Doctors Without Borders slams GHF food sites in Gaza as ‘orchestrated killing’
Six journalists including Anas among many killed in heavy Israeli bombing
Monitoring Desk
GAZA: “This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing,” a new report from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), documents the horrors witnessed by MSF staff at two clinics in Gaza that regularly received mass influxes of casualties following violence at sites run by the GHF, an Israeli-US proxy that has militarized food distribution.
An analysis of MSF medical data, patient testimonies, and firsthand medical witnessing at the two clinics point to both targeted and indiscriminate violence by Israeli forces and private American contractors against starved Palestinians at food distribution sites run by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). These are sites of orchestrated killing and dehumanization.
Between June 7 and July 24, 1,380 casualties, including 28 dead, were received at MSF’s Al-Mawasi and Al-Attar clinics in southern Gaza, near GHF-run distribution sites. During those seven weeks, MSF teams treated 71 children for gunshot wounds, 25 of whom were under the age of 15. Faced with no alternatives to find food, starved families frequently send teenage boys into this lethal environment as they are often the only males in the household physically able to make the journey. Patients have included a 12-year-old boy hit by a bullet that had passed all the way through his abdomen, and five young girls, one of whom was only 8 years old and suffered a gunshot wound to her chest.
“In MSF’s nearly 54 years of operation, rarely have we seen such levels of systematic violence against unarmed civilians,” said Raquel Ayora, MSF general director. “The GHF distribution sites masquerading as ‘aid’ have morphed into a laboratory of cruelty—children shot in the chest while reaching for food, people crushed or suffocated in stampedes, and entire crowds gunned down at distribution points. This must stop now.”
An initial analysis of the gunshot wounds among patients arriving at the Al-Mawasi clinic found that 11 percent of the gunshot injuries were to the head and neck, while 19 percent were to areas covering the chest, abdomen, and back.
“We’re being slaughtered,” said Mohammed Riad Tabasi, a patient who was treated at MSF’s Al-Mawasi clinic. “I’ve been injured maybe 10 times. I saw it with my own eyes, about 20 corpses around me. All of them shot in the head, in the stomach.”
The GHF began operating in May after Israeli authorities sought to dismantle the UN-led humanitarian response and replace it with a militarized food distribution scheme. All four GHF-run distribution sites are in areas under full Israeli military control and are “secured” by private American armed contractors. Instead of ending the siege and letting in aid trucks that are sitting on the other side of the borders, the Israeli and US governments’ “innovative solution” of the GHF was supposed to be an answer to their unproven claims of aid diversion in Gaza and unfounded accusations of UN failure. However, the GHF is nothing but a deadly scheme, institutionalizing the Israeli policy of using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. Israel has imposed a full siege on Gaza since March 2 as part of an ongoing genocidal campaign.
Meanwhile, Palestinians reported the heaviest bombardments in weeks on Monday in areas east of Gaza City, just hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he expected to complete a new expanded offensive against Hamas “fairly quickly”.
An airstrike also killed six journalists including prominent Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif in a tent at Gaza City’s Al Shifa Hospital compound, the deadliest strike against journalists during an Israeli campaign that has lasted more than 22 months.
Witnesses said Israeli tanks and planes pounded Sabra, Zeitoun, and Shejaia, three eastern suburbs of Gaza City in the north of the territory, on Monday, pushing many families westwards from their homes.
Some Gaza City residents said it was one of the worst nights in weeks, raising fears of military preparations for a deeper offensive into their city, which Hamas says is now sheltering about 1 million people after the displacement of residents from the enclave’s northern edges.
