On May 27, thousands of Palestinians increased to a Rafah aid distribution site – desperately for food after months of hunger – to be encountered by gunshots of panicked private security entrepreneurs. What the world has witnessed the Tal As-Sultan help site was not a tragedy, but a revelation: the final and violent unmasking of illusion that there is humanitarian aid to serve humanity rather than the Empire.
Venished by Israel and the United States as a model of dignity and neutrality, the new Gaza Humanitarian Gaza distribution center has disintegrated in chaos in the hours following the opening. But it was not an accident. It was the logical evaluation criterion of an unable to feed hungry, but to control and contain them.
While hungry people in Gaza – made to wait for hours under the burning sun, closely confined in metal tracks to receive a small box of food – finally started to move forward in advance, the chaos broke out. Security personnel – employed by an entrepreneur supported by the United States – opened fire in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent a stampede. Soon, Israeli helicopters were deployed to evacuate American staff and have started to draw warning photos on the crowd. The very opposing help site has completely collapsed after only a few hours of operation.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had promised something revolutionary with this initiative: free aid of the corruption of Hamas, the bureaucracy of the UN, the disorder of Palestinian civil society. What he delivered in place is the purest distillation of colonial humanitarianism – aid as an instrument of control, dehumanization and humiliation, provided by armed entrepreneurs under the vigilant eye of the occupying army.
The problem with the failed initiative of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not only the dehumanizing and dangerous way in which he tried to provide aid under the threat of a weapon. Help itself has humiliated both in quality and quantity.
What people were given were not enough to survive, not to mention restoring any feeling of human dignity. The distributed boxes contained just enough calories to avoid immediate death – calculated cruelty designed to keep people alive in quarters of stomach while their body is slowly consumed. No vegetables for nutrition. No seeds for planting. No tools for reconstruction. I have just transformed food, designed to maintain a population in a permanent crisis, still depends on the mercy of their destroyers.
Photos of the distribution center – showing desperate human beings visibly worn out by hunger, illness and incessant war, have been transformed in metallic tracks like cattle, while waiting for remains while looking at the cannon of a pistol – made comparisons with well -known images of suffering and death of the concentration camps of the last century.
The similarity is not accidental. Gaza’s “aid distribution centers” are the concentration camps of our time – designed, like their European predecessors, to treat, manage and contain unwanted populations rather than helping them survive.
Jake Wood, Executive Director of the Foundation, resigned a few days before the collapse of Operation Tal As-Sultan, declaring in his letter of resignation that he no longer thought that the foundation could adhere to the “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence”.
It was, of course, an overwhelming example of bureaucratic euphemism.
What he meant – although he couldn’t say it outright – is that the whole business was a lie.
An aid initiative to help a busy and besieged population can never be neutral when it is coordinated with the occupying army. It cannot be impartial when it excludes the occupation of decision -making. He cannot be independent when his security depends on the army itself which has designed the famine he tries to address.
Tuesday’s choreographed humiliation has been in the making. Out of 91 attempts that the UN made to provide aid to North Gaza besieged between October 6 and November 25, 82 were refused and 9 were hampered. Michael Fakhri, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, accused Israel of having led a “famine campaign” against the Palestinians in Gaza in September 2024. In a report to the United Nations General Assembly, he warned that famine and disease “killed more people than bombs and bubbles”, describing the fastest and fastest Display in modern history. Between May 19 and 23, only 107 aid trucks entered Gaza after more than three months of blockade. During the temporary ceasefire, 500 to 600 trucks were necessary every day to meet the basic humanitarian needs. Depending on this measure, more than 40,000 trucks are required to significantly deal with the crisis. At least 300 people, many children, have already died of famine.
But the bastardation of “aid” and the transformation of “humanitarianism” into control mechanism did not start on October 7 either.
The Palestinians have lived this lie of “aid” for 76 years, since the Nakba transformed them from a people who fed on a people who begged crumbs. Before 1948, Palestine exported citrus fruits to Europe, made from soap exchanged in the region and produced glass which reflected the Mediterranean sun. The Palestinians were not rich, but they were whole. They cultivated their own food, built their own house, educated their own children.
The Nakba has not just moved 750,000 Palestinians – it has designed a transformation of self -sufficiency to dependence. In 1950, the former farmers were lining up for UNRWA rations, their Gowers olive now nourishing the children of someone else. It was not an unfortunate side effect of the war but a deliberate strategy: to break the Palestinian capacity of independence and replace it with a permanent need for charity. Charity, unlike rights, can be removed. Charity, unlike justice, is delivered with conditions.
The United States, the largest donor in UNRWA, simultaneously provides most weapons destroying Gaza. It is not a contradiction – it is the logic of colonial humanitarianism. Finance the violence that creates the need, then finance the aid that manages the consequences. Keep people alive, but never allow them to live. Provide charity, but never justice. Provide help, but never freedom.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – and the tragic spectacle he created on Tuesday – was the perfection of this system of colonial humanitarianism. Aid delivered by private entrepreneurs, coordinated with occupation forces, distributed in militarized areas designed to bypass each institution that the Palestinians built to use themselves. It was humanitarianism as a counterinsurgency, charity as colonial control – and when its obscene operation collapsed predictably, the Palestinians were accused of their despair.
Palestinians have long known that no Israeli aid initiative or supported by the United States would really help them. They know that a worthy life cannot be maintained with food packages distributed in concentration camp -type installations. Karamah – The Arabic word for dignity that encompasses honor, respect and agency – cannot be poured or distributed to control points where people expect metal routes like cattle.
Of course, the Palestinians already have Karamah – he lives in their unshakable refusal to disappear, in their insistence to remain human despite all the efforts to reduce them to simple beneficiaries of charity intended to keep them barely alive.
What they need is a real humanitarian aid – a help that provides not only calories, but a chance in the future.
Real humanitarian aid would dismantle the seat, not manage its consequences. This would continue war criminals, not to feed their victims with just enough to die slowly. He would restore the Palestinian lands, would not try to compensate for his flight with boxes of processed foods distributed in cages.
Until the international community understands this simple truth, Israel and its allies will continue to dress the instruments of domination as relief. And we will continue to attend tragic scenes like that of Rafah yesterday, for the years to come.
What happened in Rafah was not a help of help. It was the success of a system designed to dehume, control and erase. Palestinians do not need more bandages of the same hands that handle the knife. They need justice. They need freedom. They need the world to stop confusing oppression machines for humanitarian relief – and start to see Palestinian liberation as the only way to dignity, peace and life.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.