bill that similarly barred the Pentagon from publicly citing the Gaza Health Ministry estimates as “authoritative.”

“Will Congress now overturn its own ban on citing the [Gaza Health Ministry] data,” Whitson said, “now that even the Israeli government has conceded it’s accurate?”

Rep. Ritchie Torres

Days before the Senate vote on the defense spending bill, Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., a staunch Israel supporter, circulated a report from a neoconservative U.K.-based think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, that accused the Gaza Health Ministry of inflating its death toll.

“Validating the public health arm of Hamas is like validating the public health arms of Al Qaeda and ISIS or the public health arms of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan,” Torres said. “It is morally and intellectually corrupt.”

Steny Hoyer

Along with Torres and a host of other lawmakers, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., accused the Gaza Health Ministry of inflating the death tolls.

“They inflate casualty numbers and make false accusations to smear Israel’s reputation,” Hoyer said in October 2023. “We must treat their claims with the same skepticism we would those made by al Qaeda or ISIS.”

Since its military accepted the Gaza Health Ministry numbers, neither Torres nor Hoyer have accused Israel of doing something similar to validating the Islamic State or Nazi Germany.

Anti-Defamation League

The Anti-Defamation League was one of a host of influential pro-Israel figures and organizations that sought to discredit the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll.

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The group released a list of news outlets that did not mention Hamas when reporting on the health ministry death estimates and called on outlets to “properly caveat data and information cited from the Gaza Health Ministry with clear mention that it is controlled by Hamas and that it has shared false and misleading information in the past.”

AIPAC

Another powerful pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee called the Palestinian death tolls a “myth” that “cannot be trusted” because it is controlled by Hamas.

Elliott Abrams

Figures at major think tanks also joined the denialism. From his perch at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams, a longtime Washington neoconservative, was among them. Abrams — who pleaded guilty in 1991 to counts related to the cover-up of the Iran–Contra affair — called the Gaza Health Ministry data “not credible” and “Hamas propaganda,” citing a United Nations death toll revision that listed fewer women and children killed in Gaza. The shifting number was due to achange in the U.N.’s methodology — to an MO that now relies solely on the Gaza Health Ministry for data.

Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Another think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an organization formed with the support of AIPAC and its donors, also used the U.N. revision as evidence of apparent misinformation, citing the shift as evidence that the figures “have lost any claim to validity.”

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies said the Gaza Health Ministry is “is scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work” after the ministry acknowledged in a report that it was still working to identify about 11,000 of what at the time was a toll of more than 30,000 Palestinians killed. The foundation suggested the report was a “deliberate effort to downplay the number of terrorists” killed by Israel.

Alan Dershowitz

Former Harvard Law professor, celebrity attorney, and pugnacious pundit Alan Dershowitz has also called the civilian death toll in Gaza “among the lowest in the history of comparable warfare.” He dismissed the health ministry death tolls as “way, way exaggerated — the number of actually purely innocent civilians that have been killed are a tiny fraction.”

Eylon Levy

Among the pundits who went after the Gaza Health Ministry death tolls was former Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy. As recently as this month, Levy expended his energies refuting early reports on the Israeli government’s acceptance of the health ministry estimates, calling such reporting “dead in the water.”

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“This myth exists for one reason: to launder Hamas data to support its war effort,” Levy said.

Levy has not made any statements on social media since the report that the Israeli military found Gaza Health Ministry data to be accurate.  

Abraham Wyner

A scholar of statistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Abraham Wyner, took to the pages of the right-leaning pro-Israel site Tablet to denounce the health ministry death toll as “fake” and “not real.” His evidence? A graph showing the steady increase in the day-to-day numbers of people killed by Israel.

“This regularity is almost surely not real,” he said. “One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day.”

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In a statement to The Intercept, Wyner said the ministry death toll totals “were never wildly wrong,” but said Palestinian officials in Gaza had produced “false” numbers. He claimed he only disputed the proportion of the numbers that the Gaza health ministry had claimed were women and children.

“You must make a clear distinction between [what] was produced early (when the information war was fought) and today (when it has been lost),” Wyner wrote in an email.

Wyner was the only death-toll denier in this story to offer comment.

Update: January 30, 2026, 3:56 p.m. ET
This story was updated with a quote from Hani Almadhoun.

The post Israeli Military Found Gaza Health Ministry Death Toll Was Accurate. Will These Deniers Admit It? appeared first on The Intercept.

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.) 

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. 

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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.

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.

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.

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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.” 

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 U.N. 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. 

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. 

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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. 

“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.”

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”).

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.”

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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.

This story was supported with funding from the Pulitzer Center and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post Our Reporter Got Into Gaza. He Witnessed a Famine of Israel’s Making. appeared first on The Intercept.

In Gaza, we are used to waking up to the sounds of explosions, counting the days between meals, and cycling constantly between fear and hope. We thought our pain was unlike any other in the world until we saw Sudan burning under the same silence. There, as here, people die from hunger and under rubble, cameras and lenses absent, as if pain in the Global South is not meant to be heard in the North.

In Sudan and Gaza, children are snatched from their mothers’ arms before they even know what safety feels like. Last Tuesday alone, some 460 people were reportedly killed by paramilitary forces in the city of El-Fasher. Estimates put the rate of displacement in Gaza at 90%; in Sudan, more than 14 million people have been displaced. Homes are destroyed, access to clean water is severely limited, food remains deeply scarce, and the wounded lie scattered on the ground without medical care, just as we witnessed in our small city on the Mediterranean coast. 

Yet what hurts more than bombing or hunger is silence. The silence of the world, the silence of those who raise human rights slogans in closed halls while people die in the streets. Despite the distance between them, Gaza and Sudan share this silence that doubles our pain and makes us ask: Is humanity truly universal, or is it only reserved for those whose suffering is in front of the cameras?

In Gaza, I have seen how hunger can become a constant dagger in the stomach, how it makes us cling to each other more than anything else. In Sudan, I see familiar faces in the photos of naked children fleeing death, in women burying their loved ones under the ruins of their homes, as if history is doomed to keep mercilessly repeating itself.

The blood spilled in Darfur is no different from the blood spilled here. The destruction of schools and hospitals in Khartoum and El-Fasher mirrors exactly what we have seen in our neighborhoods after the latest bombing. The difference is that the world sometimes looks, and sometimes closes its eyes completely.

In Sudan, especially in Darfur and El-Fasher, civilians are suffering under a suffocating siege that has cut off food, water, and medicine, while essential services like hospitals and schools collapse. Thousands of children, women, and men live under the constant threat of famine and disease, including cholera, spread due to lack of sanitation and clean water. Civilians are being killed or forcibly displaced, and hundreds of thousands have fled inside the country or across borders, under an almost complete global silence. The ongoing conflict between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese army has made civilians hostages of destruction, as they are kidnapped, targeted, and deprived of their most basic human rights—just as we experienced in Gaza.

Shared pain connects us more than any geography or language. Gaza and Sudan, separated by sea and desert, share the same suffering. Every time I read about the deaths in El-Fasher or Geneina, I feel that their pain is ours.

The unfolding tragedy in Sudan reminds us in Gaza that we are not alone, and that wars, hunger, and destruction are not isolated events—they are linked chapters of the same human suffering. And it is painful to realize that the world so often chooses to close the door on our cries, leaving the pain confined to those who live through it.

Talking about Gaza is not enough, and talking about Sudan alone is not enough. We must connect the pain, to see that human suffering knows no borders, and that those who live war, hunger, and death deserve to have their voices heard, no matter their nationality or land.

From Gaza, I raise my voice to the world: Speak about Sudan, share their cries, and do not let this pain go unanswered. Sudan knows the same destruction, the same hunger, the same fear binding us inextricably together. We who have lived bombing, death, and hunger know what betrayal feels like, and we know how the world can remain silent while innocents die.

I feel the importance, I feel the pain, and I know that every word written, every story told, can ease some of the suffering. Do not leave Sudan alone as Gaza was left alone. Speak, write, share, so that the world hears their cries and understands that humanity is not optional, but a duty we all must share.

The post From Gaza to Sudan: “Their Pain Is Ours” appeared first on The Intercept.

Another way of measuring GHF’s achievements is by counting the hundreds of Palestinians killed while trying to access such aid and the hundreds more who died of starvation-related conditions amid famine when GHF was the only organization allowed to deliver aid.

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Since May, when Israel ousted long-standing aid providers and made GHF the lone distributor in Gaza, Israeli soldiers and American subcontractors have killed nearly 3,000 Palestinians seeking aid, according to a September tally by Gaza health officials. The vast majority were killed at GHF sites. Doctors Without Borders dubbed the GHF distribution points as “sites of orchestrated killing” after its medical teams cared for nearly 900 patients wounded at the four GHF hubs.

In August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared a famine in Gaza City. GHF did not expand its operations beyond its four distribution sites. Within the famine’s first month, at least 175 Palestinians died of starvation, a likely undercount.

“The GHF model is one of the worst ‘aid’ — and I use ‘aid’ in quotes — models that’s been tried in the 21st century, if not longer than that,” said Anastasia Moran, advocacy director at MedGlobal, a Chicago-based medical aid organization that has teams inside Gaza. “On every dimension, on every indicator, I’d consider it a failure.”

Since March, Israel’s government has blockaded the entire Gaza strip in violation of international law, creating famine conditions across the territory. The Israeli government, with funding from the U.S. government, appointed the newly formed GHF to oversee all aid distribution in the territory in May. The Swiss-based organization was first run by Jake Wood, a former American sniper turned aid worker, who quit within two weeks after stating the foundation did not adhere to basic humanitarian principles of neutrality. GHF’s chair is Johnnie Moore, an evangelical minister and former religious adviser to the Trump administration.

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Built on the Israeli misinformation campaign claiming Hamas was seizing and controlling most aid in Gaza, debunked by both U.S. and Israeli intelligence, the GHF model cut out the United Nations and all international NGOs, insisting it could deliver enough food to slow the worsening starvation conditions. The U.N. previously operated 400 aid sites throughout Gaza.

Rather than maintain the existing model of bringing food and supplies to individuals with most need by delivering goods directly to communities, GHF established four distribution sites. The foundation also hired two American logistics and security firms — UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, led by a Green Beret veteran and former CIA officer, respectively — to oversee distribution. The result was the funneling of thousands of desperate people who traveled long distances into aid sites where long lines often devolved into stampedes. Gunfire from Israeli soldiers, or private American contractors, largely former U.S. special forces, was a near-daily reality. While some of those who survived the deadly queues managed to bring home boxes of food, the supplies failed to slow the famine conditions across Gaza which only worsened. The food provided by GHF was widely criticized by nutritional experts and aid groups as inadequate to prevent hunger and difficult to prepare (most items needed water to boil, itself a scarce resource in the territory).

The model amounted to simply another tool of war by the occupying Israeli forces.

“The GHF is a symptom, it’s not the problem,” said Scott Paul, Oxfam America’s director of peace and security. “The GHF is only relevant because people weren’t allowed access to food in ways that were safe and humane. In this way, the GHF is an entity occupying negative space, and the negative space is the deadly siege that the government of Israel has imposed for most of this year.”

The Israeli government continues to block aid into Gaza in violation of the recent ceasefire agreement. While the U.N. has been able to deliver some aid into the territory, Israel continues to restrict major NGOs from delivering aid, blocking more than 100 aid delivery requests in the first month after the ceasefire started on October 10, according to the U.N.

Oxfam, for instance, has $2.5 million worth of goods, including food and supplies to make water safe to drink, waiting inside a warehouse in Jordan, Paul said. Similarly, MedGlobal has said its shipments of medical goods are being prevented from entering Gaza.

While it wrapped its operations in Gaza, GHF said Monday it would not forgo its NGO status and pledged to “maintain readiness to reconstitute if new humanitarian needs are identified.” The foundation added that it is working to expand its model with the the Civil-Military Coordination Center, a base in southern Israel operated primarily by the U.S. military, meant to oversee aid distribution and the rebuilding of Gaza. The joint command base, or CMCC, is seen as the precursor to the eventual Trump-led Board of Peace that will govern Gaza’s rebuilding. The plan to form the Board of Peace, a key part of Donald Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza, was codified into international law last week in a controversial U.N. Security Council vote and excludes Palestinian voices from the process. The plan ignored a previous U.N. resolution that called for the end of Israel’s occupation and creating a path to Palestinian statehood.

Aid groups are concerned that the GHF’s tactics would be replicated by the Board of Peace in Gaza and in other conflict zones across the world. They fear it normalizes private logistics and security firms managing humanitarian aid to turn a profit. In June, an American contractor group comprised of American military veterans airdropped supplies in South Sudan. And in Gaza, UG Solutions, an American contractor group that guarded GHF sites, inked a new deal with lobbyists tied to Trump. The group said it intends to remain in the region to continue its work. Among U.S. plans leaked in recent weeks includes the construction of Israeli-controlled, fenced “alternative safe communities” — essentially camps — within Gaza where displaced Palestinians would be moved into housing with access to aid.

“My biggest fear,” Moran said, “would be if anyone looked at GHF and thought this is a model that should be tried elsewhere.”

Update: November 25, 2025, 12:34 p.m. ET
The story was updated to include more information on the food supplies provided by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

The post Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Calls It Quits After Thousands Die Seeking Its Aid appeared first on The Intercept.

In Gaza, movement is no longer a mundane part of daily life. Israel’s military assault and prolonged siege have dismantled Gaza’s transportation system so thoroughly that journeys that once took minutes by car now require hours of walking through rubble and grotesque debris. What used to be an ordinary act — leaving home, reaching a clinic, visiting kin — has now become a form of physical labor, a calculation of pain, and a risk weighed against necessity.

By late 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Transport and Communications reported that approximately 70 percent of registered vehicles — more than 50,000 cars, taxis, buses, and trucks — had been destroyed or rendered inviable. Between 68 and 85 percent of the road network suffered damage or total destruction, with some areas such as Khan Younis losing more than 90 percent of their routes. Israeli forces repeatedly bombed, cratered, and bulldozed major roads and intersections, instigating chaos that fragmented the Strip into isolated zones where movement between neighborhoods requires long detours or hours on foot.

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While the world turns its attention to Iran, daily life in Gaza has not returned to pre-genocide conditions. Since the U.S. and Israel began their joint assault on Iran, Lebanon, and the broader region, prices in Gaza have risen sharply as people rushed to buy essential goods and fuel. The sudden surge in demand and limited supply spiked the cost of food, water — and transportation. Border crossings were closed for 48 hours, further exacerbating shortages and contributing to the rapid rise in prices. In recent days, prices have begun to gradually decrease and stabilize, but the overall economic burden remains heavy for most households in Gaza, where many people are still struggling to cover basic needs.

