
Palestinians fill containers with water at a collection point in a camp for displaced people in the Nuseirat refugee camp, located in the central Gaza Strip. AFP
"The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) today announced the successful completion of its emergency mission in Gaza after delivering more than 187 million free meals directly to civilians living in Gaza," the group said in a statement.
GHF was tasked with managing aid distribution points in the Gaza Strip in May, effectively supplanting the UN after Israel placed tight restrictions on United Nations and international aid agencies.
Those agencies were highly critical of the GHF, which managed four distribution centres in the Gaza Strip, while the UN system it replaced had 400.
In August, a UN-mandated expert panel concluded that under the GHF, aid was "exploited for covert military and geopolitical agendas" and United Nations special rapporteurs called for it to be disbanded.
Hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire while seeking aid from GHF distribution sites, according to the UN human rights office.
The foundation said in its statement on Monday that it had been in talks with other international humanitarian organisations and with the so-called Civil-Military Coordination Centre, a task force set up by the US and its allies in southern Israel to monitor the truce in Gaza.
"It's clear they will be adopting and expanding the model GHF piloted," the group's executive director, John Acree, said, according to the statement reported by AFP.
In reaction to the announcement of GHF's closure, a spokesman for Hamas said the organization should be held accountable for the harm it caused to Palestinians.
"We call upon all international human rights organisations to ensure that it does not escape accountability after causing the death and injury of thousands of Gazans and covering up the starvation policy practised by the (Israeli) government," Hazem Qassem wrote on his Telegram channel.
In May, the head of the GHF, US military veteran Jake Wood, resigned after weeks of controversy, citing concerns over impartiality.
Later in July, a retired US special forces officer and former GHF security contractor, Anthony Aguilar, also resigned and spoke to the BBC, PBS, and Al Jazeera about the Israeli army's brutality.
He said that in his entire career he has never witnessed such a level of "brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population".
He recounted the death of a young boy, nicknamed "Amir," who was shot and killed by the Israeli army shortly after receiving a small amount of aid. Other contractors reported colleagues firing machine guns at crowds and referring to Gazans as the "zombie horde".
Palestinian witnesses and medical data analyzed by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) corroborate these accounts, pointing to "targeted and indiscriminate violence" by Israeli forces and private contractors against starved Palestinians seeking food.
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