Israel and USA make food distribution system a ‘death trap’ and Gaza a graveyard for international law
“When it comes to Israel, the levers of international censure are broken,” wrote Guardian columnist Nisrine Malik on May 26. “Throughout the war, international organizations, humanitarian missions and courts of justice have been rendered powerless by their inability to translate their findings into action. Words alone mean nothing. They simply bounce off Israel’s iron dome of impunity.”
It is not just the US that has kept that ‘iron dome of impunity’ intact. Despite Israel’s failure over 20 months to subdue the tiny Gaza Strip with its own weapons and the endless US arms supply that cost US taxpayers $17.9 billion in the year after October 2023, with a further $12 billion in military sales to Israel recently approved by the Trump Administration, countries around the world still apparently regard Israel as a military powerhouse.
“Europe Discusses Boycotting Israel – While Rushing to Buy More Israeli Weapons” is the headline of a June 5th Haaretz piece focused on Israel’s 2024 record-breaking arms exports. While US taxes have bolstered Israel’s defense industry, it has reaped $14.8 billion from arms sales, with a steep rise in business with the Gulf. But as far as Europe is concerned, Spain’s recent termination of a $325 million deal for Israeli missile systems may portend a less profitable 2025. “Images of destruction in Gaza, on top of accusations that Israel is responsible for the humanitarian disaster, are casting a shadow on contacts with European defense ministries,” states the Haaretz article. A recent poll documents a sharp slide in support for Israel among western Europeans.
Rendering UN agencies powerless
On June 4, 2025, in its first effort to demand a ceasefire since its attempt last November was vetoed by the US, the UN Security Council mustered a vote of 14 (including the UK and France) in support of a draft resolution calling for “an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire” while the only other member of the Security Council – the United States - issued its fifth veto of a Gaza ceasefire resolution. Dorothy Shea, the acting US ambassador to the UN, declared that “this resolution would undermine diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire that reflects the realities on the ground, and embolden Hamas.”
But what if those “realities on the ground” amount to the ‘crime of crimes’ of genocide, which Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, has forcefully asserted that Israel is committing? Trump may regard Afrikaners as victims of “persecution or genocide” but that’s not happening in Gaza, according to Trump’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
As well as paralyzing the Security Council, the US has disabled the International Criminal Court. The sanctionsTrump placed on the court’s Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan last February following its issuing of arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant have frozen Khan’s bank account in the UK, his home country, and prevent him and the non-Americans on the ICC staff from entering the US. Prison time and fines now face any individual or organization (including human rights bodies) giving Khan “financial, material, or technological support.” According to the May 28th Haaretz quoting The Wall Street Journal, Khan had been planning to issue arrest warrants for both Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. On June 4, Secretary of State Rubio placed sanctions on four ICC judges who “actively engaged in the ICC’s illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America or our close ally, Israel.”
To further cripple the UN and undermine any effective delivery of food and medicine in the Gaza Strip, Trump withdrew the US from the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council and has stopped funding the World Food Programme and UNRWA, which Israel has long been wanting to dismantle because of its support for refugee rights.
‘Humanitarian corridors’ that ‘double as kill zones’
Rather than permitting aid to reach the famine-stricken population of Gaza through UNRWA’s well-established distribution network, the US and Israel have collaborated in the creation of the shadowy ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (GHF). It was established with the assistance of Philip Reilly, the former head of the CIA’s paramilitary arm, and the Boston Consulting Group which later withdrew from the operation and apologized to its staff for its involvement. Three GHF ‘humanitarian hubs’ in southern Gaza are staffed by US mercenariesmanaged by an ironically-named shell company called ‘Safe Reach Solutions’ which is headed by Philip Reilly. Israeli troops surround the perimeter. This is the latest phase of what the International Crisis Group has termed “starvation as statecraft.” Its current source of funds is unknown, but is possibly Mossad. Israel has asked the US State Department for $500 million to support the GHF’s work for 180 days and its request is being considered.
Immediately before it launched its operations on May 26, the GHF executive director Jake Wood resigned on the grounds that its operations could not be conducted in accordance with humanitarian principles. He was replaced on June 3 by a strongly pro-Israel advisor to Trump and friend of US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Christian Zionist Johnnie Moore.
By the time Moore came on board, the GHF had given the world a glimpse of how disastrous the privatized, militarized delivery of a trickle of aid to a starving population would be. On May 26, the day the GHF said it was launching its distribution efforts, no boxes of food reached the exhausted people who had to walk an average of nine miles to Rafah. After passing through an inspection where some people were taken away by Israeli troops, the rest were crammed together for hours under the sun and buzzing drones in the dehumanizing wire-enclosed chutes - which former UNWRA spokesman Chris Gunness termed a “human abattoir” - that lead to the food distribution point.
