The plan, rejected by the UN and other aid groups, is nothing more than a ‘sinister’ mechanism of control masquerading as aid.
As starvation in Gaza reaches new catastrophic levels after Israel banned all food and aid from the enclave for now more than 70 days, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee proudly announced on Friday an imminent breakthrough: Israel and the US are finalizing a new mechanism to resume food supplies to the enclave. “President Trump has made clear that one of the most urgent things that need to happen is humanitarian aid into Gaza,” Huckabee emphasized.
But Huckabee’s announcement, apparently designed to sound benevolent, has evoked wide and fierce international backlash as well as significant opposition inside Gaza.
That’s because we now know that the mechanism will be run by a new private foundation, effectively ending the UN-led aid system that has long been in place in Gaza and replacing it with a tightly controlled process designed to only give much-needed assistance to around 60% of the enclave’s population.
“The UN altogether, from the secretary general to the different agencies, including UNRWA, rejects the plan,” UNRWA’s director of external relations and communications, Tamara Alrifai, told me. A senior European official described it as “dystopian” and “sinister,” while another called it “extremely dangerous.”
A private memo drafted by UN agencies and more than 20 international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) that I viewed sounded a serious alarm and demanded that states not fund or engage with this mechanism, warning that doing so could amount to “aiding and assisting internationally wrongful acts, and expose states and donors to legal and political accountability.” A human rights researcher and breastfeeding mother in Gaza told me, “One has to be completely insane” to go to those compounds, even though she herself suffers from acute malnourishment and has been passing out lately. “We don’t want aid, we want the killing to stop first,” she added.
Underscoring these concerns is the fact that “Israel was very quick to embrace the plan,” which “also begs further questions,” H.A. Hellyer, a scholar at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told me. Even extreme-right Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who previously said it may be “just and moral” to starve Gaza, voted in favor of the plan.
Recycling Rejected Ideas
Under the American-Israeli plan, aid would be managed and distributed solely through an unknown and newly created private organization called “The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF), which was recently registered in Switzerland. A senior Swiss diplomat told me that GHF was registered by an Armenian businessman and two Americans. The entire structure of the organization does not appear to include any Palestinians or Arabs and does not involve any of the organizations already working in Gaza with ample experience and long track records, prompting Hellyer to call it “a very shady setup.”
HF would open only four “Secure Distribution Sites” in southern Gaza, replacing the more than 400 UN aid distribution points already in the Strip. Each GHF “hub” would provide food, water, hygienic kits, and medicines “based solely on need” to 300,000 Palestinians in Gaza (1.2 million in total), which means only a little over a half of Gaza’s population would benefit from this mechanism, while the fate of the rest remains unknown as Israel would allow aid through GHF only.
The distribution sites would be run by armed American “mercenaries who previously served in this mission in Iraq and Afghanistan,” according to Israeli media. They would be “monitored and guarded by Israeli forces or private military-security companies,” according to the private memo.
Beneficiaries of aid would be called up individually to approach GHF’s armored hubs to receive one package of 50 meals for an entire family, each containing 1,750 calories. Each meal would cost $1.30 – an amount that GHF claims would include all the components of transportation, security, and distribution.
This mechanism prompted the UN and international NGOs working in Gaza to link it to earlier Israeli ideas like the security “bubbles,” (AKA humanitarian “islands,” and “gated communities”), which were premised on weaponizing aid against Gaza’s civilian population to achieve military and political goals.
A Deadly Trap
Individual beneficiaries of this plan are expected to first pass through biometric screening at Israeli checkpoints and corridors equipped with facial recognition technology on their way to and back from the heavily securitized GHF hubs, where additional ID checks would be conducted.
“This means no male between the ages of 12 to 100 would dare go anywhere near there,” a European diplomat told me, pointing to how the Israeli military has been arbitrarily abducting males of this age in Gaza without any due process, suspicion of wrongdoing, trial, legal counsel, charges, or visits from the Red Cross.
