Afrasianet – Dr. Mahmoud Alhanafy - In a shocking scene, thousands of starving Palestinians scrambled on  May 26, 2025, in front of an aid distribution center in Rafah, causing chaos that forced Israeli forces to fire in the air.

This was not just an organizational flaw, but an intense picture of the suffering of a people trapped to the bone, left to fight over crumbs of food under the soldiers' guns. In an earlier attempt, the "floating port" project, promoted by Israel and the United States as an innovative solution for the introduction of aid, collapsed before it actually began, amid sharp logistical and security criticism, raising doubts about the seriousness of these initiatives.

Amid this catastrophe, a new Israeli-American  initiative called "Humanitarian Aid" has emerged, raising fundamental questions: Can a plan run by the occupation and distributed under military supervision be described as humanitarian?

This assessment attempts to dismantle these plans through legal and humanitarian axes to monitor the extent of their commitment – or deviation – from international principles of relief work.

First: The Legal Status of Gaza and the Responsibilities of the Occupation

Despite withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, Israel remains legally an occupying power, given its continued control over borders and crossings, according to the International Court of Justice and the United Nations. 

This makes it their responsibility to meet the needs of the population, including the automatic and smooth entry of aid. Despite the October 7 operation, international law does not justify Israel's punitive behavior against civilians, prohibiting collective punishment and requiring continued protection of the population.

Any aid plan that does not stem from this responsibility – but is used to evade it – is a clear violation of international humanitarian law.

Breach of humanitarian principles in relief plans

International relief operations are based on four basic humanitarian principles that guide the work of organizations:

•    (Humanity): alleviating suffering and protecting life and health
•    (Neutrality): Non-alignment in conflicts
•    (Independence): from any political or military considerations
•    Non-discrimination (neutrality): that is, the delivery of assistance to those in need without discrimination. These principles aim to ensure that aid is purely for humanitarian purposes, not used to achieve political or military agendas.

However, Israeli-American plans in Gaza, led by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) initiative, raise serious questions about the extent to which it respects these principles. The GHF  was established in the United States (Delaware) in February 2025 with the support of the Trump administration and the Israeli government, with the aim of distributing food in Gaza in a "safe and transparent" manner.

But since its inception, the foundation has faced sharp criticism from humanitarian organizations accusing it of politicizing aid distribution. The GHF's announced operational plan deviated from established norms: it approved the establishment of four large distribution centers (mostly in the southern Gaza Strip), under heavy guard from the Israeli army, and private American security companies, with Israeli soldiers deployed in their vicinity to "ensure protection."

The plan's authors boasted that it was the only Israeli-approved model for the distribution of relief, meaning that the entire process was dependent on the will of the occupying power. 

This is in blatant contradiction to the principle of independence. Instead of being led by UN or neutral actors, aid is conditioned on Israeli security coordination that oversees every detail.

The principle of neutrality was also violated by requiring "security checks" for beneficiaries, with GHF  officials announcing that they would subject residents to screening for any possible connection to Hamas through techniques such as facial recognition and biometric. This requirement implies political discrimination in civilian relief and is a violation of the principles  of neutrality and non-discrimination.

The principle of humanity itself is questionable, as the plan has significantly scaled up the scope of aid to meet enormous needs. GHF  has proposed distributing canned meals, hygiene items, and medicine only once or twice a month across its centers, with the cost of the meal set at only $1.3 (including purchase and distribution), demonstrating limited relief content.

The United Nations and international associations have criticized the program as opaque and inadequate, stressing that it will not meet the widespread needs in Gaza.

UN officials questioned whether the aid was nothing but a fig leaf to cover military and political objectives. Thomas Fletcher, the UN's chief humanitarian officer, has stated that the  GHF  plan is nothing but a "false façade for further violence and displacement," warning that it makes food delivery conditional on Israeli political and security objectives, so that "starvation turns into a bargaining chip," and another UN official explicitly described it as "weaponizing aid."

These criticisms crystallized in practice when GHF  CEO Jake Wood resigned on May 25, 2025, declaring that he found it impossible to achieve the Foundation's goals while "strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence."

Wood acknowledged that he would not participate in any plan involving the forced displacement of Palestinians, calling on Israel to open the crossings to the entry of larger amounts of aid without hindrance or discrimination. 

Despite this,  the GHF  announced that it would proceed without it, claiming that it would start feeding one million Palestinians within a week. But the first distributions exposed the fragility of the plan: with the opening of a center in Rafah on May 26, 2025, thousands of hungry people scrambled out of control, and staff were forced to withdraw after the Israeli army fired warning fire to disperse desperate crowds.

These scenes of chaos confirmed observers' fears that the plan lacks the elements of neutrality and safety, and puts civilians at risk, in light of the deliberate marginalization of traditional international agencies (such as UNRWA and the International Committee of the Red Cross) with experience in dealing directly with the population.

It is noteworthy that Israel effectively excluded UNRWA and UN institutions from the new relief mechanism under the pretext of the collapse of its channels, which the Palestinians saw as an attempt to replace legitimate institutions with Israeli-controlled entities.

Prior to the emergence of  GHF, the initiative to establish a "floating seaport" off the coast of Gaza under the supervision of the US military was put forward as a corridor for the entry of aid. This plan was promoted as an innovative solution to overcome logistical obstacles, but from the outset it lacked a clear legal and humanitarian basis.

