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WHEN THE HELPING HAND HOLDS A MACHINE GUN  
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Jeffrey St. Clair
June 28, 2025
CounterPunch
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_ Israeli troops were ordered to kill starving, unarmed civilians who
were trying to get food for their families. _

Starving Palestinians gather in the early morning hours at an aid
distribution site along the Netzarim Corridor in Gaza., Still from a
video posted on X

 

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
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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.”

“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
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Alexander Cockburn). _He can be reached at: [email protected] or on
Twitter @JeffreyStClair3 [[link removed]]. 

* Gaza
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* Humanitarian Aid
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* Genocide
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