Roads no longer connect neighborhoods, and transportation no longer guarantees access to health care, work, or sustenance. Even streets that remain technically passable are obstructed by rubble, vehicles, or collapsed infrastructure beneath the surface. Water and sewage lines burst under bombardment, flooding streets and turning mobility into an endeavor plagued by biohazards. In many areas, roads have become indistinguishable from ruins.

This collapse did not result solely from airstrikes. Israel’s blockade — which continues to restrict fuel, spare parts, tires, batteries, and heavy machinery — has undermined Gaza’s ability to repair or recover. Vehicles that survived bombardment often remain immobilized due to mechanical failures no workshop can fix. Even basic parts and equipment — filters, belts, brake systems — have become hard to find. Fuel scarcity has driven prices far beyond the reach of most families, while mechanics resort to dangerously improvised substitutes that destroy engines and emit toxic fumes across densely populated areas.

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As formal transportation disappears, residents rely on unsafe alternatives: tuk-tuks with no safety standards, animal-drawn carts, overcrowded cargo trucks not designed for passengers, or walking long distances across shattered streets. Asphalt has collapsed and fractured, mingling with rubble, sewage, twisted metal, and remnants of destroyed buildings, forming uneven, dirt-like paths. Movement through these spaces turns the act of walking into a physically punishing routine. The clatter of collapsing buildings and distant bombardment is constant, and the air feels opaque with dust and smoke.

Municipal authorities cannot clear the wreckage. The fuel shortages and lack of functioning equipment affect them too, preventing large-scale removal of debris. The result is a form of enforced immobility: Entire neighborhoods remain effectively cut off, not by checkpoints but by devastation. Residents plan their days around how far their bodies can carry them.

I have experienced this reality repeatedly. Over several weeks, I traveled with my brother, Mohammed, four times to reach a dentist in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp, nearly 10 kilometers from our home. There is no reliable transportation between the two areas. The distance became an ordeal measured not in maps but in muscle fatigue, time lost, and pain that intensified with every uneven step.

On one of those days, rain fell heavily. Broken roads turned to mud layered over shattered asphalt and sharp stones. Water pooled in craters left by bombs. At times, I sprinted across short safe patches, only to be slowed again by mud and debris.

Transportation carried us only part of the distance. We always completed the journey on foot, adjusting our pace to the condition of the road and to the limits of our bodies. Without severe tooth pain, I would not have left my room. The road drained me more than the dental procedure itself. Each step felt like a negotiation between necessity and collapse.

I tried to make the walk bearable by searching for fragments of beauty along the way: a flowering tree growing beside rubble, a rose bush somehow still nourished, a building that had not yet fallen, the faint radiant glow of children playing in a distant schoolyard. I photographed the clouds, took pictures of myself simply to pass time, and paused whenever my body demanded it. These small acts were my survival mechanisms, attempts to assert that Gaza still contained something worth noticing.

This experience is not exceptional. It reflects a broader reality in which access to health care depends not on medical need alone, but on physical endurance. Patients miss appointments or abandon treatment altogether because they cannot reach clinics. Parents carry children for kilometers to medical points. Elderly people and those with disabilities remain trapped in place, dependent on others or forced to forego care indefinitely. The ability to walk through rubble for long distances has become a filter that determines who receives care and who does not.

Economic consequences intensify the crisis. Tens of thousands of drivers have lost their livelihoods as taxis, buses, and trucks were destroyed or immobilized. Commercial transport has slowed dramatically, disrupting supply chains and inflating the cost of basic goods. Workers arrive late or not at all. Students walk for hours or drop out entirely. For displaced families, transportation costs have reached apocalyptic levels, with some paying hundreds or thousands of dollars to move belongings short distances. Those without money walk, scavenge what they can, and leave the rest behind.

In the absence of regulation and fuel availability, informal transport operators dictate prices brazenly. Gaza’s local authorities acknowledge the exploitation, but under siege conditions, they have limited options to protect residents. Scarcity governs movement more than public need, reshaping social relations around access, endurance, and pent-up anger. Western‑run aid organizations vow to “maintain a steady and predictable flow of supplies,” yet recent reports note that while some aid has entered Gaza, the overall volume remains insufficient to meet basic needs, fueling frustration and despair.

The pattern of destruction reveals intent. Israeli attacks have repeatedly targeted intersections, bridges, and key road junctions, severing connections between neighborhoods and governorates. These actions obstruct ambulances, humanitarian convoys, and civilian movement, amplifying the effects of injury, hunger, and displacement. Gaza’s government estimates that losses in the transport sector exceed $3 billion, including the destruction of more than three million linear meters of roads. Mobility itself has become a casualty of war, leaving residents lurking between hazards and temporary shelters, pleading for safety.

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Local officials have proposed emergency rehabilitation plans focused on reopening critical routes linking hospitals, shelters, and aid distribution centers. These efforts prioritize survival rather than reconstruction. Without access to fuel, spare parts, and heavy machinery, even minimal recovery remains largely theoretical, constrained by political decisions beyond Gaza’s control.

Transportation in Gaza is not a technical issue or a matter of convenience. It defines the limits of daily life. It determines who can reach a doctor, who can work, who can study, and who must stay behind. As long as movement itself remains under siege, life in Gaza will continue to contract, measured not by distance but by pain, exhaustion, and loss. In the 21st century, Palestinians in Gaza navigate a landscape where walking through ruins has replaced the most basic promise of mobility, ceaselessly testing endurance, resilience, and the abiding human spirit.

The post Israel Destroyed Gaza’s Roads and Transit. Now, We Walk Everywhere. appeared first on The Intercept.

Among Palestinians in Gaza who survived Tuesday’s attacks, however, there is a growing belief that the ceasefire agreement exists only on paper, providing diplomatic cover that allows Israel to continue to kill. 

The Intercept asked 60 residents in Gaza, many of them students living in Gaza City, whether they believed the ceasefire still held. Fifty said no. Four said the ceasefire was still in place, but it was fragile and at risk of falling apart. Six expressed hope that the ceasefire would remain.

Residents described nights filled with explosions and mornings shadowed by tension, as Gaza braced itself for what may come next. 

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“I panicked and my body shook violently,” said 20-year-old Aya Nasser, a university student who recalled Tuesday’s attacks to The Intercept. She was in bed when, just after midnight, she heard an Israeli missile explode 30 meters from her home. A second followed shortly after. 

Nasser said she later learned that the Israeli strike had hit a nearby home and killed nine people from a single family: a grandmother, a father, a daughter-in-law, four children, and two grandchildren. 

Nasser said this was the third time an Israeli attack had targeted her neighborhood in the Al-Nuseirat camp since the ceasefire went into effect. She did not think it was still in place. “The fear is indescribable,” she said, anticipating further attacks.

When Israel announced its strikes on Tuesday, Hala, also 20, had been shopping at a market for her upcoming wedding. She rushed back to her home in Nuseirat and eventually fell asleep to relative calm. But she was jolted awake when a missile struck their neighbor’s home, which caught on fire. Hours later, she received word that another strike had killed her fiancé’s cousin, along with his wife and children. Only their 7-year-old son survived. 

For now, Hala said the wedding has been postponed while their neighborhood remains under threat of future attacks. 

“There is no ceasefire,” she said. “The occupation targets whoever it wants, stopping and resuming the genocide every few days as if playing with our lives.”

Israel claimed its attacks on Tuesday had targeted senior Hamas fighters. However, the vast number of children killed and wounded in the strikes told a different story.

Morten Rostrup, a physician working with Doctors Without Borders at al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza City, said after Israel’s airstrikes, he treated many wounded children in the hospital’s emergency room.

“There is no doubt this is an attack on civilians,” he said. “Do we really call this a ceasefire?” A Doctors Without Borders spokesperson said their teams had treated 242 patients wounded from the attacks, with 49 later dying in treatment.

Tuesday’s bombing forced 28-year-old teacher Esraa and her small children out of their home in Al-Zawaida, which had already been damaged by previous attacks. In the middle of the night, she and her children went to stay in a tent with her parents and other relatives. She said they spent the evening with no access to water. “My baby clung to me tightly the whole time, crying,” she recalled.

A 20-year-old writer and student, also named Esraa, called the ceasefire “just a declaration, not reality.” The bombs on Tuesday woke her up late at night while in her home in Nuseirat, triggering memories of the previous two years of war.

“They keep bombing and killing people and then declare that the so-called ceasefire is still going on,” she said. “How so, while lots of people are still losing family members?”

Even after the Israeli military said it resumed the ceasefire on Wednesday morning, it carried out another airstrike in Gaza’s Beit Lahiya area in the evening, killing two more people. In addition to its military barrages, Israel continues to restrict the amount of humanitarian aid to enter the Strip, choking its depleted markets, leaving food unaffordable for many.

In the first few weeks of the previous ceasefire deal brokered in January, Israel repeatedly attacked Gaza, before shattering the deal completely by killing more than 400 Palestinians in a single day. What 20-year-old student Ali Skaik fears most, he said, is that the situation in Gaza would mirror the ceasefire in Lebanon, where despite having a supposed peace deal with Hezbollah in place for almost a year, Israel has continued to attack and has killed more than 100 civilians. 

After the ceasefire, Skaik moved into his grandfather’s home in eastern Gaza City to the Al-Zaytouna neighborhood, which sits near the border of Israel’s yellow line. The Israeli military maintains control of portions of land on the other side. Every night for the past week, Skaik said, he’s heard explosions stretching from 10 p.m. until the morning. 

“For that reason, I never really felt that there was a complete ceasefire in place,” he said.

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The 109 Gazans killed Tuesday represent roughly half of the 200 Palestinians Israel has killed since the ceasefire went into effect on October 10. Throughout the genocide, Israel has killed more than 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to official numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry — though the true count is likely much higher. As many as 14,500 others also remain missing, whether killed in airstrikes and buried beneath rubble, abducted by Israeli military forces, or disappeared under other circumstances.

Bodour, 20, a university student, said he has grown accustomed to living through Israel’s ceasefire violations and has learned to mistrust Israel’s “speeches and pursuit of peace,” finding “strange comfort” in always expecting the worst from Netanyahu’s government.

“What ceasefire are we talking about?” Bodour said. He laughed when asked the question about whether there was still a ceasefire in Gaza. “The scattered bodies? The destroyed houses? The orphaned children?”

Israel reportedly notified the Trump administration before conducting its strikes on Tuesday, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly accused Hamas of failing to return the remains of deceased Israeli hostages and firing on Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza. Hamas has denied responsibility for the attacks.

As bombs began to rain down on Gaza, Trump, on a trip to Japan, told reporters inside Air Force One that he supported Israel’s strikes. “The Israelis hit back and they should hit back,” Trump said, blaming Hamas for an Israeli soldier’s death. At the same time, he insisted that “nothing’s going to jeopardize” the ceasefire. Vice President JD Vance minimized Tuesday’s bombings as “little skirmishes here and there.” And Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously predicted there would be “bumps along the road, but we have to make it work.”

“Those ‘bumps’ are ‘Israel gets to violate the ceasefire wherever it sees fit,’” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza. “As long as it doesn’t return to that full-blown, full-on assault or a full-on blockade.”

Trump has much to gain from continuing to tell the public that the ceasefire is holding, even while Israel kills dozens of Palestinians in Gaza. Throughout his second term, Trump has positioned himself as a so-called “peacemaker,” and his inner circle, including his son-in-law and ceasefire negotiating team member Jared Kushner, have voiced interest in development projects in Gaza to reap a profit in the wake of Israel’s destruction. Trump has further expressed interest in leveraging the ceasefire in an attempt to finish the Abraham Accords, which would normalize Israel’s relationships with Arab countries — and fast-track Trump’s policy goals and personal financial interests. 

“For Trump and for the Israelis, what matters is the appearance of a ceasefire,” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies who helped negotiate deals between Palestinian leadership and Israel in the past. 

The ceasefire plan, in many ways, was Trump’s way for providing diplomatic cover for Israel, which had been under increasing pressure from the international community amid images of famine and genocide, to allow it to continue its military control over the Strip, Kenney-Shawa said. 

“I think none of us should be surprised that Israel has continued breaking the ceasefire,” Kenney-Shawa said. “It very much still fits into the Trump administration’s bigger picture, because as long as they can kind of say that there is a quote-unquote ‘ceasefire’ in effect, as long as they can say, ‘At least it’s better than before,’ that enables the U.S. and the rest of the international community to let up on the pressure on Israel and to return to business as usual.”

Israel has also spent the ceasefire demolishing structures within parts of Gaza it continues to occupy. Kenney-Shawa said such tactics are meant to make the Strip even more uninhabitable to ultimately force Palestinians out of Gaza, the ultimate goal of Israel’s campaign.

The morning after Tuesday’s bombings, Tasneem, a 25-year-old homemaker in Gaza, accused Trump of lying, asking, “Where is the ceasefire they talk about?” 

Said, 26, an English teacher in Gaza, said that even with the ceasefire in place, he has felt “constant exhaustion and misery,” given the ongoing attacks. He dismissed the term “ceasefire” as “just a media trick.”

There is still recognition in Gaza that the frequency and scale of Israel’s attacks since the ceasefire have decreased from the two previous years of genocide. Tuesday’s bombings, however, returned things back to the pre-ceasefire average daily death toll of 100, shattering illusions of peace. The uncertainty is crippling for many.

Mervat, a 51-year-old homemaker, said she feared the resumed attacks would again displace her and her family, and that they would again face famine conditions. She said as long as Israel’s occupation continues, “there is no safety.”

“Simply knowing that the agreement is still in place offers a psychological reassurance,” said Aseel, a 20-year-old university student in Gaza. “Yet, news of its violation or the return of genocide imposes an unimaginable weight and traps you in an endless cycle of worry.”

Believers in Islam are encouraged to maintain hope and trust in Allah’s mercy, and many people who spoke to The Intercept said they had hope that Allah would restore the ceasefire, but currently they don’t see it as in place.

Hend, 21, another university student, said she’d lost trust in the agreement. Though she felt the ground shake during Tuesday’s bombings, she said she still has “hope for peace, and that we can feel safe.”

Such hope began to fade after Tuesday’s attacks, said Marah, a 22-year-old English literature student at Islamic University of Gaza. She said there can only be peace in Gaza with the removal of Israeli occupation in the territory.