The port was not independent, but subject to Israeli inspection and control, and limited capacity, without the effective involvement of UN agencies.  It actually collapsed in April  2025, when storms swept away its initial facilities, coinciding with scandals related to conflict of powers and lack of coordination.

International organizations have described it as a "propaganda port" rather than a real relief route. This field failure complements the failure of the  GHF experiment and reflects the fragility of any relief project based on security considerations rather than humanitarian and legal grounds.

Additional analysis shows that the proposed Israeli-American plans for Gaza, led by the  GHF initiative, not only suffer from imbalances in humanitarian principles, but also have deeper goals beyond ostensible relief. 

Observers believe that these plans seek to "repackage the siege and ration starvation" in the form of a humanitarian project, where food is used as a subjugation tool to push the population towards displacement through physical and psychological exhaustion. 

The militarization of distribution is not limited to military protection, but includes intelligence dimensions, through the involvement of an American security company (Safe Reach Solutions) founded by a former CIA officer, which collects and analyzes beneficiary data, and perhaps using biometric technologies, which makes the Palestinian fear that he will turn into a security target just for asking for help.

In the same context, the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network (PNGO)  warned in a statement dated (December 22, 2024) that Israel seeks to fully control the distribution of aid, and to silence voices documenting violations, considering that these policies coincide with the escalation of crimes to the point of genocide, as documented by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch reports.

The exclusion of the United Nations and its agencies from the new relief mechanism is a dangerous step, as it loses the transparency of the humanitarian process and deprives the population of international complaint mechanisms.

International human rights organizations, such as AIDA, have welcomed the positions of countries such as Ireland, Spain and Norway, which stressed the need to support UNRWA and not circumvent it.

Remarkably, the Swiss version of GHF was shut down before any food could be distributed, under criminal investigations, forcing those in charge of it to transfer the operations to a US entity of the same name.

Investigations in the New York Times and Washington Post revealed that the plan was born from within the Israeli government, which tried to hide its role through foreign charities, while Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid described both the GHF and the security company  SRS as "shell companies" intended to cover up government involvement.

Third: Starving Gaza between the intended crime and canned plans

With the start of the large-scale Israeli offensive on Gaza in October 2023, the violations were not limited to shelling and military destruction, but took a complex form of policies of starvation, forced displacement, and mass destruction of infrastructure and civilians, which prompted prestigious international organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, to consider what is happening as a possible crime of genocide. 

These descriptions were based on the enormous scale of the human toll, the pattern of systematic deprivation of the necessities of life, and the clarity of the intention to exterminate in the official rhetoric of some Israeli leaders.

At the same time, a comprehensive blockade was imposed on the Gaza Strip that affected food, water, electricity and medicine, and the use of "starvation as a weapon of war" was considered an additional crime that establishes international criminal accountability, especially after the ICC prosecutor requested the issuance of arrest warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense, for their involvement in the use of the blockade and starvation as a means of collective punishment.

In this context, the accused of committing acts amounting to genocide and collective punishment raises a fundamental question: how can those who commit genocide and siege come forward with humanitarian plans? How can the perpetrator assume the role of a savior? What is presented as "aid" is nothing but a soft packaging of the policy of strangulation, but rather an attempt to legitimize crime through the establishment of institutions of a security-political nature such as the GHF, which marginalize neutral humanitarian agencies and restrict distribution to security conditions that affect the essence of neutrality and independence.

Future Prospects: Towards Immunizing Humanitarian Action from Tampering and Politicization

 The GHF experience is a warning example of what can happen when humanitarian principles are hijacked and relief is administered as a tool in the hands of the occupier. But this failure in itself opens future windows that can be built upon, most notably:

1.    Restoration of the four humanitarian principles: 

Reality has shown that any relief plan that is not based on neutrality, independence, humanity and non-discrimination is doomed to failure. It will prompt the international community to review its policies regarding the involvement of the occupying countries in the management of aid, in order to avoid a repeat of what happened in Gaza.

2.    Strengthening the role of UN agencies and neutrals: 

The blatant failure of the attempt to marginalize UNRWA and the Red Cross will reaffirm the need to uphold traditional actors with experience and community trust. This reinforces the status of humanitarian work as an independent field, not as a political arm of any party.

3.    Institutionalizing the legal protection of humanitarian action: 

There will be an urgent need to establish legal red lines to prevent the militarization of aid. International aid organizations will demand new reference documents that oblige states to respect the standards and could push for a binding additional protocol under the Geneva Conventions.

4.    Activating judicial accountability: 

What happened in Gaza may create legal precedents condemning the use of starvation as a weapon, and pave the way for the inclusion of the politicization of aid as a form of crimes against humanity. The GHF experience will be used  as a witness in international tribunals to prove bad faith and violation of principles.

5.    Gaza from a Local Issue to a Global Moral Test: 

Gaza is no longer just an internal Palestinian affair or an isolated regional conflict, but has become a mirror that reflects the world's commitment to the spirit of humanitarian action. It is not only an arena of tragedy, but a revealing moment to test the universal conscience: Is human solidarity still capable of transcending geography and political alignments? The scandal over the politicization of aid has shown that humanity itself has become a bargaining chip. Hence, Gaza is not a passing station, but a turning point that can redefine the concepts of neutrality and emergency response, and push for building a just relief system that does not arm or condition, but rather preserves dignity and keeps life possible in the face of siege and genocide.