As international scholars have finally come to officially define Israel’s actions in Gaza over the last 23 months as genocide, we look at how Israel is using starvation to weaponize humanitarian aid in the strategy of further killings. Over the summer of 2025, Unicorn Riot heard firsthand accounts from dozens of witnesses in Gaza who describe Israel’s new aid mechanism as a death trap.
After banning UNWRA from operating in Gaza and all occupied Palestinian territories starting in February 2025, Israel systematically criminalized and dismantled the rest of Gaza’s network of civilian aid that was in place for decades. Around the same time that Israel’s ban on UNWRA’s went into effect, Israel violated a fragile ceasefire with Hamas and then fully stopped allowing the entry of aid into Gaza in March — Israel controls all access points into Gaza.
In late May 2025, the so-called ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (GHF) began distributing limited aid rations at four military-controlled stations in the Gaza Strip. This led to over 1,300 unarmed Palestinian civilians being killed by Israeli forces while trying to obtain aid at sites run by GHF from May 27 to Aug. 31, 2025.
“I consider this the invention of a new mechanism for killing the Palestinian people,” said Ahmed Refaat, who called GHF a “security agency” that’s working with “the Zionist enemy to lure Palestinians into these traps, and then giving the signal” to kill Palestinians.
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