A controversial new aid organisation supported by the US government and Israel, expected to deliver much needed humanitarian aid to Gaza, is faltering before it can begin work.On Monday the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation CEO Jake Wood, a US military veteran, announced his resignation after serving only weeks in the organisation which was publicly launched in early May.
“I am proud of the work I oversaw, including developing a pragmatic plan that could feed hungry people, address security concerns about diversion, and complement the work of longstanding NGOs in Gaza,” he said in a statement.
“However, it is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon,” he added.
GHF was born out of Israel’s efforts to weaponise starvation as a tool in its 19-month-old war on Gaza. Existing United Nations and international humanitarian networks that provided much needed aid to the Palestinians have been banned by the Israeli regime under the pretext that their assistance serves Hamas and other resistance groups in Gaza.
Israel has blocked the entry of goods to the enclave since 2 March to pressure Hamas, Israeli officials said. It has since resumed its bombing campaign on the Strip while starving its population of over two million. Meanwhile tonnes of goods and crucial life-saving equipment on Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Jordan were denied entry and left to rot.
It was only after growing international concern and condemnation of this tactic that Israel announced what it called a new and alternative aid delivery mechanism to Gaza.
GHF was established and registered in Geneva, Switzerland by private US contractors with no previous experience in humanitarian aid.
Since then, however, a growing collective rejection by UN, international and independent humanitarian aid groups of GAF’s mandate, mechanism of action and objectives has stigmatised the organisation as more figures initially associated with its plan continue to distance themselves from the project.
Wood urged Israel to “significantly expand the provision of aid into Gaza through all mechanisms” and urged all stakeholders to pursue “innovative new methods for the delivery of aid, without delay, diversion, or discrimination.”
The GHF said in a statement it was “disappointed” by Wood’s resignation, criticising opponents who they said “have been more focused on tearing this apart than on getting aid in.” On Monday it announced the interim executive director would be John Acree, “a senior humanitarian practitioner with more than two decades of global field experience in disaster response, stabilisation programming, and civil-military coordination.”
GHF said it delivered truckloads of food to its secure distribution sites on Monday.
The organization began distributing food Tuesday in the southern Tal Al-Sultan city west of Rafah.
As thousands poured to the area, chaos ensued as GHF contractors lost control of the crowds and eventually withdrew from the scene without completing the distribution of food, witnesses said. This led to people to attack the distribution center and stole the aid. Air force aircraft then intervened to remove citizens from the area.
According to reports at least one Palestinian who showed up to pick up a small box of food for his family was kidnapped by Israeli intelligence officers at a distribution center in the Muraj Crossing, where he was interrogated about a relative before he was disappeared.
The organisation’s aid distribution scheme is based on a mechanism that relies on armed private contractors providing logistics and security for a handful of aid distribution hubs to be built in southern Gaza. Palestinian civilians would have to travel from across Gaza to four hubs and submit to “identity checks” in order to receive rations. Eventually, according to the plan, Palestinians would live in what critics described as concentration camps, but which GHF rephrased as guarded compounds that would each, house tens of thousands of screened civilians.
After a smear campaign against UNRWA, the only UN agency tasked with providing humanitarian aid and relief to the Palestinians since 1949, the Israeli regime banned the organisation from working in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) in December 2024. The decision was enforced in January this year, depriving over six million Palestinian refugees of much needed aid.
The GHF board includes former senior U.S. military and security officials with no roots in Gaza, no accountability to Palestinian civil society, and a clear record of working in coordination with the Israeli and U.S. Governments,” according to a statement signed by 11 international aid and human rights organisations.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, has warned that GHF Gaza could force mass displacement and amount to “a second Nakba.” In an interview with Middle East Eye this week, Lazzarini said Israeli’s aid plan is designed to dismantle the existing and functioning UN system.
The new plan concentrates food pickup at just four distribution sites, down from 400 under the UN. Lazzarini warned this would be “forcing the people to move from where they are and, in fact, to regroup around this distribution cluster. So it becomes an instrument of a forced displacement of the population.”
It’s a plan that falls short of aligning with or abiding by basic humanitarian principles such as independence, impartiality, but also humanity, he said. Not everybody will be able to go, which means a number of people will be discriminated against when it comes to the assistance.
Lazzarini cast doubt on the plan’s long-term goals. “I do not think that such a model will succeed. But this model seems also to be put in place in order to support more a military objective than a real humanitarian concern.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 29 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: