When the Helping Hand Holds a Machine Gun

Jeffrey St. Clair

There’s no precise number for how many Palestinians have been starved to death by Israel’s embargo on food entering Gaza. But there is a number for how many Palestinians have been killed trying to keep from starving to death at food distribution sites, many of them by Israeli gun or mortar fire: 549, with 5 to 10 more Palestinians being killed every day. More than 4,000 have been wounded.

These killings weren’t accidents. They weren’t provoked. They didn’t come about as an attempt to quell riots. The people killed were not collateral damage in attempts to kill Hamas fighters. The shootings were not in retaliation for any violence from the Palestinians. Israeli troops were ordered to fire on Palestinians coming to get scraps of food handed out by the Christian fundamentalists and mercenaries who run the food distribution sites set up by Trump and Netanyahu. Let’s repeat that: Israeli troops were ordered to kill starving, unarmed civilians who were trying to get food for their families.

These killings aren’t news to anyone who has been paying attention to reports coming out of Gaza from Palestinian journalists, eye-witness testimony from survivors of the attacks, and doctors who have treated the wounded and examined the bodies of the dead.

The news is that the Israeli paper Haaretz got Israeli soldiers to describe how their superiors ordered them to fire into crowds of people seeking food at aid distribution sites that Israel itself had designated. These sites have become the latest kill zones for Palestinian civilians. “In the place where I was, between one and five people were killed every day,” an IDF soldier told Haaretz. “They’re fired upon as if they were an attacking force: no crowd-dispersal methods are used, no tear gas — they shoot with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade machine guns, mortars.”

Nearly all of Gaza has been on the brink of famine since the first week of March, when Israel imposed its latest embargo on humanitarian aid entering Gaza. As global pressure mounted against Israel for imposing a mass starvation policy on Palestinians in Gaza, the Netanyahu government turned to a newly created company with the backing of Trump, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, now run by Johnnie Moore, Jr. Moore is an evangelical Christian with close ties to Trump. Moore had hailed Trump’s plan to assume control of Gaza, saying: “The USA will take full responsibility for the future of Gaza, giving everyone hope and a future.”

Atar Riyad, a displaced Palestinian father of five from Beit Hanoun, whose wife is pregnant. Described to Al Jazeera the treacherous experience of trying to get his family food at aid sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation:

The Israeli military forced us into displacement. We ended up in Gaza City on the streets. I have a family. I have children who are all under the age of 15. My wife is pregnant. My financial situation is not easy. A few weeks ago I had to sell some of my belongings. I had a stroller that I used to push the gallons of water on. I had a bicycle too and other things I had to sell to buy flour. We have no food, no water. We don’t have anything. I went to the US aid distribution sites and to the aid trucks. I went there seven or eight times to get food. About 20,000 people gather at the distribution sites along the Netzarim corridor early in the morning, but only 2,000 manage to get any food parcels. Why? Because of the overcrowding. Because of the number of people creating chaos. The food parcels they put in front of us are not enough compared to the number of aid seekers. The American site is a dead end. They told me that there is American aid in Netzarim. I went there. I walked 15 kilometers to look for some flour, rice or lentils. I couldn’t get anything. I went to the Netzarim aid site three or four times. All in vain. We go there only to find death in front of us. There was no food or water. There was only death. People were lying dead in the sand in front of us. I don’t know what to say. This situation is very hard. They told us there is aid in the trucks. Then, we went to the trucks. The trucks move very fast, running over people. The trucks were running on top of people! Today, I am unable to do anything. I used to weigh 90 kilos. Now I weigh only 58 kilos. Things are hard, really hard in Gaza. We are subjected to the worst torture in the world.

These distribution sites, which operate for only one hour each morning, are not a serious attempt to avert the famine in Gaza that Israel engineered and continues to enforce. They are a distraction and a half-hearted one. Worse, they serve as a magnet, drawing thousands of desperate Palestinians together within the scope of Israeli guns and tanks. The humanitarian aid sites, like the humanitarian zones for Palestinian tent camps where so many families have been burned alive as they sleep by Israeli airstrikes, have become, in the words of one Israeli soldier, “killing fields.”

The first GHF aid station opened on May 25 and was immediately met with violence that killed three Palestinians and injured dozens. This set the daily pattern, where the promise of food served as bait to trap and kill unsuspecting Palestinian civilians.

On June 1, 32 Palestinians were killed and more than 250 wounded near the Rafah aid station, in what became known as the “Witkoff Massacre,” after Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff.

On June 3, at least 27 Palestinians were killed and 184 were injured by an Israeli airstrike on the road leading to the Rafah distribution center.

On June 8, 13 Palestinians were killed and 173 wounded when Israeli forces fired on crowds at the Rafah aid site.

On June 9, 14 Palestinians were killed and 207 were injured at another GHF site.

On June 10, 36 Palestinians were killed and 207 were wounded at an aid site near Deir al-Balah.

On June 11, 25 Palestinians were killed at night, as they camped near a GHF distribution site and another 14 were killed during the day as they lined up to receive boxes of food.

On June 12, 26 Palestinians were killed by an Israeli drone strike on a crowd near an aid site.

On June 14, 29 Palestinians seeking aid were killed and more than 380 wounded in separate attacks at aid distribution sites.

On June 16, 23 Palestinians were killed and 200 wounded outside the Rafah aid site.

On June 17, 59 Palestinians were killed and 221 injured when Israeli drones, tanks and troops fired on a crowd at the Khan Yunis aid site.

On June 18, 12 Palestinians were killed and 72 wounded by Israeli gunfire and mortars while they waited for food trucks to arrive at the Deir al-Balah aid site.

On June 19, 12 Palestinians were killed and 60 were wounded at the aid site in the Netzarim Corridor.

On June 20, 23 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 wounded by Israeli drone and tank fire at the aid site in central Gaza.

On June 21, 8 Palestinians were killed and more than a dozen were injured by Israeli gunfire at a GHF aid center.

On June 22, 6 Palestinians were killed and more than 20 were injured by Israeli troops at an aid site in central Gaza.

On June 24, at least 40 Palestinians were killed by Israeli drones and gunfire at the GHF site in southern Rafah.

On June 25, 25 Palestinians were killed and 30 were wounded by Israeli forces at the aid site near the Netzarim checkpoint.

On June 27, 18 Palestinians were killed by an Israeli drone strike as they assembled to get flour from a GHF site outside Deir al-Balah.

Most of the massacres have taken place in the morning, as Palestinians line up in front of the aid sites before the gates open, even though, as one Israeli soldier said, there was “no danger to the forces. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”

“[We’d open fire] early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range”, the soldier said. “Once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire. I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire.”

The rations are meager by any standard, but critically so considering the ever-deepening crisis in Gaza, where 2.3 million Palestinians are starving, nearly two-thirds of them women and children. In its first 10 days of operation, GHF reported distributing 8.3 million meals, equivalent to less than four meals per person for every Palestinian in Gaza, or approximately one meal every two and a half days.

Even now, the aid sites are only distributing enough aid to feed each Palestinian in Gaza one meal a week. And most, perhaps even the majority, aren’t getting that. There are only four aid sites, and each is open for only one hour a day. The goal isn’t to feed Palestinians, but to pretend to be doing so. Yet people are so hungry they’re willing to risk their lives to get a small box of food.

From the opening days of the war, the Israeli plan has been to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza. The strategy for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza has been one of maximum brutality on every front, making the choice for Palestinians a cruel one: leave or die.

“A combat brigade has no tools to operate against a civilian population in a combat zone,” another IDF soldier told Haaretz. “Firing mortars to drive away hungry people is neither professional nor humane. I know there are Hamas members among them, but there are also people who simply want to receive aid…Every time we fire like this, there are casualties and deaths, and when you ask why a shell is necessary, there are never any smart answers.”

Both Biden and Trump have endorsed using humanitarian aid as a weapon: Biden with his ridiculous humanitarian pier and Trump with the aid distribution sites, where Palestinians are forced to line up in fenced lanes like cattle at an auction to get a box of pre-packaged rations, resembling the MREs of the Gulf War. That’s if they don’t get shot. The aid sites serve, in the words of the UN’s Tom Fletcher, as “a fig leaf for further violence and displacement.”

The GHF operation is projected to cost $550 million. Yet, so far, the US has contributed only $30 million. Where’s the rest of the money coming from? Yair Lapid, the Israeli opposition leader, said that both GHF and Safe Reach Solutions (the private security company run by former CIA officer Philip Reilly) were actually shell companies constructed to conceal the fact that they were funded and controlled by the Israeli government. In the words of UNICEF’s James Elder, “These are not humanitarians, they are people with guns.”

It’s not just the Israelis slaughtering defenseless Palestinians. By their own admission, American security contractors hired by GHF are engaging in the same murderous attacks on people seeking food, firing on them as if in sport, under rules of engagement that give them an “open license to do whatever they want.” Two contractors told Associated Press reporters Julia Frankel and Sam Mednick this week that US mercenaries routinely toss stun grenades and pepper spray bomblets into lines of Palestinians, some of them holding their children, and fire rounds of live ammunition “in all directions, into the air, into the ground, and at times toward the Palestinians.”