When the ceasefire went into effect, she said, “I tried to reclaim even a small part of life before October 7, but everything collapsed again in an instant. Fear returned, along with the sounds of bombing and the smell of death.”

The post We Asked People in Gaza What They Think of the Ceasefire: “Just a Declaration, Not Reality” appeared first on The Intercept.

UG Solutions inked a lobbying contract in late August with Ballard Partners, the firm that previously employed Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles and Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to a disclosure form filed Friday.

Ballard help the firm navigate a variety of business opportunities, including its future in Gaza, a company spokesperson said in a statement.

“Our retaining of Ballard Partners will ideally help us understand how various parts of the U.S Government may view the role of private security firms in a post-war Gaza, as well as in other parts of the world struggling with conflict, and we shall make business decisions accordingly,” the spokesperson said.

UG Solutions provides armed security at food distribution sites operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The U.S.-based and Israeli-backed nonprofit has been given a leading role in the distribution of food to starving Palestinian civilians — despite the fact that hundreds of aid-seekers have been killed under Israeli fire on routes to distribution points.

A peace proposal touted by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes no mention of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, leaving the group’s fate uncertain if the plan goes through. With the security contractor’s business under threat, Ballard could help UG Solutions buttress its presence in Washington. The North Carolina-based company was founded by a Green Beret veteran and employs retired special forces veterans to staff its Gaza mission.

Trump’s plan was formally unveiled Monday after circulating in diplomatic circles last week. It calls for the distribution of aid “through the United Nations and its agencies, and the Red Crescent, in addition to other international institutions not associated in any manner with either party.”

A group of independent experts appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council has described the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as being “created by Israel” and lacking the impartiality expected of humanitarian groups, charges the group denies. The group says it has distributed more than 176 million meals while operating under dangerous conditions in a war zone.

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Gaza Aid Security Contractor Hired Members of “Islamophobic Hate Group” Biker Club, Dem Rep Says

Democrats in Congress have also slammed UG Solutions for hiring members of the Infidels Motorcycle Club, a self-professed anti-“jihadist” biker group whose members sometimes sport Crusader tattoos. One U.S. representative dubbed the motorcycle club an Islamophobic hate group.

In a statement posted to its website Monday, UG Solutions said that it would be willing to work with the proposed “Board of Peace” — to be helmed by Trump and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair — that would oversee an interim authority in Gaza.

“Today’s press conference with President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu signals that peace is finally near. UG Solutions remains committed to supporting the humanitarian relief effort in Gaza and to delivering security to aid delivery work that respects the Gazan people and understands the concerns of the Israeli people,” the company said.

Despite persistent criticism of the relationship between the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and Israel, Ballard’s disclosure form says that UG Solutions does not have ties with any foreign countries.

The form asserts that no foreign entity “directly or indirectly, in whole or in major part, plans, supervises, controls, directs, finances or subsidizes” the company’s activities.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and Ballard Partners did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement about its hiring of Ballard Partners, a spokesperson for UG Solutions said that the company’s work for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was “one of many of our ongoing efforts,” but the company was interested in business opportunities outside the Middle East.

“UG Solutions has a wide range of service offerings, to include executive protection, security training, and a North Carolina facility that can be utilized by private and public sector organizations,” the company spokesperson said. “The hiring of a Washington, DC-based lobbying firm is a common business practice to better understand what business opportunities may exist within the broad US Government space, how various arms of the government may be viewing different foreign partners that could be interested in UG Solutions’ services, and what efforts and initiatives competitor companies may be undertaking.”

The post Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Security Contractor Hires Trump-Linked Lobbyists appeared first on The Intercept.

The bombing killed over 100 people as of early Wednesday, according to Gaza officials. It came just four days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio toured a new U.S. military base in Israel, a rare deployment of U.S. forces meant to signal that President Donald Trump was serious about maintaining the end to the bombardment of Gaza. 

“There is no plan B,” Rubio said on the tour, rebuffing an Israeli reporter’s question of whether Israel needed Trump’s permission before resuming its attacks on Gaza. “This is the best plan, it’s the only plan, it’s one that we think can succeed.”

According to The Associated Press, Israel notified the Trump administration before conducting Tuesday’s strikes — presenting the question of whether the U.S. would hold Netanyahu accountable for the latest round of ceasefire violations.

“All eyes now are going to be on Washington,” said Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at Arab Center Washington DC. “Would they really be a referee that calls balls and strikes fairly? Or were they just there for decoration and were they just going to allow the Israelis to get away with murder, as they always have?”

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance signaled that they would opt for the latter. He described the attacks as “little skirmishes here and there” and said that “the ceasefire is holding.” 

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Israel’s Mounting Ceasefire Violations in Gaza

“We know that Hamas or somebody else within Gaza attacked an [Israeli military] soldier,” Vance said. “We expect the Israelis are going to respond, but I think the president’s peace is going to hold despite that.”

Israel’s strikes on Tuesday and stretching overnight into Wednesday mostly targeted Gaza City, including the courtyard of the al-Shifa Hospital, the Strip’s largest medical complex, and apartment complexes throughout the city, according to Al-Aqsa TV, a station run by Hamas. Other strikes hit Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. The attacks killed least 104 people, including 46 children, the Gaza Health ministry announced early Wednesday.

Israeli officials claimed Tuesday that Hamas fighters had fired on Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza, while Hamas denied responsibility for the attacks.

It was the latest of several instances in which the Israeli government pushed the notion that Hamas was the one in violation of the ceasefire agreement. Israeli officials have accused Hamas of intentionally delaying the return of the remains of Israeli hostages, a claim on which even the U.S. has cast doubt. Speaking to reporters on his own visit to the new U.S. base in Israel last week, Vance urged “a little bit of patience,” citing the difficulty of uncovering bodies buried under tons of rubble of destroyed buildings.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is assisting and overseeing the return of hostages, continues to work with Hamas’s search crews — though the group issued a statement on Tuesday reacting to drone footage Israel released, which it purports to show Hamas reburying hostage remains to stage a recovery for the Red Cross. The video and the claim have not been independently verified. The Red Cross said it was “raising its concerns directly with the parties” and called on both sides to follow international humanitarian law while handling remains. Many of the Palestinian bodies returned by Israel, meanwhile, have shown signs of abuse and torture.

Hamas returned all living Israeli hostages within the required 72 hours and has since returned the remains of 15 of the 28 deceased Israelis. The ceasefire deal included a stipulation that allowed Hamas leeway beyond the initial 72 hours to continue its search for the remaining bodies, as long as it continues to communicate with the Red Cross. 

Meanwhile, the Israeli government has gone to lengths to undermine the peace process. Israel is still limiting the amount of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza; it has continued to block the Rafah border, an essential crossing for aid transfers; and it has continued a range of attacks on Palestinians, including a wave of airstrikes on October 19 that killed at least 26 Gazans, including civilians. One of the attacks struck a school sheltering displaced families in Nuseirat. Israel has also continued to demolish large swaths of city infrastructure within the more than 50 percent of the Strip that remains under its military control. Beyond Gaza, Israel has conducted mass military raids and an airstrike in the West Bank, where daily settler violence against Palestinians continues unabated.

“They are trying to push the Palestinians to react,” said Ramy Abdu, chair of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a watchdog that has tracked Israel’s targeting of civilians in Gaza. “This is their strategy, they want Palestinians to do anything to react just to complete their mission.”

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Abdu said he thinks Israel was never serious about holding to the ceasefire agreement but rather has looked for reasons to resume its attacks. On Tuesday, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir claimed that Hamas “continues to play games” in a social media post on X, calling on Netanyahu to resume the bombing. 

“If Israel has the genuine intention to bring their hostages back, then it will facilitate every effort to get them back, not articulating these kinds of stories and fabricated images,” Abdu said.

Hamas, for its part, maintains it is committed to upholding the deal and has accused the Israelis of barring entry to teams and heavy machinery to complete the digging.

Israel’s resumed aggression fits into a pattern that we’ve seen before, Munayyer added. During previous ceasefires in November 2023 and this January, Israel retrieved as many hostages as it could to soften blowback from its citizens, then restarted attacks on Gaza, Munayyer pointed out.

And while the U.S. is the major player, it’s not the only one with sway. Leading up to the ceasefire deal, the European Union and several major Western countries — the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Australia — began to threaten Israel with sanctions or the formal recognition of a Palestinian state if it did not halt its genocide, likely responding to mass protests from their citizens. 

“The Israelis are now trying to create a narrative that Hamas violated the ceasefire and therefore the agreement’s off,” Munayyer said. “Is the international community going to buy that?”

Update: October 29, 2025
This story has been updated to increase the death toll from Israel’s latest airstrikes on Gaza as new numbers emerged.

The post Netanyahu Is Blowing Up the Gaza Ceasefire — and Trump Is the One Losing Face appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Pete Welch, D-Vt., and Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill., said in statements that they were outraged that a contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation employed members of the Infidels Motorcycle Club. At least 10 members of the Infidels were employed by the GHF’s security contractor, UG Solutions, according to a recent BBC report.

“It is unacceptable for the United States to fund an organization tied to an Islamophobic hate group,” Casten said in a statement to The Intercept.

Casten led an unsuccessful push this week to bar government funding for the aid group, and Welch has alleged that its employees may be complicit in Israeli war crimes.

“The U.S. government is sending violent motorcycle gangs to Gaza in the middle of a famine,” Welch told The Intercept in a statement. “The American people deserve answers.”

In a statement to The Intercept, GHF said, “The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation maintains a strict zero-tolerance policy toward any form of hateful or discriminatory behavior.” The group said it was undertaking a review.

UG Solutions did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

The legislators’ concern centers on the Infidels Motorcycle Club. The group has not been publicly designated as an outlaw motorcycle gang or accused of violence by law enforcement, but a 2014 report by federal authorities said a chapter in Florida, where some of the Infidels in Gaza hail from, had been “observed riding and associating” with an outlaw gang.

The Infidels describe themselves as a club “for Patriotic Americans and our supporting allies” that is opposed to the “Jihadist movement” and “Islamic extremism.”

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Clad in Crusader-style crosses sewn to their jackets and tattooed on their skin, the Infidels cruise highways in 15 states and Germany.

More recently, a member employed by a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation contractor, Johnny Mulford, used the Infidels as a recruiting network to hire at least 10 club members for GHF, according to the BBC. (In a statement, GHF said, “Mr. Mulford has not been involved with GHF since August and we are actively reviewing additional allegations.”)

The Intercept previously reported on Mulford’s membership in the Infidels and leadership role at UG Solutions. Mulford and the Infidels did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

Seven club members are in oversight positions at GHF aid sites in Gaza, the BBC reported. One club member posted on his Facebook page an image of contractors in Gaza posing with rifles and a “Make Gaza Great Again” sign.

Palestinians Killed Near Aid Sites

The involvement of Infidels members is especially troubling to critics of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation because of the Israeli-backed group’s record at aid distribution sites in Gaza. Other aid groups have criticized the foundation for using a militarized model relying largely on American military veterans.

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At least 859 people have been killed near the foundation’s aid sites since it began distributing food in May, a group of United Nations experts said last month. The group claimed that Israeli forces and private security contractors were using “open indiscriminate fire on people seeking aid.” The U.N. group also alleged that there have also been forced disappearances at aid distribution sites.

The State Department approved $30 million in early funding for the foundation despite an internal government assessment raising “critical concerns” about its model.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has denied that any UG Solutions employees have shot Palestinians in Gaza. The group says it has distributed 162 million meals to Palestinians.

Earlier this week Casten, the Democratic representative, tried to offer an amendment to the annual defense budget bill that would bar further funding to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

That push died in the Republican-controlled House Rules Committee before the broader bill was approved Wednesday, a move that Casten criticized in a statement calling the Infidels an “Islamophobic hate group.”

“The United States must immediately halt all funding to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. GHF’s operations have caused deadly chaos at aid distribution sites,” Casten said. “House Republicans’ refusal to even allow a vote on my amendment to end GHF funding — and to ensure that humanitarian aid to Gaza is delivered through established and legitimate international organizations — is deeply disappointing and indefensible.”

Update: September 12, 2025, 10:55 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a statement from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

The post Gaza Aid Security Contractor Hired Members of “Islamophobic Hate Group” Biker Club, Dem Rep Says appeared first on The Intercept.

There, Maryam saw a lifeline. After weeks of applying — and making dangerous trips to connect to the internet — an American university had given her a full-ride admission into its computer science program. “I was trapped in darkness, but God gifted me something to be thankful for,” Maryam said.

That feeling was short-lived. After receiving her acceptance in April, she submitted her visa application earlier this month — right after the Trump administration instructed U.S. embassies to ban most Palestinian visitor visas. These restrictions, put in place in August, apply to students, as well as those traveling to the U.S. for business, medical treatment, or to visit family. “The suspension hit hard, but I was never shocked,” she said.

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Continuing her higher education in Gaza would be impossible. Israel destroyed Maryam’s university in Gaza City, where she was a fourth-year software engineering student, in October 2023. She would have deeply grieved the faculty members who were killed, but the constant news of death has numbed her emotions. “Now, I just find a strange sense of peace for those who passed,” she said.

Maryam is one of at least a few dozen Palestinian students who recently received offers and scholarships from American universities. The ban means most Palestinian visa applicants will be refused. The students interviewed by The Intercept for this piece asked to go by pseudonyms, out of fear for their safety.

“The State Department is acting in an arbitrary and capricious manner against victims of genocide by suspending these visas and not giving any context or reason for why,” said Juliette Majid, a co-founder of Student Justice Network, a group that has been helping Palestinian students apply to American universities. “Even with all of these achievements, these students are still looked at as … a threat instead of a gift.”

While the Trump administration publicly announced stopping all visitor visas for individuals from Gaza on August 16, U.S. officials were not as transparent about expanding the ban. The measure was detailed in an August 18 cable sent by the State Department to American embassies and consulates around the world. “The administration is cowardly, because they know there’s going to be pushback,” Majid said. 

The State Department said in an emailed response that the Trump administration’s actions are in compliance with U.S. law. “Every visa decision is a national security decision, and the State Department is vetting and adjudicating visa decisions for PA passport holders accordingly.”

The U.S. immigration system has developed ways to exclude people for decades, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the Muslim and African travel bans and family separation policies under Biden and Trump’s presidencies. But Palestinians have often been singled out for exclusion — not only for who they are, but also because they are stateless, and therefore unprotected under international law, said Los Angeles-based immigration lawyer Ban Al-Wardi.