Another EU diplomat remarked that such a mass individual screening and data collection operation would render Palestinians in Gaza “the most monitored people on the face of the Earth.”
Israel can also weaponize this apparatus, by luring individuals with a promise of aid into a trap, where they could be kidnapped, interrogated, or killed at those checkpoints. Furthermore, the UN has documented Israeli soldiers carrying out systematic sexual assault against Palestinians at checkpoints, including the forced stripping of men, women, and children, sexual harassment, torture, and violent abuse. The joint UN-INGO memo highlights that “the planned structure would also create conditions that facilitate collective punishment, arbitrary detention, exploitation and the abuse of civilians, while removing external actors who could monitor, mitigate or report such wrongful acts.”
Local staff, foreign staff, and prospective beneficiaries would undergo screening and vetting by Israeli authorities through an undisclosed, non-transparent, and unappealable process. The UN and INGOs’ memo warned that “experience shows that Israeli-imposed vetting is neither neutral nor transparent. It has been used to arbitrarily deny access to individuals and organizations without due process or explanation.
his means Israel would retain the ultimate power to pick and choose which Palestinians can receive aid and who would be left to starve to death. This opens the door for the Israeli government to further weaponize aid on a micro level to punish individuals like journalists or critics or to blackmail beneficiaries into collaborating and working as informants. Israel has already been doing this for decades, exploiting Palestinians’ need for medical treatment as a weapon of blackmail and punishment.
The joint UN-INGOs memo concluded that the new US-Israeli aid plan “seeks to formalize” Israel’s “weaponization of aid… as a political and military tool (e.g. during ceasefire negotiations, or to further territorial gains).”
“If this is not a weaponization of aid, we don’t know what is,” Alrifai told me. The UN-INGO memo also warned that the new mechanism aims to establish “a system of illegitimate military control and territorial consolidation under the guise of aid delivery.”
‘Concentration Camps’
Establishing distribution hubs in the very south of Gaza alone and deliberately excluding the northern half suggests “a potential policy of forced displacement,” warned the UN humanitarian aid agency (OCHA) in a briefing note last week. The UN-INGO private memo emphasized that “civilians who are left with no choice but to relocate in order to survive are, by definition, being forcibly transferred.” It further warned that the new aid mechanism carries a “risk of internment and inhumane conditions” where people are coerced into “fenced-in containment zones or distribution sites” that would “deprive Palestinians of their dignity and rights, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis and impeding any meaningful recovery.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made this goal clear on Sunday when he, according to the Israeli newspaper Maariv, told an Israeli parliament committee that “receiving the aid would be conditional on the Gazans who receive it not returning to the places from which they arrive at the aid distribution sites.” The paper quoted Netanyahu as saying: “We are demolishing more and more houses, they have nowhere to go back to. The only obvious outcome will be Gazans wishing to emigrate out of the Strip.”
Smotrich, Israel’s ultranationalist finance minister, similarly emphasized that Gaza would be “totally destroyed,” with its people “concentrated” in a small area on the Egyptian border that he called a “humanitarian” zone, which aligns with those newly created hubs. The Israeli news outlet +972 warned in April that “Israel’s latest vision for Gaza has a name: concentration camp.”
Not a Way to Stop Looting
The Trump administration’s pretext for endorsing and co-designing this widely rejected aid plan is to prevent aid looting or Hamas diversion of aid to “buy weapons,” as Ambassador Huckabee put it.
Israel has been using the looting talking point as a pretext to ban all aid from going into Gaza, though Joe Biden’s humanitarian envoy David Satterfield admitted in February of last year that “no Israeli official has …come to the administration with specific evidence of diversion or theft of assistance delivered by the UN in center and south of Gaza since October 21 [2023].” Israel’s own ambassador to the EU, Haim Regev, had said in mid-October 2023 that “there’s no evidence EU aid went to Hamas.”
Ironically, the only evidence of organized, systematic aid theft has been of criminal gangs, reportedly, in some cases, operating under full Israeli military protection.