One of the contractors said that most of his heavily armed fellow contractors have little to no experience in these kinds of operations and view all Palestinians with suspicion. A video shot by one of the contractors records a conversation on how to disperse the crowd of Palestinians after the aid site had run out of food parcels. A contractor says that he’d called on the Israelis to have one of their tanks make “a show of force.” Then there’s the sound of around 15 gunshots being rapidly fired off.

“Whoo! Whoo!” A contractor exclaims.

Another one congratulates him: “I think you hit one.”

“Hell, yeah, boy!”

“This has become routine,” a soldier said. “You know it’s wrong. You feel that it’s wrong, that the commanders here are taking the law into their own hands. But Gaza is a parallel universe — you move on quickly. The truth is, most people don’t even stop to think about it.”

The aid site massacres are acts of state terrorism. By instilling the fear that even the helping hands are holding machines that might strafe you down at any moment, Israel is attempting to make Palestinians lose all hope that they can hold out long enough for the world to finally turn against Israel and force it out of Gaza. Even as the bodies pile up at a rate of 10 or 12 a day, these tactical acts of butchery are doomed to fail. Gaza is Palestinian land and here they will stay, against all odds.

[Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.]

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Seneca was Wrong

Cesar Chelala

A recent report by Haaretz, one of the most prestigious Israeli newspapers, on IDF soldiers’ actions against Palestinians civilians looking for food, represents a damning accusation of the soldiers’ behavior. Predictably, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz rejected those claims and called them ‘blood libels’

According to the report, based on interviews with IDF officers and soldiers, the commanders ordered Israeli troops to shoot at crowds at food distribution centers to drive then away or disperse them, even though they posed no threat to the soldiers.

The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza reports that 549 people have been killed near food distribution centers while waiting for UN food trucks since May 27. In addition, over 4,000 people have been wounded, although the exact number of those killed or injured by IDF fire remains unclear.

Haaretz informs that the Military Advocate General has instructed the IDF General Staff’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism – a body which reviews incidents involving potential violations of the laws of war—to investigate suspected war crimes at these sites. Previous investigations of that nature didn’t produce any practical results.

According to one IDF soldier, “It is a killing field. Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force –no crowd-control measures, no tear gas—just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

An officer at a distribution center called the IDF’s approach ‘deeply flawed’. “Working with a civilian population when your only means of interaction is opening fire –that’s highly problematic, to say the least,” he told Haaretz. “It’s neither ethically nor morally acceptable for people to have to reach a humanitarian zone under tank fire, snipers and mortar shells.” Another officer said, “The fact that live fire is directed at a civilian population –whether with artillery, tanks, snipers, or drones—goes against everything the army is supposed to stand for.”

The easy way out –and an incorrect one—has been to call antisemites all those that criticize the IDF soldiers’ actions against the Palestinians. To do so, however, is to deny a tragic reality that is being increasingly denounced by Jews and non-Jews alike, as well as by an increasing number of governments worldwide.

A testimony from Reform Jews for Justice states, “My Judaism teaches me pikuach nefesh, that every life is sacred and must be saved. When we destroy a single life, we destroy the whole world, and when we save a single life, we save the whole world. I cannot stand idly by and watch as my own people ruthlessly take away the lives of innocent children and families in Gaza that have truly nowhere to run or hide. Even worse, these murders are done in the name of Judaism, in the name of protecting the Jewish people, but it is not the Judaism that I practice and love. I pray for the safe return of the hostages and mourn the tragic loss of Israeli lives, but I know that killing innocent Palestinian families will not bring back our loved ones and will not subside our grief. The Jewish people must do better.”

Stephen Kapos, writing in Double Down News, says, “The way the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they are doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust. It is an outrage…What distinguishes the Jewish Holocaust is its industrial scale and industrial methods being applied. And what has been happening in Gaza is similar in that the scale of the bombing and the indiscriminate nature of the bombing, the complete lack of care about children and women being the majority of the victims, amounts to an industrial scale of genocide. The painting of the Palestinian people as worthless, almost animal like, by the description of some of the leaders, that dehumanization, enables the population of Israel to tolerate what’s going on. The way the Palestinian people who were arrested were treated having to take their clothes off and parading them, it’s part of the humiliation.”

The IDF soldiers’ massacring innocent Palestinians, including women and children, proves Seneca wrong. When the Roman philosopher and poet said, “Wherever there is a human being there is a chance for kindness,” he couldn’t have foreseen that indiscriminately killing unarmed civilians desperately looking for food makes of the soldiers who carry out illegal and inhumane orders war criminals.

[Dr. Cesar Chelala is a co-winner of the 1979 Overseas Press Club of America award for the article “Missing or Disappeared in Argentina: The Desperate Search for Thousands of Abducted Victims.” Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.]