Even before the visa ban, Palestinians in Gaza had to overcome a bureaucratic maze of requirements while surviving a famine and relentless bombing to arrange their admission and travel to American universities. The State Department already had broad discretion to deny visas. The doctrine of consular nonreviewability means it’s typically not possible for courts to review the reasons used to deny a visa. This leaves applicants with virtually no way to challenge decisions. 

The American government’s typical vetting process includes a standard nonimmigrant visa form (the DS-160) that includes basic details about family, employment, school, and criminal record. Palestinians also need to get a criminal clearance report, issued by the Israeli police, to prove they have never been arrested. They must attend an in-person interview at an American embassy. For Palestinians in Gaza, getting to the consulate in Jerusalem is difficult because of restrictions on movement, so they typically go to the embassy in Cairo. But the Rafah crossing to Egypt has been shut down.

Some students reported being asked if they ever worked for a government agency in Gaza, volunteered for UNRWA, or taught at a public school, Al-Wardi notes. The interview often includes details about their family. “It’s like an information gathering session,” Al-Wardi said. “You might not know exactly what has been going on with your uncle or cousin, but you could be accused of omitting material facts if you don’t mention them.” Some students were called back for secondary interviews and received a supplemental DS-5535 form, which digs deeper into phone numbers, addresses, and emails associated with their name. Social media accounts must be public and provided to the American government. At the American airport, students from Arab countries are often pulled aside for a secondary screening in which U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers question them and search their electronic devices, Al-Wardi notes.

The American government has built-in processes to review secondary evidence in cases where key documents are not available, but getting those can be logistically complicated too. Gaza’s postal system has also been largely destroyed over the last three years. Many students used attorneys, notary public officials, family, and friends outside Gaza to help them access important documents and facilitate the process on their behalf.

Universities typically review academic transcripts as part of their admissions process. But many students lost school records, as well as birth certificates and proof of identity, after Israel bombed their homes and universities.

Ali, a 40-year-old living in North Gaza with his wife and three children, wants to pursue a master’s degree in nutritional science. He applied to American universities last November but lost documents that proved his identity after Israel bombed his house in late 2023. He also needed a copy of his degree certificate, but his university in Gaza had been destroyed. One of his old professors, who moved to Canada from Gaza in 2023, helped Ali get another copy of the document. While Ali waited to hear back from the school, he worked for an American humanitarian organization as a nutritional program support officer, helping to find points to distribute hot meals and providing nutritional support to internally displaced Palestinians in Gaza.

Ali was excited to learn about his acceptance into an American university but later was disheartened by the ban. “I’m so frustrated that I’m unable to think,” he said. The plan was always to return to Gaza to apply what he learned into practice. “There is no [place with a] greater need for an effective nutrition program. I came to understand the importance of this field and the need for it, especially during the war.” 

Aisha, a graduate student in physics, also lost her identification documents when Israel bombed her home in late 2023. She would walk almost an hour on foot, toward the Egyptian border, hoping to connect to the internet to complete her admissions process. Aisha used to live in Gaza City with her husband and two children but has since been displaced more than 19 times. She has lived in tents, as well as on the street. During her master’s program in physics, Israel destroyed her university and killed a physics professor who had become a mentor. He had scribbled the phrase “Stay well, my physicist” in her notebook a day before he died.

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Lawyers and advocacy groups in the U.S. are now limited in their ability to help. The Student Justice Network assisted dozens of Palestinian students with their university applications and connected them with educational, legal, and community resources. The Arab Resource and Organizing Center’s Project Immigration Justice for Palestinians — made up of more than 400 volunteer lawyers, paralegals, and translators— helped Palestinian Americans reunite with family members trapped in Gaza. Some attorneys with the group focused on supporting Palestinians students in Gaza, who were admitted into American universities, in the visa application process. 

In the meantime, Palestinian students are no longer looking to the U.S. as a lifeline. When Aisha received an acceptance and scholarship to pursue her Ph.D. at an American university, she cried and hugged her two children tightly, whispering to them, “We will survive this genocide.” She used to spend hours looking at photos of university labs abroad, knowing that they had access to materials and resources that are banned from entering Gaza. 

When Aisha learned about the visa ban, she cried with the same intensity as when she was first accepted. “My only hope is to see my children grow up in a safe world, where science and knowledge guide us toward a brighter, more peaceful future,” she said. “We are not what they say about us.”

The post Gaza Students Found a Lifeline to U.S. Colleges. Then Trump Shut the Door. appeared first on The Intercept.

By early October, however, with the enactment of President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan — which world leaders call a “ceasefire” or “peace plan,” despite ongoing Israeli violence in Gaza — such concern seemed to evaporate. Mounting international pressure was replaced with an eagerness from many governments, lawmakers, and institutions to return to the status quo.

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Exactly one week after the Gaza plan went into effect, EU parliamentarians tabled its proposals to sanction Israel over its human rights violations in Gaza. One month later, the German government, Israel’s second largest supplier of weapons, announced it would lift its arms embargo on its longtime ally; last week, Germany’s parliament approved a $3.5 billion deal to expand its missile defense systems to protect Israel. Earlier this month, Eurovision, the popular singing competition, cleared Israel to continue competing, despite pledges to boycott from Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Iceland. The U.N. Security Council also authorized Trump’s plan, agreeing to help form a so-called International Stabilization Force.

In Congress, even as polls show most Americans disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza, lawmakers and advocates behind the Block the Bombs to Israel Act in Congress have struggled to build on its summertime momentum, garnering only two new co-sponsors since Trump declared he had achieved peace.

What happened?

“Now that there is technically a ‘ceasefire’ in place, that alone has had a big immobilizing effect on activists, advocates, and — I think more importantly — just the general public,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow at Al-Shabaka. Calls for a “ceasefire now” had a galvanizing effect for public pressure to end the killing — so the Gaza deal served as a release valve.

The Israeli military continues to violate the agreement, launching strikes into Gaza on a near-daily basis and continuing its partial, yet illegal blockade on humanitarian aid. The United States, for its part, has so far been unwilling to enforce the truce in any meaningful way beyond strongly worded letters.

Under the Gaza deal, gunfire and bombings have slowed but not ceased, with the Israeli military striking Gaza more than 350 times since, killing at least 394 people and wounding more than 1,000 others across the Strip, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations. Israel continues to occupy 58 percent of the territory, establishing a largely imaginary yellow line within which the military demolishes buildings and civilian infrastructure and shoots Palestinians along the indefinite border — including two children, Fadi Abu Assi, 8, and Jumaa Abu Assi, 10, who were killed by an Israeli drone while gathering wood. The Israeli military also continues to launch daily attacks beyond the yellow line, including the assassination of Hamas commander Raed Saad on December 13, which drew the ire of the White House.

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In tandem with its ongoing strikes in Gaza, Israel launched a new military operation in the West Bank, raiding refugee camps, conducting mass arrests of Palestinian civilians, and killing unarmed individuals, including at least 14 children during confrontations with Israeli soldiers, according to Defense for Children International-Palestine. One boy, 13-year-old Aysam Jihad Labib Naser, died of tear gas inhalation one month after Israeli soldiers attacked him and his family while they were picking olives.

Trump’s Gaza plan “has given a convenient excuse to members of Congress to look away from the situation,” said Josh Ruebner, policy director at the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project. He supports the Block the Bombs bill, originally introduced by Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., in May, and acknowledged that it had stalled in recent months. “But the reality is that U.S. weapons are still being used on an almost daily basis by Israel to kill Palestinians.”

The Israeli government has allowed a trickle of aid into Gaza but continues to block most international and Palestinian aid groups from delivering supplies, a violation of both the 20-point plan and international law. Stuck at the border is $50 million worth of aid, such as food, maternal and newborn care supplies, much-needed treatments for malnutrition, and shelter goods.

On Friday, the global hunger monitor IPC declared Gaza is no longer experiencing famine, but warned the majority of Gazans still face “high levels of acute food insecurity.” Half a million people remain in “emergency” levels of acute malnutrition, risking death, the monitor said. Around 2,000 people are still experiencing famine conditions. Exacerbating the hunger crisis, winter storms blowing through the Strip have ripped through and flooded tent cities and war-torn homes where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. At least 13 people have died as a result of the weather, according to Gaza health officials. Among them is one-month-old Saeed Eseid Abdeen, who died last week due to hypothermia.

As attention and outrage have waned, Israel and its defenders have attempted to regain control of the narrative that they have struggled to wield over the last two years of genocide.

At the Jewish Federations of North America conference in November, former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz blamed Israel’s losing public relations battle among young Americans on TikTok, which is “smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.”

“And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews,” said Hurwitz during a panel discussion in which she also blamed the backlash against Israel on backfiring Holocaust education. “Because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage.”

Several weeks later, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — speaking at a conference hosted by the Israeli news outlet Israel Haymon, owned by right-wing, pro-Israel, pro-annexationist megadonor Miriam Adelson — also blamed young Americans’ concerns over Gaza on TikTok and social media, dismissing livestreamed genocidal violence as “pure propaganda” and as “threat to democracy.”

Hurwitz and Clinton failed to mention how such dismissals of Israel’s atrocities have been powered by massive crackdowns on the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity advocates in the U.S. and abroad — and how legitimate concerns for the safety of Jewish people have been weaponized to crack down on pro-Palestine speech.

After the mass shooting at a Hannukah event in Sydney, Australia’s Bondi Beach, where two gunmen killed 15 people, mostly Jewish festival goers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately seized on the moment to tie the violence to Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood earlier this year following widespread anti-genocide protests in the country. In a CBS Mornings segment covering the shooting, Israel’s former special envoy for combatting antisemitism Noa Tishby advocated for the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, which considers criticism of the state of Israel as antisemitic.

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Lawmakers in Australia’s New South Wales, where Bondi Beach is located, are now considering a ban on all protest for up to three months. In the United Kingdom, police agencies in London and Manchester responded last week to the Bondi Beach shooting by criminalizing the chant “globalize the intifada,” a call for popular resistance against Israel’s occupation of Palestinians, commonly misinterpreted to mean violence against Jewish people. The Trump administration, meanwhile, issued a travel ban on all Palestinian Authority passport holders, citing concern over “U.S.-designated terrorist groups operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.”

Despite the recent measures taken against the pro-Palestinian movement, Kenney-Shawa said he believes Israel and its backers will still fail in the long term to retake the narrative.

“They’re not going to be successful in restoring Israel to its former untouchability in U.S. politics — that train has left the station,” he said. “The Biden generation obviously grew up with all these myths about Israel and those myths were shattered by this generation who’s growing up with new facts about Israel, the reality of Israel.”

A growing body of polling shows Americans, mostly on the left but increasingly on the right, are beginning to reject the government’s special relationship with Israel — signaling a major role for such shifts in the upcoming midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

The Trump plan itself remains uncertain. Its second phase would see the disarmament of Hamas, though the Palestinian militant and political group has said it would only give up its weapons if there is a path toward Palestinian statehood. Israeli officials, however, continue to reject calls for a Palestinian state. Instead, Netanyahu’s cabinet has been open about its stated policy of totally erasing Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank in pursuit of forming “Greater Israel.”

Whether the rising awareness will amount to material improvement for the people of Palestine is also unclear. Some protesters aim to make their efforts tangible by interrupting the global supply chain of weapons sent to Israel, as new campaigns by the Palestine Youth Movement have sprouted at docks and warehouses in Oakland and New Jersey. In the United Kingdom, imprisoned Palestine Action members are undergoing a weekslong hunger strike; among their demands is the closure of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit System’s factories in Britain. The Hind Rajab Foundation, meanwhile, continues to file legal complaints and investigation requests across the globe aiming to hold Israeli soldiers and commanders accountable for war crimes.

And in Congress, public pressure still seems to be having some influence on lawmakers. A recent resolution introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., which recognizes “the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza” and underlines the U.S. responsibility in upholding the Genocide Conventions, has drawn support from 20 other members of Congress — including Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., who was elected with significant support by pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC.

“I will not continue to willingly be part of that complicity,” Dexter said during her speech on the House floor to back the resolution. Dexter is one of several lawmakers who have altered their public stances on Israel after sustained protest from their constituents at town hall meetings and in front of their district offices.

“Public opinion has shifted in permanent and dramatic ways,” Ruebner, of the IMEU Policy Project, said. “People cannot unsee what they have seen over the past two years.”

The post International Pressure Was Building to Hold Israel Accountable. What Happened? appeared first on The Intercept.

Israel killed six journalists with an airstrike on a press tent in Gaza City last month. Among the dead in the August 10 attack were Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al-Sharif and his colleague, photojournalist Mohammad Nofal.

In the days leading up to the killing, I had been speaking with Mohamed’s brother and fellow photojournalist, Ibrahim Nofal, 27, about what it’s like to be a photojournalist in Gaza today, to witness horror and massacres. 

“This is the only thing I know how to do,” he said. “Every person here has a role in this war. Mine is to document. If I don’t photograph it, this moment will never exist.”

His job may be the most dangerous in the world. Israel killed five more journalists on August 25, in a “double-tap” missile strike on Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis that appeared to be designed to kill the rescue workers and journalists who responded to the initial strike.

The day after Israel killed his brother, I asked Ibrahim what he misses most. He immediately responded: “My mother and my brothers Omar and Mohammad, who were killed in this genocide. I had a life in Turkey when I was traveling; I had plans. But none of it matters now. Only my mother and brothers do.”

I and my own brother, Ali Skaik, spoke with Ibrahim and five other photojournalists in Gaza about their daily lives and what the deadly task of documenting the genocide means to them. We also asked them to share one photo that is close to their hearts. I fear that any of them may join the ranks of the 221 other journalists that Israel has killed in Gaza in the past two years. I fear that I and my brother could be killed any day too, as the Israeli military advances closer to our home.

Ibrahim is still working, despite the risks. He’s come close to death before. “Once, a gas canister exploded beside me — I thought it was the end. Another time, a house we were documenting was hit, and everyone around me was injured,” he said. His home was bombed on October 30, 2023, and five of his cameras were destroyed. 

His photos have not only traveled far, they have changed lives: Some of those he photographed were able to leave Gaza for medical treatment because the world saw their suffering.

He keeps documenting. “The camera is my weapon,” he said. “It respects me because I respect it. Through it, I make the world see Gaza and its people.”

Documenting the genocide is not a choice — it is a responsibility, carried out with a sense of duty and love for our homeland and people. In Gaza, every image carries a cost, and every photographer bears both the burden of memory and the duty of witness.

