GENEVA, June 27, 2025 (WAFA) - Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières – MSF) has condemned the Israeli-US food distribution scheme in Gaza, launched one month ago, calling it “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.” MSF said the plan degrades Palestinians by design, forcing them to choose between starvation or risking their lives for minimal supplies.
“With over 500 people killed and nearly 4,000 wounded while seeking food, this scheme is slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid and must be immediately dismantled,” MSF said in a press release.
The organization urged Israeli authorities and their allies to lift the siege on food, fuel, medical, and humanitarian supplies and to reinstate the pre-existing, principled humanitarian system coordinated by the United Nations.
“This disaster has been orchestrated by the Israeli-US proxy operating under the name Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The way supplies are distributed forces thousands of Palestinians, who have been starved by an over 100-day-long Israeli siege, to walk long distances to reach the four distribution sites and fight for scraps of food supplies,” the release stated.
MSF stressed the system’s discriminatory and dangerous nature: “These sites hinder women, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities from accessing aid, and people are killed and wounded in the chaotic process. Yet each renewed atrocity now happens with barely a shrug, let alone condemnation, from an international community seemingly resigned to its role in allowing and perpetuating a campaign consistent with patterns of genocide. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza, Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, described the distribution system as structurally violent and designed to inflict harm: “The four distribution sites, all located in areas under the full control of Israeli forces after people had been forcibly displaced from there, are the size of football fields surrounded by watch points, mounds of earth and barbed wire. The fenced entrance gives only one access point in or out.”
“GHF workers drop the pallets and the boxes of food and open the fences, allowing thousands in all at once to fight down to the last grain of rice.”
“If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot. If they arrive on time, but there is an overflow and they jump over the mounds and the wires, they get shot. If they arrive late, they shouldn't be there because it is an ‘evacuated zone’ — they get shot.”
MSF said that every day, its teams treat patients who have been wounded or killed while trying to access food.
“A lot of people were getting directly shot at. This is not aid – it’s a death trap,” said Hani Abu Soud, a community member at Al-Mawasi healthcare centre. “They were going to kill us one by one. We were hungry; we were just trying to feed our children. What else can I do? A bag of lentils costs around 30–40 shekels [€6–€10].”
“We do not have that kind of money. Death has become cheaper than survival,” he added.
As the distributions have continued, MSF medical teams reported a sharp rise in the number of patients with gunshot wounds. In its Deir Al-Balah field hospital, gunshot injuries increased by 190% in the week of 8 June compared to the previous week.
MSF emphasized that Gaza’s hospitals are barely functioning. They are operating with minimal supplies of pain relief, anaesthetics, and blood. The few remaining functioning hospitals cannot manage the high volume of trauma patients arriving daily.
Injured patients increasingly seek treatment at basic healthcare clinics or field hospitals, as larger trauma-equipped hospitals have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks.
“The MSF clinic in Al-Mawasi, which is not typically equipped to treat trauma patients, has received 423 people wounded from the distribution sites since 7 June. Ten or more patients with violent injuries arrive each day,” MSF said.
“These injuries require immediate lifesaving treatment, like blood transfusions or surgery, that our medical teams cannot provide in a basic healthcare clinic. Patients are referred to the few remaining hospitals still functioning, like Nasser Hospital, but with healthcare so scarce, MSF has received reports of people wounded at aid distribution sites dying from their injuries before they can receive treatment.”
In a firsthand account shared by MSF, the story of a teenager injured while trying to obtain food for his family underscores the dangers: With no food in the tent he shared with his family, seventeen-year-old Ashraf went to a distribution site on 23 June. “I told him it was too dangerous. He said he wanted to get something for his sister,” says Hanan, Ashraf’s mother. “Thirty minutes later, he called me, crying for help. He had been shot. This ‘aid’ is soaked in blood.”
Ashraf was being treated at Al-Mawasi basic healthcare clinic.
MSF reiterated that aid must not be militarized: “Aid must not be controlled by a warring party to further its military objectives. The Israeli authorities have used a deliberate tactic of food deprivation against Palestinians in Gaza. They have weaponized the food supply by denying it to people, then by limiting it to a trickle, in a complete violation of international humanitarian law.”
MSF concluded: “Humanitarian principles exist to enable the facilitation of aid to those who need it most, with dignity. Aid must be delivered at scale, consistent with these principles. The people of Gaza are in vital and immediate need of the re-establishment of a genuine aid system and a sustained ceasefire, for their very survival.”
T.R.