When boxes of food were retrieved by some Palestinians the following day (May 27) their contents were found to be “woefully inadequate” and fresh food, bottled water, cooking fuel, soap, essential medicines and baby formula were entirely missing. And just trying to pick up a box was life-threatening. When the crowd of hungry people surged towards the distribution point, Israeli forces surrounding the perimeter shot three dead, wounded 48 and ‘disappeared’ at least seven. Both the army and GHF denied shooting directly at people.
There was no distribution on May 28, and in the desperate effort to find food, crowds surged into the World Food Programme’s warehouse in Deir al-Balah. Two were crushed to death and two killed by gunfire. On Sunday, June 1, when a crowd attempted to approach a ‘humanitarian hub’ in Rafah before dawn, at least 31 Palestinians were killed by gunfire and hundreds wounded. The Israeli army claimed it had only fired ‘warning shots’ and an army spokesman maintained that the report that the army fired at civilians “is entirely false and echoes the propaganda of the terrorist organization Hamas….Regarding the incident on Sunday – it simply didn’t happen!” But this lie was debunked by a thorough CNN analysis - view it here.
A June 3rd report by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor states that gunfire came from quadcopter drones, vehicles behind dunes and navy boats, and “the shooting was intense and random. Everyone lay on the ground as bullets flew overhead; no one dared to stand, because standing cost one his life.” Khaled Ahmed Abu Sweilem, aged 41, managed to collect a food box and was shot in the head as he exited the distribution center. When the boxes had all been taken “a quadcopter was overhead, broadcasting insulting remarks: ‘You animals, go away, the supply is out.”
The report states: “Incidents on the ground demonstrate that Israeli forces have deliberately positioned aid distribution centres in dangerous, militarized areas under their control, without providing safe corridors. This has created a deadly trap for thousands of starving civilians…The Israeli army typically denies responsibility for these serious crimes or attempts to justify its use of live fire by claiming that ‘suspects’ approached areas where its forces are deployed. These claims are made without presenting evidence and often contradict earlier accounts, reflecting a disregard for the lives of starving civilians. This pattern is a direct consequence of the impunity Israel has long enjoyed.”
In his +972 Magazine piece “How six months in the West Bank undid a lifetime of Zionist indoctrination,” Sam Stein wrote: “Like most Jews and Israelis, I was raised to view the IDF as infallible. But when I say the army lies, I’m not talking about spin or selective truth-telling. I mean they fabricate reality wholesale – creating fictions devoid of any factual basis.” He goes on to describe incidents he had personally witnessed “only to later read military accounts that completely contradicted reality.”
Three more people were shot dead when attempting to obtain food on June 2 and a further 27 Palestinians were mown down by direct gunfire which left 90 injured on June 3. The heart-wrenching story of Reem Zeidan, who was killed trying to get food for her family on that date after returning home empty-handed on five previous attempts, is told here. By then the number of those killed while trying to reach food distribution sites since May 27 had reached 102, with nearly 500 injured and an unknown number ‘disappeared’ by Israeli forces. The hubs were shut on June 4 through June 7 for a “logistical reorganization” and the construction of earth mounds around the food distribution sites. At least five people were shot dead approaching a GHF hub when it re-opened on Sunday, June 8. Again, the Israeli army said it had only fired warning shots.
Israel arms “ISIS-affiliated Gaza militia”
The Israeli media meanwhile focused on the emergence of a new militia armed by Israel that was set up to counter Hamas. The Abu Shabab militia calls itself the “Anti-Terror Service.” It is reportedly headed by Yasser Abu Shabab, a Rafah resident who has long been accused of looting aid deliveries and now operates to distribute aid and man checkpoints under the direct control of the Israeli army which has provided members of his large clan with arms. Some family members have denounced him as a collaborator and his gang and other criminal groups that have looted aid deliveries have been targeted by Hamas. Israel has repeatedly declared that it is Hamas that has diverted aid, but in an internal communication the army admitted it could find no evidence that this is the case.
Former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman claimed on June 5 that just as Netanyahu “propped up Hamas as a counterweight to the PA, he is now helping to establish a new armed force as a counterweight to Hamas” and that its members “are in essence lawless criminals who in recent years wanted to give themselves an ideological angle or spin, so they became Salafi [Jihadists] and began identifying with ISIS.” Netanyahu responded by declaring, “What’s wrong with that? It’s only good. It saves the lives of IDF soldiers.”
Israel’s end game
While Palestinians struggle with the dehumanizing quest to feed families, the slaughter from the skies has been unrelenting. According to a chilling +972 Magazine piece by Yuval Abraham, a co-director of the Oscar-winning film ‘No Other Land’, Israel is using “a crude algorithmic analysis of phone usage patterns over a wide area” to classify neighborhoods as empty of inhabitants when they are anything but, and then send in the bombing squads so there would be nothing left for Palestinians to return to. Hundreds of civilians have recently perished because of this murderous scorched earth policy.
The Israeli air force has also deliberately bombed at least six school buildings since May in which families were sheltering, killing at least 120 people. Israel claimed the shelters were “used by terrorists.” When challenged by the BBC, the army admitted that it had made an artillery strike on the horrendously overcrowded tented encampment in al-Mawasi area on June 1, claiming “technical and operational errors” had caused the shells to hit the wrong target.