“Realities That Cannot Be Hidden Behind Propaganda”

Abdul Hakim Abu Riash, 37, captured a searing photograph of starvation in Gaza: the image of 2-year-old Yazan Abu Foul in the Al-Shati refugee camp, suffering from severe malnutrition.

He said he was not surprised when American media outlets, biased in favor of Israel, tried to deny or discredit his work and the work of his fellow Palestinian journalists.

“The reality, however, is far harsher than what has been reported,” Abu Riash said. “During the most recent closure of the crossings, I myself lost 13 kilograms — my weight dropped from 67 to nearly 53” kilograms, or from 147 to 117 pounds. Food remains scarce, with prices 10 times higher than before the Israeli restriction of food. “If this is my condition as an adult, one can only imagine the plight of children, especially those with chronic illnesses who rely on specific nutritional needs,” he said. “Their suffering is far greater, and under this blockade and the denial of food entry, their situation is only worsening — leading already to the deaths of dozens of children.”

“I risk my life and everything I own to share realities that cannot be hidden behind propaganda,” he said. “We’ve had to learn new lessons on how to adapt in the field, to keep working under almost impossible conditions, and to find ways of ensuring our message still reaches the world.”C

He traces his love for photography back to his boyhood in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip. His first mobile phone with a camera, bought in 2005, felt like a miracle, he said. He was capturing photos of nature in Beit Lahia, sunsets, and daily life scenes. By 2011, after the first war on Gaza, he turned his passion into journalism, determined to document the truth.

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For Abu Riash, images touch emotions before they reach the mind. “A photograph speaks to everyone — even the blind can feel its weight through silence. It’s the world’s only common language,” he said.

One particular image left a mark on Abu Riash: a photograph of a young girl embracing the bodies of her family members, killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Deir al-Balah. The shock was etched on her face, her grief uncontainable. “Every photo I take is a witness for history. I want the world to see the truth: the suffering of my people and their resilience. Nothing less,” he said.

“The Truth Is Our Weapon” 

For Ayman Majed al-Hessi, 32, photojournalism was imposed on him. He studied electronics engineering and Islamic sciences before life pushed him into the media. Since 2018, he has worked with Al Jazeera Mubasher and captured beauty and wars, drawn by the belief that images have more power than words. “When I photograph, I’m not documenting strangers. I’m documenting my people, my father, my mother, my siblings, and my neighbors,” he said.

He has lived through multiple wars, but the current one has been different. He has been injured three times since October 2023, the first during the early days of the war while covering Al-Shati refugee camp. “I moved from being a reporter to a photojournalist overnight,” al-Hessi recalled, “but also to a survivor.”

His cameras and equipment were destroyed when his family home was bombed. With no tools, he resorted to a cheap Xiaomi phone, yet even from that device, he broadcast some of the most haunting images of Gaza’s devastation. One of al-Hessi’s widely circulated images is the targeting of journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul. After photographing a massacre, the images linger in al-Hessi’s mind, preventing restful sleep.

“The Israeli occupation tries to silence us. They accuse us of using artificial intelligence when we show famine,” al-Hessi added, “they close our social media accounts and keep threatening us. But our responsibility is to show the world what is happening. The truth is our weapon.”

“Images are stronger than texts,” al-Hessi said. “If I describe a flower, you’ll imagine one thing. But if I show it, the truth is undeniable. The occupation knows this. That’s why they fear our lenses.” 

There are many images that have stayed with al-Hessi, but the harshest of all was the moment his brother Akram was killed. “I was filming the aftermath of an airstrike on the Shati refugee camp. People around me were shouting his name: ‘Akram, Akram!’ When I reached the site, I found my brother Akram lying lifeless, and my father clutching his body, screaming in anguish,” remembered al-Hessi.

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The weight of loss bleeds into his words. He has lost his brother, his uncle, and 50 close friends. “I miss everything,” he admitted. “Our homes, our places, the people we lost.” Yet still he photographs, because if he doesn’t, no one will know. “Every photo is not just for history,” he said. “It’s for my family, my neighbors, my people.”

“Before, I Looked for Beauty and Daily Life”

Suhail Nassar, 30, is a photojournalist who used to capture Gaza’s hidden beauty: the laughter of children, sunsets over the Mediterranean, fleeting moments of joy. Photography began as a hobby for him, until he became a photojournalist to show the world how the people of Gaza live.

Since October 7, 2023, his lens has shifted. “Before, I looked for beauty and daily life. Now, everything I shoot is death, hunger, and ruins,” Nassar said. Direct bombardment, lack of supplies, and the absence of safety anywhere are great risks for photojournalists in Gaza. Yet the worst risk for them is becoming a target simply because of carrying their cameras. “There is no true protection here; you try to pick safe angles, move quickly, and keep your eyes on all directions.”

“You don’t really deal with the trauma,” Nassar said. “You carry it with you. The pictures stay in your head, stronger than any archive.”

But he feels compelled to document reality as it is. “If we do not document, no one will know what happens to us. Silence erases us. I photograph so that no one can ever say, ‘We didn’t know,’” Nassar said.

“These Moments Break You”

Anas Fteiha, 31, is a photojournalist from Gaza who works for the Turkish Anadolu Agency. Fteiha never imagined that his profession would demand such sacrifice. He moves constantly between hospitals, bomb sites, and displacement camps. 

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He recalls one haunting moment: a little girl who had lost both her arms. When another explosion thundered nearby, her instinct was to cover her ears — only to realize she no longer could. “These moments break you,” he admitted. “But they also remind you why you must keep going.”

“A photo invades your consciousness before you even ask. People may forget articles they read, but they will never forget an image,” Fteiha said. He is currently suing global publishing giant Axel Springer for an article in their German tabloid, BILD, that accused him of being a Hamas propagandist. Axel Springer also owns U.S. publications Politico and Business Insider.

The greatest challenges are the lack of safety, frequent electricity and internet outages, and the difficulty of reaching event sites amid continuous bombardment. “I try to separate work from emotions, but it is extremely difficult. Sometimes, after shooting, I feel an internal collapse. I console myself with the thought that what I do has value and meaning, and that my pain cannot be compared to the suffering of those I document,” recounted Fteiha.

There are no “neutral zones” in Gaza; every area is dangerous. “The greatest danger is being directly targeted. Many colleagues have been injured or killed while covering events,” Fteiha said. He doesn’t want the world to see Palestinians as just a political issue, but as fathers, mothers, and children who deserve dignity. 

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He described his mission as more than work — it is duty. “Every image I capture might become a voice for the voiceless and could help convey the suffering of people who would otherwise remain invisible or ignored,” he said. “If we stop documenting, who will show the world what’s happening here in Gaza?”

“Louder Than Words”

Motasem Abu Aser, 30, is a documentary filmmaker and short story creator. 

Photography began as an obsession for him. From childhood, he felt drawn to the camera. His heart always belonged to visual storytelling. After surviving a near-fatal head injury while covering the Great March of Return in 2018, he refused to stop. “People thought I would quit journalism after that, but the fear was erased. Nothing could scare me anymore,” he asserts.

His work on “The Night Won’t End,” an Al Jazeera documentary that included the story of 6-year-old Hind Rajab, trapped under bombardment, became one of his most powerful works. “When you film in the moment, you capture history as it burns. That is why our work has meaning,” he highlights.

Since October 7, his days have blurred into endless hours of work. He rarely sleeps, sometimes only half an hour at a time; he feels as if he works 24 hours a day. “As a filmmaker, I don’t just hold a camera — I carry images in my mind constantly. Sleep is fleeting; even with eyes closed, my mind remains alert,” he recounts.

At the Anan family massacre near Saraya Street in December 2023, Abu Aser was the first to document the atrocity. Soldiers lined women and girls on a billiard table, bound them, and shot at them randomly. Men were trapped under stairs and exposed to explosives, killed slowly. “Images always speak louder than words. Often, a photo alone suffices; a caption may not even be needed,” said Abu Aser.

The post “They Fear Our Lenses”: Gaza Photojournalists Speak Out appeared first on The Intercept.

The first bombs of the current genocide fell during Tasneem’s final weeks of pregnancy. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, she was 25 years old, seven months pregnant, and eagerly awaiting her second child.

In Gaza, Tasneem had already lived her whole young life under Israeli surveillance, confinement, and violence. But as the bombs rained down on October 7 — in what Israel claimed was retaliation for the nearly 1,200 Israelis killed that day, but has since become a two-year-long genocide, killing at least 66,000 Palestinians  — it was clear her child’s generation would be born into a new level of horror.

There were no calm nurses by the time Tasneem went into labor with her son, Ezz Aldin. The hospital was overcrowded with no steady electricity. Tasneem labored for hours in the barely functioning hospital, and when she gave birth, there was no food to help her recover. Diapers were nearly impossible to find. Weakened and hungry, she breastfed her son. It was December 25, 2023.

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Bombs are still falling on Gaza, despite a pending peace deal. As the Israeli government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, moves into its third year of trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza, many Palestinian women still push to bring the next generation into the world. They give birth not in hospitals with clean beds and available staff, but in overcrowded, collapsing clinics, under drones and bombs, amid the deadliest genocide Gaza has seen in decades. 

This is the story of my sisters, and of other Palestinian women who brought children into a world that was falling apart.

Doaa wasn’t pregnant when the first bombs dropped. Like everyone else, she was trying to survive. When her home was bombed on January 14, 2024, the windows shattered, the walls cracked, and the air was filled with smoke and dust. Though she wasn’t physically harmed, the emotional toll was enormous. A few weeks later, amid her family’s displacement — from a small flat, to a tent, to a tiny apartment — she found out she was pregnant. Living with a child growing inside her, under constant fear of sudden death, the sounds of nearby strikes would jolt her awake at night.

When her labor began — on October 28, 2024, just over a year into the genocide — she was rushed to an already overwhelmed hospital. She clung to the thin mattress through waves of pain, until her son Hossam was born: small, fragile, but alive. No special food awaited her. No clothes. No comfort. Still, she held him close, nursing him through hunger and fear.

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The World Health Organization reports that 10 percent of Gaza’s population and up to 20 percent of pregnant women suffer moderate to severe malnutrition. Over 5,100 children were admitted to malnutrition programs in July alone, including 800 in critical condition. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, 25 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women are malnourished. Mothers face shortages of nutritious food essential for recovery and breastfeeding, as iron-rich foods, fresh fruit, and vegetables are nearly impossible to find.

“What have these children done to deserve being born in these conditions of genocide and famine? Why can the world not see them?” asked my friend’s aunt, who gave birth on October 6, 2024. A single pack of diapers cost $600 at the time. Today, it’s 400 shekels, or about $120 — still impossibly out of reach. Most have to make do with a plastic bag tied up with string.

Her baby, Layan, had to drink formula. Many babies born in Gaza under the genocide do. Their mothers — starving, dehydrated, terrified — can’t make breast milk. When formula is available, it’s at inflated prices: 200 shekels per can. Most of the time, it simply isn’t there.

Layan is now a year old. From the age of nine months, children are supposed to start eating soft food: mashed rice, boiled zucchini, fruit, grapes, melon, yogurt. But there’s nothing. Nothing to feed him. Nothing to grow on.

Dana was born in a tent by the sea, to a mother suffering from severe malnutrition. The family had been forced to leave their home in Khan Younis, and Dana’s mother had gone days without proper food.

“They told her mother she might give birth to a child with disabilities because of her lack of vitamins,” said Aya, Dana’s cousin.

The pregnancy was grueling. “I could barely get out of bed; there was hardly any food,” Dana’s mother recalled. Every day was a struggle against fatigue, hunger, and uncertainty. Her body weak, her mind anxious, she carried on, driven by hope for her baby. And against all odds, Dana arrived healthy — a small miracle in a world that seemed to offer none.

But the tents where displaced Palestinians reside are not fit places for children. Flies, mosquitoes, rats; the insects bite, sting, infect. A mosquito bite on a baby’s cheek swells for a week. Medical care is nearly impossible to find.

And the sewage system? A two-meter-deep pit in the ground, uncovered. There have been cases of children falling in.

In the heat, small bodies burn with fever. Skin diseases — itching, peeling, red blotches that blister — spread quickly. There are no creams. No medicine. Their immune systems are too weak to fight anything off.

“We had nothing but each other,” Dana’s mother said. Relatives, neighbors, and small acts of kindness became their lifeline, helping them prepare for the birth and supporting them through the first fragile days.

Now, Dana is thriving. But some babies don’t survive the winter. The tents freeze, and so do they.

As Noor rushed to the hospital in labor, her family’s car jolted violently from a nearby explosion. Her husband’s voice cracked as he called for calm, but the fear was thick in the air. The ambulance had been delayed, so they drove themselves through streets scattered with debris and silence broken only by distant blasts. Upon arriving, the hospital was overwhelmed — hallways packed with patients, no beds available. 

Nurses found a corner in a busy corridor where Noor could lie down. The lights flickered, and the generator’s low drone filled the room. There was no privacy, no quiet. Doctors worked quickly, hands steady despite their exhaustion. Noor’s contractions came one after another. Sweat dripped down her face. Finally, a girl was born: her cries faint but still a signal of life. Noor held her daughter close without food, clean clothes, or diapers. The room smelled of fear and hope tangled together, as a new life began amid ruin.

Since the genocide began, official reports estimate that over 3,000 babies have been born in Gaza’s collapsing hospitals. Many arrive too soon, or with health complications caused by malnutrition and inadequate medical care. Many others suffer from disabilities linked to poor prenatal conditions and genocide-related trauma. In the first month of the genocide, United Nations agencies reported that there were about 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, with more than 180 giving birth every day, and 15 percent of them likely to face complications that require medical care.

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Neonatal mortality has risen sharply: Miscarriage rates have tripled and stillbirths surged beyond prewar levels. For the first half of 2025, the U.N. Population Fund reported that among 17,000 births, 20 newborns died within 24 hours, and 33 percent of babies — 5,560 infants — were premature, underweight, or required NICU care. These figures are not just statistics; they are a record of lives that began in crisis.

Birth in Gaza often means sharing incubators, giving birth without anesthesia during power outages, and risking infection because water and sanitation systems are destroyed.

And clothes? Even before the genocide, baby clothes were expensive. Now they’re nearly impossible to find. If you’re lucky, you might come across a scrap of fabric shaped like clothing — but it’s rough, stiff, and anything but comfortable on a newborn’s skin.