Hellyer told me this new mechanism is “self-defeating” and “backwards” in terms of stopping any looting. He explained that “looting happens because of scarcity… if looting doesn’t take place at the point of receipt, it can take place thereafter.” He added that Hamas is “certainly not looting food and medicine to create weaponry, and it boggles the mind to have to even say this,” as it widely acknowledged that the group’s key source of rearmament is Israel’s own unexploded bombs in Gaza.
The UN-INGO memo similarly said that “there is no evidence of large-scale aid diversion.” It added that the best way to reduce looting is to increase the aid reaching Gaza in order to reduce needs and stabilize prices. This is an intuitive point: currently, Gazans have largely run out of wheat flour, which has driven the price of a single 25-50 kg (110 Ib) bag up to 1,500-2500 NIS ($420-$700), thus incentivizing looting out of desperation or due to the high value of food items. But, according to the memo, when aid flows were increased to Gaza during the ceasefire, prices returned to normal, and it no longer paid off to loot.
Providing food to half of Gaza while leaving the rest to starve to death is a surefire recipe to boost looting, engineer societal collapse, and deepen social fragmentation.
Masking Continued Starvation
Under the new aid plan, Israel would allow only 60 trucks per day into Gaza to GHF’s militarized hubs, according to the UN. This represents only 10% of the number of trucks Israel was allowing into Gaza during the ceasefire. UNRWA’s Alrifai said Gaza’s minimum need before the war was 500 trucks per day. After prolonged closures and restrictions during the past 19 months, as well as the systematic destruction of Gazan factories and agriculture, 500 trucks per day would even fall short of what’s needed. Before Oct. 7, Israel used to sometimes allow into Gaza over 850 trucks per day.
This means Israel would be using this new mechanism to pretend that it’s no longer preventing aid from entering Gaza, while at the same time reducing that aid to a fraction of what’s needed for basic survival.
Furthermore, the aid allowed solely to GHF’s hubs would lead to the loss of essential and life-saving services, per the UN-INGO memo. For instance, the Israel-US plan also lacks any strategy for providing clean water or addressing the collapse of sanitation services, which has contributed to the outbreak of diseases. It also doesn’t entail the entry of crucial equipment and fuel to revive Gaza’s collapsed health sector or any equipment for temporary housing, rubble removal, reconstruction, or education.
The memo warns that meager rations of food alone would be insufficient for the population’s survival because prolonged starvation and malnutrition cannot only be treated with food; they also require medical attention for recovery.
Dystopian Mechanism
The US-Israeli aid plan is “logistically unworkable,” as Alrifai put it. It presumes that a Palestinian in the northern areas of Jabalia or Beit Hanoun would walk 41km (about 25.5 miles) on foot to Rafah once a week through destroyed streets, mountains of rubble, and Israeli checkpoints, under constant bombing, and in the scorching heat to pick up a heavy package of 50 meals, and then walk back home with it for another 41 km.
“Vulnerable people; the elderly, the young, the children, the disabled, all of these people cannot go, they cannot move around in Gaza to go and get food,” Alrifai said.
The UN already has the largest aid infrastructure in Gaza and a wide network of local staff with the ability to reach people in need, while this new plan “completely forgoes and ignores the UN,” Alrifai added.
The Trump-backed GHF plan is not a humanitarian solution – it is a dystopian mechanism of control masquerading as aid. By institutionalizing starvation, surveillance, and displacement under the guise of relief, it seeks to replace compassion with coercion and dignity with domination. Rather than easing suffering, it entrenches it – militarizing food, fragmenting society, and formalizing apartheid through biometric gates and securitized “aid” compounds. As global institutions recoil in alarm, the world must recognize this plan not as a benevolent act of rescue but as a blueprint for engineered collapse and enforced erasure. To endorse or fund such a scheme is not to deliver relief – it is to be complicit in a crime against humanity and genocide.
Muhammad Shehada is a Palestinian writer and political analyst from Gaza.
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