Blood for food’: The US soldier-spies sidelining UN aid work in Gaza

Gaza’s health ministry reported last week that at least 549 Palestinians had been killed, and 4,066 injured, while seeking aid since the introduction of a controversial US-backed distribution system on May 27. Gazans are now forced to travel through militarized areas in southern Gaza to pick up bags of food, frequently resulting in the Israeli military firing on civilian aid seekers.

Behind the statistics are grieving families. One Gazan, whose little brother was killed as he sought aid west of Gaza City, told FRANCE 24 that he got a call from Al Shifa hospital on Tuesday June 17. His brother was dumped there, wrapped in a bag.

“He was killed by an Israeli sniper, shot while crowds rushed towards aid trucks,” he said, “I touched his body and found the sniper’s bullet had entered through his left shoulder and exited through his heart.”

“We couldn’t bury him that night because of the war,” he added. “He spent his last night at home – dead.”

“He wasn’t just my little brother. He was the joy in our home – the soul of the family. Everywhere he went, laughter followed. He was generous, loved by all, kindhearted. But now… He’s no longer here,” he wrote.

“He was killed while searching for a piece of bread, while the world remains silent – watching, or justifying the killing.”

Beginning in March, Israel blocked deliveries of food and other crucial supplies into Gaza for more than two months. It began allowing supplies to trickle in at the end of May through sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and secured by armed US contractors, with Israeli troops on the perimeter.

The UN has boycotted the GHF, refusing to work with the group over concerns it violates humanitarian principles and was designed to help Israeli military objectives in the enclave. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Friday told the press that, “Any operation that channels desperate civilians into militarized zones is inherently unsafe. It is killing people.”

‘Blood for food’

A UN source in Gaza who requested anonymity explained that the new system forces civilians to approach evacuated areas, putting their lives at risk.

“Because there is not enough aid, people go in the thousands into the areas under evacuation, and this is where the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) kills them for not coming one by one,” the source said. “It’s blood for food.”

A report by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in early June cited several eyewitness accounts of civilians encountering fire from tanks, drones and helicopters as they sought food at GHF distribution sites.

Both the GHF and the Israeli army have rejected such accounts.

A GHF spokesperson told FRANCE 24 that, “There has not been a single fatality at or near any of GHF [sic] distribution sites. Period.”

“Hamas doesn’t want us here because they want to control the aid,” the spokesperson added.

Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of looting aid, without providing evidence. It sees the GHF as crucial to undermining what remains of Hamas’s control over Gaza.

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained in a recent interview with Fox News: “We have a plan, that we devised with the help of American firms, to separate the giving of the humanitarian aid to the population from Hamas control.”

Who is behind the GHF network?

After the tumultuous resignation of its original executive director, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is now led by former USAID official John Acree and former Trump adviser Johnnie Moore, an evangelical preacher and public relations professional with close ties to both the US president and Israel’s Netanyahu.

During Trump’s first term in office, Moore was part of an evangelical Christian drive to convince the president to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and move the US embassy there. He recently wrote in a post on X, “There’s nothing more Christian than feeding people in need.”