Tasneem had hoped, in those early days, that a ceasefire might come before her son arrived. In her final weeks of pregnancy, she held onto the idea that she would give birth in normal conditions — at home surrounded by family, rather than rubble. But the days passed, the bombing grew heavier, and that hope was crushed.

With the support of her family, Dana is growing strong. “She is healthy and happy, thanks to our care and attention,” her mother says. The early hardships have left their mark; subtle signs in her development that remind the family of the struggle before her birth. But the family remains steadfast and says they make sure Dana has milk, diapers, and everything she needs.

None of these mothers had what they needed. What they did have was determination: stubborn, unbreakable, quietly defiant. Each of them carried a life inside them while the world fell apart around them. Each gave birth with explosions in the background, fear in their lungs, and courage in their hands.

To be pregnant in Gaza today is to give life with death knocking at the door. It is to feel your baby kick while warplanes circle overhead. It is to count the seconds between explosions and pray the next one doesn’t find you. It is to bring life into a world that feels like it’s ending — and to do it anyway.

In Gaza, where the Israeli government is explicitly seeking to eliminate the existence of Palestinian people, the birth of every child is an act of resistance. These women, sustaining life amid bombs and shortages, rewrite the meaning of courage and resilience. Their strength is not demonstrated in grand speeches or headlines, but in the small moments: steady hands breastfeeding a hungry baby, a newborn’s fragile cry cutting through the sound of bombardment, a family’s silent promise to protect life. They carry the future in their arms, embodying the determination of a people who refuse to disappear. 

Despite the violence, the hunger, and the fear, life continues — because in Gaza, to live is to resist.

Correction: October 8, 2025
An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Tasneem was awaiting the birth of her third child. She was pregnant with her second child.

The post Mothers in Gaza Give Life to the Next Generation of Palestinians Despite Genocide appeared first on The Intercept.

The agreement stipulated that Israel would halt all of its military operations and that the flow of aid would return to levels seen under the previous ceasefire, during which at least 600 aid trucks entered the territory each day. Despite this, Israel’s military carried out two strikes and COGAT, the military unit that controls shipments of aid into Gaza, told aid groups that it would limit deliveries to half the amount — 300 trucks daily — agreed upon in the deal. The Israeli government also said it would not reopen the Rafah crossing along the border of Egypt, a key avenue for the delivery of aid.

Israel carried out the attacks and restricted aid as it accused Hamas of failing to hand over the bodies of the remaining Israeli prisoners in a timely manner as promised in the ceasefire agreement. Within the 72 hours allotted in the deal, Hamas returned the 20 living Israeli prisoners, in exchange for about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom were detained in Gaza during the war without charges. For the retrieval of the remains of the deceased detainees in Gaza, all sides, including Israel, had acknowledged it would take more time since many of the bodies are buried beneath rubble of buildings destroyed by Israel’s bombardment. According to Palestinian and United Nations estimates, 10,000 bodies remain buried beneath the 50 million tons of rubble from buildings leveled by Israel’s attacks. Some of the bodies are also believed to be within the nearly 60 percent of Gaza that remains under Israeli military occupation.

The implementation of the ceasefire, signed by both Israel and Hamas, spelled out such terms to deal with the logistical obstacles. The plan, published by Israeli media, called on Hamas and Israel to share information about the whereabouts of “any remaining deceased hostages that were not retrieved within the 72 hours.” The information would be shared through mediating countries and the International Committee of the Red Cross. “The mechanism shall ensure that the remains of all the hostages are fully and safely exhumed and released,” the plan said. “Hamas shall exert maximum effort to ensure the fulfillment of these commitments as soon as possible.”

The Red Cross, which is facilitating the transfer of remains, said the search for the bodies may take days or weeks.

Hamas has returned the bodies of eight individuals, according to the Red Cross and the Israeli government, while the search for 20 others continues. 

While the ceasefire plan included exceptions for the return of bodies, no such exemptions existed for the resumption of delivering humanitarian aid. 

Both the Red Cross and the United Nations blasted Israel’s decision to again limit aid into the territory. 

While Palestinian American writer and foreign policy expert Tariq Kenney-Shawa expected Israel to violate the new ceasefire deal — as Israel repeatedly did during the first few months of a previous ceasefire before shattering it completely by killing more than 400 Palestinians in a single day — he didn’t expect it to happen so shortly after Trump’s tour of the region, which included a speech before Israel’s parliament. 

“Israel knew that those technicalities existed,” Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, said, referring to the difficulty of locating the Israeli bodies amid the rubble. “And what they’re doing now is that they’re exploiting it in order to continue to genocide, albeit at a slightly reduced rate of killing.”

Experts worried the ceasefire deal was vague, allowing Israel leeway to resume attacks whenever it sees fit. They had pointed to Israel’s routine violations of its ceasefire agreement with Hezbollah in Lebanon, in which the Israeli military’s ongoing strikes have killed dozens of civilians. 

On Tuesday, an Israeli drone strike killed at least five people who were inspecting their homes in a residential area of Gaza City. A separate Israeli drone strike killed another individual in the territory’s south outside of Khan Younis, according to Middle East Eye. And on Monday, Israeli soldiers killed a man, identified by state-sponsored news outlet Wafa as Khalid Barbakh, while he inspected his home in the downtown area of Khan Younis, reports said. 

Israel’s far-right leadership is already suggesting future ceasefire violations. Over the weekend, Defense Minister Israel Katz said on social media that after the return of the Israeli prisoners, the military’s focus would be on “the destruction of all of Hamas’ terror tunnels in Gaza,” adding that he had “instructed the IDF to prepare for carrying out the mission.” He did not specify how such a mission would take place, but would likely require Israeli soldiers to re-occupy large swaths of Gaza’s cities. 

For Ramy Abdu, chair of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a watchdog that has tracked Israel’s targeting of civilians in Gaza, such attacks and aid restrictions are a part of Israel’s long-term plan to undermine the ceasefire so that it can continue to displace Palestinians from Gaza by further worsening their living conditions. Such efforts could set the stage for the economic redevelopment plan outlined in the deal, which largely excludes Palestinian involvement and promises foreign investment opportunities to “well-meaning international groups” that have already pitched “investment proposals and exciting development ideas.”

“The matter is not a ceasefire,” said Abdu, who is from Gaza and whose sister and her family were killed in March by an Israeli strike. “We are talking about a managed genocide, a managed forcible displacement.”

During the rollout of Trump’s plan for Gaza several weeks ago at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened further military action in Gaza if he deemed Hamas to be violating the deal. A major piece of the plan that is yet to be negotiated is the disarmament of Hamas. The militant and political group has previously said it would only surrender its weapons to a Palestinian-led government in Gaza. 

But on Tuesday, Trump laid out his position with a threat of further violence, telling reporters at the White House, “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them. And it will happen quickly, and perhaps violently.”

Such threats echoed those by Israeli’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who voted against the ceasefire deal last week. He urged Netanyahu to issue an ultimatum to Hamas that if it did not immediately return the remaining bodies of Israel captives, “we will immediately halt all aid supplies entering the Strip.”

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Such a move would not only violate the ceasefire but exacerbate an already catastrophic level of starvation and famine throughout Gaza, which Israel has choked off from aid since March. Before the deal, images of Israel’s famine in Gaza had begun to change the tides of the international community’s view on Israel, further isolating the nation. As governments such as the European Union weigh whether to continue its push for sanctions against Israel, EU officials are reportedly watching how Israel handles the resumption of humanitarian aid flows into Gaza, according to Politico Europe. Over the weekend, the U.N. said “progress” has been made in Gaza, but called on more aid to be allowed in. Some hundreds of trucks have entered the territory over the past several days, still short of the necessary amount, according to aid groups, which are limited to movement through two crossings into Gaza.

“What Israel is trying to do is actually very strategic in the long-term,” Kenney-Shawa said. “They’ve signed this agreement that’s going to get their hostages back, but that will allow them to resume their strategic objectives of rendering Gaza uninhabitable and eventually leading to mass exodus … in a way that is palatable by the international community.”

Correction: October 15, 2025, 2:02 p.m. ET
An earlier version of the article misstated the month that Ramy Abdu’s sister and family were killed by an Israeli airstrike; it was May, not March. The number of people who were inspecting their homes, then killed by an Israeli drone strike in Gaza City was also corrected, from at least six to at least five people.

The post Israel’s Mounting Ceasefire Violations in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

In contrast, the 20-point plan — written by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, both real estate investors — is both vague and full of contradictions, largely excluding Palestinian involvement while allowing Israel and the U.S. to maintain broad political, military, and economic powers within Gaza, according to observers and experts on the region.

Similar to previous ceasefire proposals throughout Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, the recent plan calls for the immediate cessation of fighting, an exchange of Israeli and Palestinian prisoners, the disarmament of Hamas, and the gradual withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza.

Where this plan differs is that U.S. officials are attempting to spell out what a post-war Gaza would look like.

The plan states that “Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza” and that “no one will be forced to leave Gaza.” Palestinians would have the ability to leave or return, a reversal from Trump’s previous calls to expel all Palestinians from the territory. Yet experts cautioned that these assurances do not indicate a reversal of policy for the Israeli government, which has been consistent in its goals toward the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and total control over the territory.

Trump’s plan allows for Israel to have veto power during the military withdrawal phases, with terms largely set by the U.S. and Israel. Internal security of Gaza would then be managed by a so-called International Stabilization Force, led by the U.S. and other Arab states. Even after withdrawal from Gaza, the plan calls for “a security perimeter” around Gaza maintained by the Israeli military until the territory is “secure from any resurgent terror threat.” 

Allowing Israel to maintain such a security perimeter around Gaza all but guarantees Israel the opportunity to indefinitely occupy the territory in a similar manner to the decadeslong blockade that rendered Gaza an open-air prison preceding Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks. In 2005, Israel withdrew its military from and dismantled its settlements within Gaza, but the Israeli military remained in control of its borders. Experts said the new proposal promises a similar chokehold on the territory, along with the possible resumption of Israel’s military campaign.

“This is a continuation of the occupation, if not a continuation of the war by other means,” said Amjad Iraqi, a senior analyst on Israel/Palestine with the International Crisis Group. “Palestinians might be able to stay in Gaza, but they will not be able to really govern its affairs.” 

At Monday’s conference, Netanyahu thanked Trump, “the greatest friend that Israel ever had in the White House,” for the plan, which he said allows his government the chance to “achieve all of our war objectives without any further bloodshed.”

But the Israeli leader reserved the right to “finish the job … the hard way” and resume its military campaign in Gaza if Hamas were to reject the deal or fail to meet its conditions. Immediately after the conference, in which the leaders declined to take questions from the press, Netanyahu posted a video in Hebrew meant to address his coalition, promising that he does not intend to withdraw Israeli troops from Gaza.

As Hamas weighs how to respond to the plan, Trump on Tuesday threatened the Palestinian militant political group with “a very sad end” if it declines the deal. Trump said he would give Hamas “three to four days” to decide.

The plan already has buy-in from a number of Western nations, including the United Kingdom, France, and Australia, which all were new to recognize Palestinian statehood last week. Other nations that welcome the plan include Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, China, and Russia. Also supporting the plan are a host of Arab and Muslim-majority nations, such as Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Indonesia, which had received a draft of the plan one week earlier from the Trump administration at the United Nations headquarters. The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority also said it welcomed Trump’s plan.

Indefinite Occupation of Gaza

Experts worry that Israel’s veto power in the new Gaza plan gives it freedom to resume its military campaign at any moment.

Netanyahu’s government has hardly been a trustworthy partner in peace agreements in recent years: Israel has repeatedly bombed Lebanon even after signing a deal with Hezbollah last November, and in March, it broke the U.S.-brokered peace deal with Hamas by blocking all humanitarian aid into Gaza and resuming its bombing campaign, blaming Hamas for not releasing enough hostages, and falsely accusing the group of preparing new attacks on Israel.

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Israel Violated the Gaza Ceasefire From the Start. Why Won’t the Media Tell You That?

Regardless of whether Hamas rejects or accepts the plan, Israel is sure to continue its policy of mass removal of Palestinians from the territory, said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka.

“If Hamas rejects the ceasefire proposal, that’ll give Israel the pretext to just steamroll Gaza City and do it in the way that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir want, which is all at once in one fell swoop,” Kenney-Shawa said. But even if Hamas were to follow all of Israel’s demands of disarmament and return of hostages, he said, there is little guarantee that Israel would not renege on the deal as it has in the past.

For Ahmed Moor, a fellow with the Foundation for Middle East Peace, who was born in the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, the Trump–Netanyahu meeting and the language in the deal echoes the Oslo Accords of 1993, which had been intended as a two-state solution, only for Israel’s government to illegally expand its settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank in the 30 years since.

“This is back to the future, right?” Moor said, recalling the 1993 scene on the White House’s South Lawn where Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Palestine Liberation Organization Chair Yasser Arafat. The Oslo deal, he said, is an example of Israel “front-loading” its demands while committing to the needs of Palestinians “at some indeterminate point in the future.”

In the hours since Monday’s announcement, the Israeli military has killed more than 50 Palestinians in Gaza, including five people who were attempting to receive aid, according to Gaza health officials. Meanwhile, settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, often sanctioned by the Israeli military, continued unabated with Israeli settlers setting fire to a building outside a Palestinian village near Nablus on Tuesday evening.

“The Palestinians today need relief from genocide,” Moor said. “This document is not going to provide that.”

“Paul Bremer 2.0”

The plan itself also envisions the installment of a transitional government called “a Board of Peace,” overseen by Trump and a panel that includes former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, who since leaving office in 2007 has attempted to establish himself as a power broker between European and Middle East nations. In its purview would be the funding and redevelopment of Gaza, where wide swaths have been rendered uninhabitable by Israel’s brutal military offensives.

Adding to the vagueness around the plans’ security details, it also calls for economic redevelopment led by those behind “some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East,” a vision that falls in line with Trump’s own musings for a Gaza Riviera. The plan looks to create a framework that would attract investment, as well as the creation of a “special economic zone” and tariff scheme for nations that agree to participate. 

Moor called such aspects of the deal “a neocolonial plan designed to enrich Tony Blair and a few other people.” He further coined the plan “Paul Bremer 2.0,” a reference to the former U.S. State Department diplomat who served as the head of the U.S. puppet government of occupied Iraq. In other words, Gaza would be rendered “a fiefdom for other overlords to manage,” Iraqi added.

