Gaza’s aid system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed | Humanitarian Crises

On May 27, thousands of Palestinians surged towards an aid distribution site in Rafah – desperate for food after months of starvation – only to be met with gunfire from panicked private security contractors. What the world witnessed at the Tal as-Sultan aid site was not a tragedy, but a revelation: The final, violent unmasking of the illusion that humanitarian aid exists to serve humanity rather than empire.

Marketed by Israel and the United States as a model of dignity and neutrality, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s new distribution hub disintegrated into chaos within hours of opening. But this was no accident. It was the logical endpoint of a system not designed to nourish the hungry, but to control and contain them.

As starving people in Gaza – made to wait for hours under the scorching sun, tightly confined in metal lanes to receive a small box of food – eventually began to press forward in desperation, chaos broke out. Security personnel – employed by a US-backed contractor – opened fire in a failed attempt to prevent a stampede. Soon, Israeli helicopters were deployed to evacuate American staff and began firing warning shots over the crowd. The much-advertised aid site collapsed completely after only a few hours in operation.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had promised something revolutionary with this initiative: Aid free from the corruption of Hamas, the bureaucracy of the UN, the messiness of Palestinian civil society. What it delivered instead was the purest distillation of colonial humanitarianism – aid as an instrument of control, dehumanisation, and humiliation, dispensed by armed contractors under the watchful eye of the occupying military.

The problem with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s failed initiative was not only the dehumanising and dangerous way in which it attempted to deliver aid at gunpoint. The aid itself was humiliating in both quality and quantity.

What people were given was not enough to survive on, let alone to restore any sense of human dignity. The boxes handed out contained just enough calories to prevent immediate death – a calculated cruelty designed to keep people alive on quarter-full stomachs while their bodies slowly consume themselves. No vegetables for nutrition. No seeds for planting. No tools for rebuilding. Just processed food, engineered to maintain a population in permanent crisis, forever dependent on the mercy of their destroyers.

Photos from the distribution centre – showing desperate human beings visibly worn down by hunger, disease, and relentless war, corralled into metal lanes like livestock, waiting for scraps as they stared down the barrel of a gun – drew comparisons with well-known images of suffering and death from the concentration camps of the last century.

The similarity is not accidental. The “aid distribution centres” of Gaza are the concentration camps of our time – designed, like their European predecessors, to process, manage, and contain unwanted populations rather than help them survive.

Jake Wood, the foundation’s executive director, resigned days before the collapse of the Tal as-Sultan operation, stating in his resignation letter that he no longer believed the foundation could adhere to “the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence”.

This was, of course, a damning example of bureaucratic understatement.

What he meant – though he could not say it outright – was that the entire enterprise was a lie.

An aid initiative to help an occupied and besieged population can never be neutral when it coordinates with the occupying army. It cannot be impartial when it excludes the occupied from decision-making. It cannot be independent when its security depends on the very military that engineered the famine it is trying to address.

Tuesday’s choreographed humiliation was months in the making. Of 91 attempts the UN made to deliver aid to besieged North Gaza between October 6 and November 25, 82 were denied and 9 were impeded. Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, accused Israel of conducting a “starvation campaign” against Palestinians in Gaza as early as September 2024. In a report to the UN General Assembly, he warned that famine and disease were “killing more people than bombs and bullets”, describing the hunger crisis as the most rapid and deliberate 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 needed each day to meet basic humanitarian needs. By that measure, over 40,000 trucks would be required to meaningfully address the crisis. At least 300 people, including many children, have already died of starvation.

But the bastardisation of “aid” and transformation of “humanitarianism” into a mechanism of control did not begin on October 7, either.

Palestinians have been living this lie of “aid” for 76 years, since the Nakba transformed them from a people who fed themselves into a people who begged for crumbs. Before 1948, Palestine exported citrus to Europe, manufactured soap traded across the region, and produced glass that reflected the Mediterranean sun. Palestinians were not rich, but they were whole. They grew their own food, built their own homes, educated their own children.

The Nakba did not merely displace 750,000 Palestinians – it engineered a transformation from self-sufficiency to dependency. By 1950, former farmers were lining up for UNRWA rations, their olive groves now feeding someone else’s children. This was not an unfortunate side effect of war but a deliberate strategy: To break Palestinian capacity for independence and replace it with a permanent need for charity. Charity, unlike rights, can be withdrawn. Charity, unlike justice, comes with conditions.

The United States, UNRWA’s largest donor, simultaneously provides most of the weapons destroying Gaza. This is not a contradiction – it is the logic of colonial humanitarianism. Fund the violence that creates the need, then fund the aid that manages the consequences. Keep people alive, but never allow them to live. Provide charity, but never justice. Deliver aid, but never freedom.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – and the tragic spectacle it created on Tuesday – was the perfection of this system of colonial humanitarianism. Aid delivered by private contractors, coordinated with occupying forces, distributed in militarised zones designed to bypass every institution Palestinians have built to serve themselves. It was humanitarianism as counterinsurgency, charity as colonial control – and when its obscene operation predictably collapsed, Palestinians were blamed for their desperation.

Palestinians have long known that no Israeli or US-backed aid initiative would truly help them. They know that a dignified life cannot be sustained with food packages distributed in concentration camp-like facilities. Karamah – the Arabic word for dignity that encompasses honour, respect, and agency – cannot be air-dropped or handed out at checkpoints where people wait in metal lanes like cattle.

Of course, Palestinians already possess Karamah – it lives in their steadfast refusal to disappear, in their insistence on remaining human despite every effort to reduce them to mere recipients of charity meant to keep them barely alive.

What they need is true humanitarian aid – aid that provides not just calories, but a chance at a future.

True humanitarian aid would dismantle the siege, not manage its consequences. It would prosecute war criminals, not feed their victims with just enough to die slowly. It would restore Palestinian land, not try to compensate for its theft with boxes of processed food handed out in cages.

Until the international community understands this simple truth, Israel and its allies will continue to dress instruments of domination as relief. And we will continue to witness tragic scenes like the one in Rafah yesterday, for years to come.

What happened in Rafah was not a failure of aid. It was the success of a system designed to dehumanise, control, and erase. Palestinians do not need more bandages from the same hands that wield the knife. They need justice. They need freedom. They need the world to stop mistaking the machinery of oppression for humanitarian relief – and start seeing Palestinian liberation as the only path to dignity, peace, and life.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.