Hospitals and journalists continue to be targeted as the known death toll of Palestinians approaches 55,000, with 14,000 unaccounted for. The army struck Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah on June 4 and the following day attacked al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, which is run by the Anglican Church. Three journalists and two other people were killed and scores wounded - among them four journalists, one of whom later died of his injuries - in what the army said was a precise strike on an “Islamic Jihad terrorist who was operating in a command-and-control centre.”
According to Medecins Sans Frontières, new displacement orders and movement restrictions have been put on Nasser Hospital, the main hospital in the south where many of those wounded at GHF hubs and the Mawasi encampment were taken. The hospital, which serves as “southern Gaza’s last lifeline,” is being pushed “to the brink of becoming non-functional.” Hamdi al-Najjar, the doctor who had worked there with his doctor wife Alaa and was wounded in the bombing that killed nine of his ten children on May 23, died at the hospital on June 1.
As Israel refuses to sign off on a ceasefire agreement which Hamas accepted as a way of bringing the war to an end, it has continued to drive toward what appears to be its endgame – displacing the population to the southern quarter in preparation for either massive ethnic cleansing or “a reality in which growing numbers desperate to escape constant violence, economic collapse, and a manufactured dystopia make their way elsewhere,” in the words of the astute analyst Mouin Rabbani. “Israel has, Rabbani writes, “reached the stage where it needs war to sustain itself. War can ebb and flow but cannot end. The permanent war footing also enables the accelerated annexationist agenda in the West Bank, further expansion into Syria, continued attacks on Lebanon and Yemen, and serves the ultimate prize of unleashing an armed confrontation with Iran…confronting genocide is not US policy. Israeli impunity, by contrast, remains a Western priority.”
The Israeli mindset
Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert caused an uproar and gained considerable media attention when he wrote in a May 27 Haaretz op ed that “what we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians…Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”
On the same day, as many as 1,300 Israeli academics signed a letter decrying the “horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing. We cannot claim that we did not know. We have been silent for too long.”
But according to a recent Pennsylvania State University poll, 82 percent of Israelis support the forced expulsion of Palestinians, and 56 percent favor the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel, with only nine percent of those under 40 opposing mass ethnic cleansing.
On May 26, thousands participated in Israel’s ‘Flag March’ through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City chanting ‘Death to Arabs’ and “there is no school in Gaza, there are no children left” as finance minister Smotrich declared that “we are being blessed with the opportunity to blot out the seed of Amalek, a process which is intensifying.” A May 28th Haaretz editorial stated that the event “normalized calls for genocide.”
There also appears to be little opposition to the ethnic cleansing underway in the West Bank, as settler violence to drive Palestinians from their homes becomes a routine matter. On May 29, the government announced it would be building 22 new settlements in the West Bank. Determined to demonstrate that a ‘two-state solution’ was not an option, Ron Dermer, Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister, told France and the UK that Israel would annex parts of the West Bank if they recognized the State of Palestine, as 147 countries and the Vatican currently do. Meanwhile, Netanyahu blocked a visit to the Palestinian Authority scheduled for June 1 by the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey.
People of conscience must rise up
The Sarajevo Declaration issued on May 29 by the Gaza Tribunal warns that “the world is approaching a dangerous precipice, the front edge of which is in Palestine. Dangerous forces in both the public and the private spheres are pushing us toward the abyss.” To meet the moment “the challenge of justice now falls to people of conscience everywhere, to civil society and to social movements, to all of us. As such, our work in the coming months will be dedicated to meeting this challenge. Palestinian lives are at stake. The international moral and legal order is at stake. We must not fail. We will not relent.”
The courage of people of conscience is exemplified by the 12 activists aboard the Gaza Flotilla boat named the Madleen whose journey to deliver aid to Gaza began on June 1. Its progress can be tracked here. Israel has threatened to seize the ship and arrest those on board. On June 8, as the Madleen neared Gaza’s territorial waters, Defense Minister Israel Katz posted on X that Israel would “take whatever measures” are necessary to stop it from reaching its destination. As the boat approached within 160 nautical miles of Gaza its communications were jammed. And then early on the morning of June 9, after quadcopters sprayed the boat with a gas-like substance, Israeli forces seized the Madleen and detained the activists.
Five days earlier Madleen passenger Greta Thunberg told Democracy Now!:
“My message is that right now international law is failing us. International institutions, our governments are failing us. Media, our companies are all failing us. Or ‘failing us’ is a diplomatic way of saying that our system seems to be designed in a way that is built upon exploitation and oppression of people. And so, there’s no one to turn to…it falls on us to step up, to continue flooding the streets, to continue organizing, boycotting, to speak up on all platforms to try to send a clear message that we will not stand for what is happening right now.”
Their valor and determination should inspire us all.
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
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