There is a clear throughline between the governance structure in the Gaza plan and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan by the U.S. and U.K.-led coalitions during the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East, said Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders. Similar to the cases of both Iraq and Afghanistan, Duss expects Israel to prolong its occupation of Gaza until it reaches its eventual aims of permanent control of the territory.

“There’s always going to be some reason why the occupying military needs to stay, especially when you have a government as in Israel that is dominated by these kind of messianic extremists who see conquering and controlling the entire land as their religious duty,” Duss said.

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“A Purely Manmade Famine”: How Israel Is Starving Gaza

Duss and others also criticized the attempts to attract investments before guarantees to end Israel’s occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Any economic vision should be led by the Palestinian people, Al-Shabaka’s Kenney-Shawa added.

“It’s never too early to to talk about economic visions if it’s coming from Palestinians themselves,” Kenney-Shawa said, “but it’s way too early to be talking about these investments and economic visions when there is no plan to reconstruct Gaza or clear the rubble, or dig out the the 13,000 dead bodies that are under the rubble, and provide long-term care to the 2 million people who are in a very bad state and are desperate for that care.”

Where to Go From Here?

While a report by CBS News indicated that Hamas may be leaning toward accepting the U.S.–Israeli deal, Palestinians are faced with an almost impossible choice.

Kenney-Shawa, who is Palestinian and whose family is from Gaza, said from his conversations with other Palestinians that the deal has left them feeling like there are no good options remaining.

“I’ve spoken to people who are just hoping that they accept the deal because they want this to be over,” he said, “And then there are some who say they hope they don’t accept the deal because it’s surrender.”

He said he thinks Hamas should accept the Trump deal as a way to remove any pretext for Israel to continue its genocide in Gaza. He said that Hamas no longer has leverage and is at its weakest point, given the indifference the Netanyahu government has shown toward the remaining Israeli prisoners in Gaza. Others called for the Arab-led plan to rebuild Gaza introduced earlier this year by Arab states that allowed for Hamas to give up its large-scale arms and be integrated into a Palestinian-led security force within the framework of a Palestinian-led government. Hamas has said it would accept giving up governance of Gaza but has in the past refused disarmament. 

There is already increasing pressure on Israel from other nations to end its incursion. That international pressure, along with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, may be the best chance toward ending the occupation, Moor, the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s fellow, said.

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More nations, such as Spain and Belgium, are enacting arms embargoes on Israel, while Germany and the European Union are weighing proposals on sanctions and blocking trade to Israel. Within the U.S., some Democratic lawmakers have broken with the powerful pro-Israel lobby and have voted or pledged to support legislation designed to block some weapons transfers from the U.S. to Israel. Calls for cultural boycotts have also intensified, with Ireland, Netherland and Spain promising to sit out of the popular singing contest show Eurovision if Israel were allowed to participate in 2026. 

Israel’s acceptance of Trump’s Gaza plan can be interpreted as an attempt to rehabilitate its image in the face of such growing international pressure, Moor said. The plan, however, is generating new political conflict within Israel as members of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition have publicly expressed disgust with the deal, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who called it a “resounding diplomatic failure, a closing of eyes and turning our backs on all the lessons of October 7.”

Trump’s plan references an earlier peace plan authored by France and Saudi Arabia and later codified in the United Nations as the New York Declaration, which, in a July vote, drew support from the vast majority of member states: 142 in favor, with Israel and the U.S. in opposition. The Trump plan borrows from the French–Saudi plan when convenient, such as in the formation of a transitional security force and government, but ignores many of its core provisions — such as allowing Palestinians to lead most points of the peace process, declaring “There must be no occupation, siege, territorial reduction, or forced displacement,” and the need for a Palestinian state with a unified Gaza and West Bank.

Kenney-Shawa took exception to the Trump administration’s labeling of the deal as “a comprehensive peace plan,” a phrasing that some mainstream media outlets have readily disseminated. Instead, he said the deal is similar to Oslo in that it is “a way to re-intrench Israeli control, just in a way that’s more palatable for the international community.”

Moor agreed, adding that Israel is trying to regain its legitimacy as a democratic state that provides equal rights to Jewish people and Palestinians. “That’s not a world that we can ever go back to,” Moor said. “And I interpret this deal as an effort to go back to that world.”

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Trump and Netanyahu Dictate Terms of Palestinian Surrender to Israel and Call It Peace

While nations backing the plan also see it as a possible pathway toward a two-state solution and Palestinian statehood, experts said that such a pathway is circuitous at best. The only mention of Palestinian statehood is in the second-to-last point of the plan, tucked behind myriad requirements such as following advances in redeveloping Gaza and after the Palestinian Authority undergoes reform. Only then would the conditions “finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” Those reforms, however, rely on further conditions spelled out in Trump’s 2020 peace proposal. 

That plan, announced in January 2020, also co-written by Kushner, an old family friend of Netanyahu’s, similarly excluded Palestinians from its drafting and placed stringent conditions and ultimatums on Palestinians. The plan was hazy on details on Gaza’s fate, but it allowed the Israeli government to annex much of the West Bank. It was announced under similar circumstances, with Trump standing side by side with Netanyahu as he faced mounting political pressure. 

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Trump Destroyed Any Hope of Israeli-Palestinian Peace — and Biden Can’t Rebuild It

On the same day the 2020 plan was unveiled, Israeli officials indicted Netanyahu on corruption charges. His hold on power was weakening heading into his reelection in March of that year. Trump’s 2020 plan was seen by observers as a political life raft for Netanyahu, at the expense of Palestinian lives, further eroding any chance at Palestinian sovereignty. 

Now, as Israel’s genocidal military and starvation campaign in Gaza, which has killed at least 66,000 Palestinians, drags toward its third year, and as Israel is at its most isolated on the international stage in decades, the Trump administration has again given Netanyahu a place on a White House podium with this week’s 20-point plan for Gaza. 

While watching Monday’s press conference, Iraqi, of the International Crisis Group, said he was thrown back to 2020.

“It really is a repeat of history,” Iraqi said, “and it shows how much that the Trump–Netanyahu alliance, and the alliance of the Israeli right and the American right, has really allowed for the complete withering of any pushback to this one-state reality, where Israelis get to determine the Palestinians’ fate.”

The post The Trump–Netanyahu Gaza Peace Deal Promises Indefinite Occupation appeared first on The Intercept.

The filing against a European news organization is a first-of-its-kind legal strategy for a journalist working in Palestine. “I want to prove the truth cannot be erased by false allegations,” Fteiha told The Intercept.

Fteiha’s legal claim, submitted in the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court, stems from a BILD article published on August 5 under the headline “This Gaza photographer stages Hamas propaganda.”

The BILD piece singled out Fteiha, alleging he fabricated images of starving Palestinians to push a Hamas narrative. To underscore this charge, BILD published a picture showing Fteiha kneeling to photograph people in Gaza holding empty pots in front of a metal barrier. BILD framed the scene as an attempt to exaggerate the levels of hunger in Gaza. Later in August, a United Nations-backed body declared a famine in Gaza.

The article claims Fteiha staged the photo and describes him as a “journalist” three times, always in quotation marks.

“In fact it was a genuine moment of human suffering,” Fteiha told The Intercept.

Fteiha was at the food distribution site as a freelancer for the Turkish news agency Anadolu and published a range of photographs online from that day. To Fteiha, BILD’s reporting is part of a campaign to discredit Palestinian journalists, he told The Intercept.

“Falsely accusing me of staging propaganda exposes me to threats and undermines the supposed protections afforded to journalists,” he said. “It means I could be targeted simply because false reports about me were published.”

Fteiha is seeking an injunction proceeding, an emergency procedure aimed at reaching a quicker resolution than a typical lawsuit. If granted by the court, the injunction would require Axel Springer to correct the statements in the article that he alleges are false and would oblige the publisher to cover the costs of the legal proceedings brought by Fteiha.

Axel Springer has not responded to questions from The Intercept. A BILD group communications spokesperson said that the company has not yet received Fteiha’s filing and therefore cannot comment on it.

Fteiha’s legal action could test whether German courts are willing to hold one of the country’s most powerful media outlets accountable for defamatory coverage that critics say has fueled the dehumanization of Palestinians. Just days after Fteiha was singled out in the August article, BILD ran the image of Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif — who was killed by an Israeli strike hours earlier — with the headline: “Terrorist disguised as journalist killed in Gaza.” The phrasing was later revised to “Killed journalist allegedly was a terrorist.”

That article, too, is mentioned in the filing: “It seems that [Axel Springer] is promoting a narrative portraying journalists in Gaza as accomplices of Hamas.”

Fteiha’s claim, filed by German press lawyer Ingrid Yeboah with support from the European Legal Support Center, rejects BILD’s assertions that Fteiha staged or manipulated his images and that he masquerades as a journalist. It argues that the BILD reporting includes “gravely defamatory and life-threatening statements” that constitute a violation of Fteiha’s “general right of personality” under German constitutional law, which protects individuals against defamation.

BILD never sought Fteiha’s comment before publication, his filing alleges, despite claiming otherwise in the article. BILD’s communications director Christian Senft told The Intercept: “As a matter of principle, we do not comment on our sources or editorial processes.”

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The article, the filing says, insinuates that Fteiha deliberately withheld photos showing men at the food distribution site in order to distort reality and bolster a “constructed narrative” serving Hamas.

Yet before the BILD article was published, Fteiha had already posted several images from the day in question — depicting men as well as women and children waiting for food — as a report by Der Spiegel showed.

The filing argues that BILD deliberately withheld this fact in order to maintain its narrative that a Gaza-based journalist was spreading Hamas propaganda.

BILD further attempted to link Fteiha to Hamas, he alleges, by citing an Instagram image he co-published that reads “Free Palestine” — describing this as Fteiha’s “mission” — and by framing his freelance work for Anadolu as “subordinate to Turkish President and Israel-hater Recep Tayyip Erdogan.” Both examples, the filing argues, were wrongfully presented as evidence of political extremism intended to delegitimize Fteiha.

Before the BILD article came out, the liberal news outlet Süddeutsche Zeitung, or SZ, published a piece titled, “How real are the images from Gaza?” BILD referred to the article as it questioned the authenticity of photos taken by journalists in Gaza. The SZ article consulted experts and published the same image of Fteiha photographing civilians behind a metal barrier.

Although SZ did not mention Fteiha by name, the article — together with BILD’s — was quickly amplified on social media by Israel’s foreign ministry. Pointing to the German coverage as proof that Hamas manipulates global opinion, the ministry branded Fteiha an “Israel- and Jew-hater” serving Hamas.

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The U.S–Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation quickly joined in, followed by major Israeli outlets such as The Times of Israel, Ynet, and the Jerusalem Post. Israeli President Isaac Herzog echoed the fabrication narrative as well, holding up the photo of Fteiha at a conference in Estonia and citing German press reports. “It was all staged,” Herzog declared.

Christopher Resch, a spokesperson for Reporters Without Borders Germany, said that German media appeared eager to amplify Israel’s campaign to delegitimize a Palestinian journalist.

“Newsrooms should always — especially when it comes to war reporting — apply the highest professional and ethical standards and never report carelessly,” Resch said. “If media reports can be used to legitimise criminal decisions by the Israeli military, one can assume they will be used.”

Fteiha’s legal action followed an application for a cease-and-desist order that Yeboah filed on September 1 demanding that BILD retract the contested statements and cover Fteiha’s legal costs, while reserving the right to seek further damages.

Axel Springer’s lawyer Felix Seidel rejected that request in an official letter on September 4, arguing that “after reviewing the facts and legal situation, [we] inform you that we do not intend to comply with the demands of your client.”

According to the filing, the BILD article violated multiple standards of German press law. The filing alleges the story contained false claims, including that Fteiha had not distributed the images in question and was merely posing as a journalist. It further argues that under German law, suspicion reporting is only permissible if backed by careful research, a minimum factual basis, and a clear indication that the allegations are unproven. It notes that the subject must be given the chance to comment before publication — all requirements that, the filing says, BILD ignored.

Fteiha continues to work in Gaza despite the Israeli military’s heavy bombing and imminent ground invasion of in Gaza City. “I believe my role as a journalist is to bear witness to what is happening and to convey the truth to the world — no matter the cost,” he told The Intercept.

The post A Newspaper Called His Gaza Photos “Hamas Propaganda.” He’s Fighting Back. appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter to the two firms’ CEOs, Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., and three other lawmakers said they were “horrified” by reporting about the companies’ “deadly” security operations on behalf of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

“We are deeply concerned that you may have failed to alert your personnel — or investors — of the immense legal risks they face.”

The members of Congress say that news reports and firsthand witnesses indicated employees for Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions were “sent to Gaza armed for combat” and directed by Israeli officials to use lethal force.

“As a result, we are deeply concerned that you may have failed to alert your personnel — or investors — of the immense legal risks they face for conducting what amounts to military operations on behalf of the Israeli government on land outside of the State of Israel,” the lawmakers say.

They asked the companies to answer a series of questions about whether they had warned staffers about their legal risks, including from international courts, and to preserve documents related to their interactions with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The letter represents the latest ratcheting up of congressional pressure — so far all from Democrats — on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the contractors supporting its operations in the Middle East.

Founded only in February, the foundation became the main conduit for U.S.- and Israeli-backed aid into Gaza after Israel lifted a total blockade at the end of May.

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The foundation’s decision to employ armed contractors at its sites, and its close cooperation with Israel, have drawn widespread condemnation from other aid groups who say they violate core humanitarian principles. Some of the security contractors supporting its operations are former U.S. service members, including Special Operations veterans.

Welch was joined by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Democratic U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro of Texas and Sara Jacobs of California. Castro and Jacobs’s districts in San Antonio and San Diego, respectively, are home to large populations of U.S. military veterans.

Hundreds of people have died trying to access aid at the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s distribution points, according to the United Nations, many of them under Israeli fire.

The foundation’s chair has brushed off reports of chaos and violence at its distribution sites as “Hamas disinformation” and boasted about its success.

A foundation spokesperson responded to the letter in a statement Thursday.

“Our team looks forward to addressing the Senators’ concerns and all of the misinformation and misperceptions related to our mission focused on feeding the Palestinian people in Gaza. Additionally, we welcome the opportunity to restate our continued support and advocacy for the collaboration and coordination with other humanitarian organizations to flood Gaza with aid,” the spokesperson said.

Dozens of Senate Democrats in a letter earlier this week said the foundation had failed to address the growing crisis in Gaza and called on President Donald Trump’s administration to expand aid through other nonprofits.

