‘GHF seen to be running away from its responsibilities to provide aid’
After a week of repeated failures in delivering meaningful aid and setting up a safe framework for aid seekers, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) seems to be facing serious challenges.
In a carefully-worded statement, the group cited security concerns and the need for “renovation, reorganisation and efficiency improvement” [for its one-day suspension of operations]. But this raises more questions than it answers.
When it comes to security – Gaza has not seen any absolute security for 20 months. When it comes to logistics – roads are destroyed and damaged, there is a fuel shortage.
These are all things that can cause the flow of aid to slow down, but suspending humanitarian operations altogether highlights the organisation’s incompetence in contingency planning. Many smaller humanitarian organisations, including local ones, were able to keep operating despite the challenges on the ground.
The GHF is seen to be running away from its responsibilities to provide aid.
Israel’s militarised aid takeover creates ‘absurd theatre’ in Gaza
Mads Gilbert, an emergency medicine coordinator who has worked extensively in Gaza, has slammed the Israeli-conceived Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) for sidelining established aid groups and putting starving Palestinians in the line of fire.
“Israel has made a whole new set of rules, in which they exclude the common UN mechanism of distributing help to people in need and replace it with a militarised type of distribution,” he told Al Jazeera.
Pointing to recent deadly attacks on aid seekers in Rafah, Gilbert said Israel had created an “absurd theatre” in which desperate people are forced to risk their lives for parcels of food.
“What needs to happen is for Israel to keep its hands off the distribution of humanitarian aid,” said Gilbert. “We need robust sanctions and a stop to Israel’s outrageous killing of starving people.”
British charity calls Israel’s US-backed aid mechanism in Gaza an ‘atrocity in action’
Action for Humanity, a British humanitarian organisation that operates in Gaza, has blasted the Israeli-conceived Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) for failing to bring aid to most of Gaza’s population while subjecting civilians to deadly violence near aid sites.
“Today, this system – the GHF – has shuttered: depriving thousands of aid access, while Israeli forces escalate military operations in civilian areas and declare aid distribution points as ‘combat zones’,” the organisation wrote in a statement. “An entire population has been denied, humiliated and traumatised by this negligent and insufficient system.”
“Beyond the countless casualties since the programme launch, according to its own data, the GHF has reached only 13 percent of Gaza’s population with food aid – a catastrophic failure by any standard,” it added. “This isn’t a solution; it’s an atrocity in action.”
Displaced Palestinians return from a food distribution centre in Rafah, where rescuers said Israeli forces opened fire, June 1
