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First, They Replaced the Bombs with Boxes" — How Gaza's Aid Has Been Turned Into a Weapon

 


✍️ By Malik Mukhtar
📅 July 22, 2025

“This is what systematic harm to human beings looks like.”
— Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI)

When the bombs fell on Gaza, they shattered homes, hospitals, and bodies. But what followed was not peace. It was something colder, more insidious: a militarized, politicized aid regime dressed in humanitarian disguise.

Enter the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — a U.S.- and Israel-backed initiative marketed as a “new solution” to Gaza’s suffering. But for Palestinians, it has become a new layer of trauma, a cruel mechanism of control, and in the words of Israeli human rights doctors, a danger to civilian life.

⚕️ Who Is PHRI?

Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI) is one of Israel’s oldest and most respected human rights organizations, founded in 1988. It consists of Israeli doctors, public health professionals, and legal experts who promote the right to health for all people under Israeli control, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or legal status. Over the years, PHRI has documented abuses in prisons, occupied territories, and war zones — and has consistently challenged state policies that violate medical ethics and international humanitarian law.

Their recent call to remove the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation from Gaza marks one of the clearest denunciations of Israel’s war-time policies from within its own civil society.

🏴 From Aid to Entrapment

Since its deployment in late May 2025, GHF has operated just five major aid distribution centers — all located in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. These include hubs in Rafah, Khan Younis, and Al-Mawasi.

They are not coordinated by the UN, not protected by humanitarian law, and not administered by neutral bodies.

Instead, they are:

  • Controlled by a U.S.-Israeli task force,
  • Secured by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and private contractors, including Global Guardian and Elbit Systems' Urban Defense Unit — both of which have been criticized for roles in other conflict zones,
  • And increasingly associated with bloodshed, displacement, and legal controversy.

☠️ Bodies for Bread

In the last two months alone:

  • 875+ Palestinians have been killed near aid sites, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
  • Dozens of stampedes and crowd crushes have occurred at GHF sites, often triggered by Israeli gunfire or fear of sudden strikes.
  • 36 people were shot dead in Rafah on July 19, 2025, as they approached a GHF food truck.
  • 20 more were trampled to death days earlier in Khan Younis during a chaotic aid drop.
  • Hospitals describe malnourished patients dying not of hunger, but of hope — the hope of surviving long enough to reach food.

⚕️ Doctors Against Deception

This week, Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHRI) issued a rare and urgent public call:

“The GHF endangers Palestinian lives and must be immediately removed from Gaza.”

They urged its replacement with systematic, independent international aid, led by neutral UN agencies — a direct challenge to the  narrative that GHF is “safe” and “effective.”

PHRI is not alone.

Over 170 humanitarian organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, Oxfam, and TRIAL International, have condemned the GHF model as:

  • A violation of humanitarian neutrality
  • A form of engineered displacement
  • A possible mechanism of complicity in war crimes — or even genocide

🔥 A System Designed to Fail

Why does GHF operate only in the south?

Because Israel wants northern Gaza depopulated. By centralizing aid in one corner of the Strip, Palestinians are forced to flee or starve — a war crime dressed up as logistics.

By controlling access to food and medicine, GHF becomes not a bridge to relief but a lever of pressure, a way to coerce movement, punish resilience, and erase the north.

“Gaza has become a graveyard not only for children but for humanitarian law itself.”

🧨 When Humanitarianism Becomes Collusion

According to legal experts from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Al-Haq, and TRIAL International, the GHF and its operators may be liable for:

  • War crimes
  • Crimes against humanity
  • Aiding and abetting genocide

The aid workers, contractors, and logistics firms participating in this scheme — no matter how well-intentioned — are now operating under legal warning.

💔 The UNRWA That Was

Before the war, UNRWA and WFP delivered aid with dignity, at scale, and under international protection. But Israel, backed by the U.S., defunded and dismantled these systems — replacing them with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation: a privatized, militarized, and deeply political Frankenstein of a relief model.

And yet, the world calls this “aid.”

✊ The Call to Dismantle GHF

Today, humanitarian doctors, rights defenders, legal experts, and survivors themselves are calling not for reform — but removal.

Remove the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Restore independent, impartial humanitarian access.

Let the United Nations do its job.

Because bread should not be delivered by bullets.
And aid should never come with a gun to your back.

📚 Sources:

  1. Physicians for Human Rights–Israel Statement
    Dawn News – PHRI calls for removal of GHF

  2. Mass Deaths at Aid Sites
    AP News – 32 Palestinians shot near GHF aid
    Financial Times – GHF site stampede kills 20
    Reuters – 36 killed at GHF aid convoy

  3. Legal Concerns and NGO Statements
    TRIAL International – Legal risks for GHF operators
    Amnesty International – GHF undermines humanitarian law
    CCR Justice – Call to suspend GHF operations

  4. Background on GHF Model and UNRWA Replacement
    Wikipedia – Gaza Humanitarian Foundation

🔗 This blog is part of the “Aid as a Weapon” series. Follow for more updates on Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and the global complicity that sustains it.
📌 ainnbeen.blogspot.com

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