Update: August 1, 2025
This story has been updated to include a statement from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation that was received after publication.

The post Worked Security For GHF in Gaza? Beware of War Crime Charges, Democrats Say. appeared first on The Intercept.

For 30 minutes, Israeli military munitions and quadcopter gunfire rained down on a city block in northern Gaza, which included the U.N.-run Khalifa school, a market, and residential buildings, said mobile kitchen director Hani Almadhoun, relaying an account from his nephew, a kitchen staff member who survived the attack. Dozens scrambled for shelter from an airstrike that left at least four people dead.

Among them was Almadhoun’s 16-year-old cousin, Samih Ibrahim Almadhoun, who had been volunteering at the kitchen. He was killed alongside two women sheltering together, Almadhoun said. Another cousin helping at the kitchen had his arm amputated after he was struck by rocket fire. Mourners were able to bury Samih in a hastily dug grave before fleeing the area. 

The strike forced the kitchen out of Mashrou’ Beit Lehia and further south into Jabalia. Such movement is normal for the kitchen, which operates several mobile sites throughout the Strip and relocates to wherever need is most acute. “We go where the people are,” Almadhoun said. Some families have come to rely on the Gaza Soup Kitchen as their primary source of food amid the ongoing starvation brought on by Israel’s unlawful blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza. But as of late, where the kitchen goes is dictated by bombings and evacuation orders. 

In November, Almadhoun’s brother, Gaza Soup Kitchen co-founder Mahmoud Almadhoun, was killed in an Israeli drone strike while delivering food to Kamal Adwan Hospital, which had been under siege by the Israeli military. Almadhoun and his family have called the attack a targeted assassination, and said the military continues to target soup kitchen workers. 

“We learned that if they bomb and they are serious, then we get the hell out,” he said. “We tried to be the last man standing, then we realized the world doesn’t give a shit. So, when they really push, we just run for the next area where they’re going to bomb in a week or two.”

This is the reality in Gaza: Death can come from the lack of food, or death can come from trying to find food.

Tuesday’s airstrike near the soup kitchen in Mashrou’ Beit Lehia was a part of a broader Israeli military a campaign launched last Sunday known as “Operation Gideon’s Chariots.” It involves intense bombardment in the north intended to push Palestinians further south, eventually concentrating Gaza’s population of about 2.1 million people into what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “sterile zone,” completely controlled by the Israeli military. The Israeli government has also used the term “sterile zone” in the occupied West Bank to refer to areas that isolate Palestinians while giving access to Israeli settlers. The zone would be the only place in the Strip where Palestinians could receive food and aid supplies. Aid would be funneled into four distribution sites, with three in southern Gaza run by a new Swiss-based nonprofit and two U.S.-based security firms. 

Both Israel and the U.S. claim the aid plan is meant to keep supplies from getting in the hands of Hamas, which they accuse of stealing goods and enriching themselves in the black market, an allegation denied by both Hamas and aid groups. 

Earlier this month at a Jewish settler conference, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a member of Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet who has long called for the establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza, previewed the plan to push Palestinians to the south, referring to southern Gaza as “a humanitarian zone” along its border with Egypt. From the south, he said according to translations from Hebrew, Palestinians “will start to leave in great numbers to third countries” due to poor living conditions. 

The southern Gaza area where Israel intends to push Palestinians has been under Israeli occupation since late March, when its military forced civilians out of the area’s largest city, Rafah. Though much of Rafah already lay in ruins from previous bombing campaigns, the Israeli military has been destroying what few structures remain. During its occupation, Israel established the Morag Corridor — a new road named for a former Israeli settlement in Gaza — that cuts off southern Gaza from the rest of the Strip. While Netanyahu has said the security corridor is intended to root out Hamas militants, officials have also been vocal about their intent to erase Palestinian civilians. 

“They will be totally despairing,” Smotrich said of Palestinians during the pro-settler conference, “understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

When discussing Operation Gideon’s Chariots, Netanyahu on Wednesday echoed his right-wing ally, telling reporters that among his conditions “to end the war” is the demand that Hamas disarms and is exiled from Gaza. He also said that Israel will “carry out the Trump plan,” likely referring to President Donald Trump’s proposal to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East” and relocate its Palestinian residents to neighboring countries — a premise aligned with the long-held vision of far-right settler groups in Israel. NBC News recently reported that the Trump administration had been working on a plan to permanently displace as many as 1 million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya, which has its own issues of instability and violence, and is known to mistreat migrants. Though U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was not aware of the Libya plan, he repeated Trump’s plan of displacing Palestinians to other third-party nations.

Netanyahu credited Trump’s proposal on Wednesday as “a plan that is so correct and so revolutionary.”  

To Almadhoun, it’s obvious what comes next.

“This is the final stage of ethnic cleansing,” he said. 

On top of his work with Gaza Food Kitchen, Almadhoun heads philanthropy efforts for the U.S. wing of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, which manages most of the direct aid to Palestinians. Almadhoun is based in Virginia, but much of his family — including his mother, siblings, nieces, and nephews — live in Gaza. Along with the brother killed in the hospital attack, another brother was killed alongside his family by an Israeli airstrike in their home in early 2024. Almadhoun said he fears his remaining family will be forced south under the plan, into a humanitarian zone that he calls an “internment camp.”

“Our family will hold on to Gaza as long as we can,” he said, “but I fear I’m going to lose another person that I care deeply about.”

Israel’s plan to control dispersal of aid has drawn wide condemnation from Palestinians, human rights organizations, aid groups, and the United Nations, which are responsible for the majority of aid distribution in Gaza. 

A little-known Swiss-based organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, is slated to lead Israel’s U.S.-backed aid plan for Palestinians displaced to southern Gaza. The organization was run by former U.S. Marine sniper Jake Wood, who received recognition for his disaster relief work in Haiti, for two months. Wood announced that he had resigned from GHF on Sunday, stating that the foundation would not be able to adhere “to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”

GHF was founded in February and has already received a reported $100 million from a foreign government donor, prompting questions about the sources of its funding. The foundation is expected to manage the distribution of aid in the designated sites, with security administered by two American private security firms: Safe Reach Solutions, based in Wyoming, and UG Solutions, based in North Carolina, which are reportedly staffed by former CIA, Blackwater and U.S. military personnel. Armed contractors with the firms previously ran checkpoints along the Netzarim Corridor during the ceasefire earlier this year as Palestinians returned north. There have been reports that the security firms would use facial recognition on Palestinians seeking aid, which Wood has dismissed as “misinformation.” The aid plan is set to take effect in late May, Netanyahu has said, with the Israeli military providing limited security support. 

Aid groups and the United Nations have rejected the plan, which circumvents humanitarian guidelines and the existing structures in place to deliver aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Lacking buy-in from the U.N. would mean the more than 13,000 UNRWA aid workers in Gaza would be sidelined. The U.N. typically operates 400 distribution sites; the Israeli plan would trim that down to four. UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said the plan leaves Palestinians with “impossible choice between displacement and death.” 

Scott Paul, Oxfam America’s director of peace and security, dismissed the aid plan for forcing Palestinians to “reshuffle their lives and dramatically shift where they’re living in service of political agenda.”

“It’s a plan that would inevitably leave behind hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million Palestinians, many of whom would be the most vulnerable and endangered people in the Gaza strip,” Paul said. He added that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s plan leaves “meaningful assistance as an afterthought” and doesn’t address other necessary aid, such as clinical health services, outpatient health services, shelter needs, waste management, and access to clean water. 

“Mostly what we’re talking about is the desire to avoid the appearance of complicity in a famine,” Paul said.

Mara Kronenfeld, executive director of UNRWA USA, likened the plan to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany that her grandfather fled and where his sister and her family were later killed.  

“Putting the same country that is out-loud threatening extermination and has already transformed most of Gaza into rubble, and then actively pushing people out,” Kronenfeld said, “putting that entity in charge of humanitarian aid to keep people alive is just flat-out a combination of laughable and evil.”

Before his resignation as GHF’s director, even Wood acknowledged that the foundation lacks the capacity and infrastructure to deliver aid on its own and had requested that traditional aid groups be allowed to deliver non-food aid, according to a leaked letter he sent to the Israeli government, published by The Associated Press.

A spokesperson for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation told The Intercept in an emailed statement that the group is “independent and apolitical” and “will never participate in or support any form of forced relocation of civilians.” While there will initially be four distribution sites — three in southern Gaza and one in central Gaza — the GHF spokesperson said there will be “no limit on the amount of sites the GHF could open” and plans to open more in the north. The spokesperson said GHF hopes the U.N. and other aid groups would start to work with them through the new system, though it is unknown if the foundation received permission from the Israeli government amid the military’s ongoing campaign in the Strip. 

“While there were benefits to the previous UN-led mechanism — in terms of networks and capacity — the reality is that the previous UN-led mechanism is no longer viable because of the concerns around diversion of aid,” GHF said in the statement, referring to worries of looting and allegations that aid is being diverted to Hamas to be resold in the black market.

The foundation did not provide evidence to substantiate the claim of aid being diverted to Hamas, which the Israeli government has made in the past to justify blockades on Gaza.

Once aid is delivered to civilians, however, aid groups cannot control ends up in the black market, said UNRWA USA’s Kronenfeld.

“There are always ways for groups like Hamas or others to be able to access [aid], but you cannot hold an entire civilian population without food in an effort to try to isolate a small tiny percent of the population,” said Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington, D.C., this week, while speaking on a virtual panel with Kronenfeld. “This clearly amounts to collective punishment. It is absolutely illegal under international law.”

Related

Famine Haunts the People of Gaza. Israel Is Trying to Convince You It’s Fake.

The Israeli government has blocked or limited aid shipments into Gaza as a means of military and political strategy since 2007 when it laid siege on the territory, crippling its economy. It has done the same at multiple points in its current invasion. Its most recent and most brutal effort to restrict humanitarian aid started in March and had lasted more than 80 days, the longest of the conflict, before Israel last Monday began to allow some supplies into Gaza. Amid the unlawful blockade, food and other essential supplies — such as fuel, water, hygiene products, medicine, and medical supplies — have grown increasingly scarce.

With the majority of aid still out of reach from Palestinians in need, aid organizations told The Intercept that Israel’s blockade largely remains in effect. 

Even Netanyahu this week admitted he only allowed the “minimal” amounts of aid to maintain support from international allies. He said U.S. senators had threatened to withdraw support of Israel if they continued to see “pictures of … mass starvation.” 

The Israeli government approved about 100 trucks of aid to enter Gaza this week, with the first loads of flour and baby formula reaching storehouses and bakeries on Thursday. The number of trucks is far below the amount seen during the brief ceasefire earlier this year, when about 600 trucks per day arrived. Even that figure, aid groups said, was inadequate to address the humanitarian crisis. 

The new shipments have been confined to a single crossing in southern Gaza, Karem Shalom, rather than utilizing the handful of entry points open during other parts of the war. Aid officials have also blamed the Israeli government for delays and burdensome inspections that have further slowed aid.

“All the aid authorized until now amounts to a teaspoon of aid when a flood of assistance is required,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday. 

One in 5 Palestinians in Gaza face starvation, according to an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report released last week, and the entire Strip is currently at risk of famine. This famine risk includes nearly 11,000 pregnant women, and nearly 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women are expected to need treatment for acute malnutrition in the next 11 weeks. More than 9,000 children have already been treated for acute malnutrition this year. Over the past week, 29 children and elderly have suffered starvation-related deaths, Gaza health officials said. 

Trump has yet to comment on Israel’s latest offensive and aid plan, but his Cabinet members have expressed support. During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Rubio said he was “pleased” with Israel for allowing some aid into Gaza. The flow of military aid from the U.S. to Israel has also accelerated under Trump. 

In a recent interview with NPR, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee defended Smotrich’s calls to destroy what remains of Gaza, arguing that the Israeli official was referring to “the culture that was created by Hamas.” Huckabee claimed that Hamas had circumvented aid money meant for boosting Gaza’s economy to “build bombs and bullets and tunnels.” He went on to question why the U.N. rejected the U.S.-backed aid plan for Gaza “if you really care about the food getting to people.” Huckabee also downplayed speculation that Netanyahu has fallen out of favor with Trump, who notably snubbed Israel during his visit to the Middle East last week.

While ceasefire talks continue in Doha, including reported direct talks between the U.S. and Hamas, Israel has shown no sign of slowing its offensive. 

By Wednesday, the Israeli military said it had struck at least 800 targets inside the territory since it launched its new operation on Sunday, aimed at “terrorist cells.” Strikes have continued to destroy civilian infrastructure and kill scores of Palestinian civilians, including a week-old infant who died Wednesday from blast wounds in a central Gaza hospital. At least 629 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military strikes in the past week; 358 of them, including 148 children and women, were killed inside their homes or tents, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office in Occupied Palestinian Territory. Among those killed are nine journalists, marking this week as one of the most deadly for journalists in Gaza since the attack by Hamas on October 7, the U.N. office said.

On Thursday, the Israeli military announced further evacuation orders for large swaths of northern Gaza, including Beit Lehia and the Jabalia refugee camp, as the military promised to strike the area “with great force.” The evacuation orders affect thousands of refugees sheltering in the area — and will likely again force the Gaza Soup Kitchen to relocate.

For some, meals from the Gaza Soup Kitchen are their only source of food for the day. The mobile kitchens feed roughly 360 families daily, said Almadhoun. In recent weeks, lines have gotten longer and people have grown more aggressive, Almadhoun said, as supplies run thinner and food prices skyrocket — with a bag of flour selling for as much as $500. But the constant bombardments have hampered their ability to provide aid.

On Sunday, when a farmer helped drive Almadhoun’s mother out of Beit Lehia to flee Israel’s bombardment, Almadhoun’s family gave the man two packs of food in thanks. Hours later while the driver lay asleep at home, an Israeli strike killed him, his wife, their children, and extended family — 10 in all, Almadhoun said. 

Several weeks ago at one of the mobile kitchens in northern Gaza, while dozens of people lined up for food, Israeli bombs fell a couple blocks away. Those in line begged the kitchen to serve them their meals half-cooked. “‘We just want to take it and stay alive,’” the crowd told kitchen workers.

“There is no point in freely giving food to people,” Almadhoun said, “and then have them only die by Israeli bombs the next day — that’s the reality.”

Update: May 27, 2025
This story has been updated to include new information on Jake Wood’s resignation from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

The post In Gaza, Famine Is the Weapon — and So Is Aid appeared first on The Intercept.