No nonprofit group is more controversial at the moment than the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Founded in February and operationalized in late May, GHF is an American-led, Israeli-backed solution to the problem of Hamas diverting humanitarian aid. That has generated strong reactions all around, but there’s no better proof that Hamas and the international NGO-media industrial complex consider GHF a threat than the tidal wave of opposition it has faced from those organizations and their political allies.
According to the Wall Street Journal, “Shutting down the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation … was the no. 2 item on Hamas’s list of demands in [July’s] cease-fire negotiations.” Other humanitarian organizations have refused to work with GHF, with over 240 of them, including “Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Amnesty International,” calling to end it. Media outlets worldwide have repeatedly amplified stories about GHF that were subsequently debunked as false.
Twenty-one Democratic senators wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in July, urging him to stop funding GHF and “resume support” for United Nations aid efforts. (All 21 senators were among the 27 Democrats who voted to block weapons for Israel in July.) And 40 members of the Democrats’ Senate caucus wrote Rubio and U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, saying, “The ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ has failed to address the deepening humanitarian crisis and contributed to an unacceptable and mounting civilian death toll around the organization’s sites,” urging aid expansion and tapping “experienced multilateral bodies and NGOs.”
Professor Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, commented, “As GHF has expanded and succeeded, Hamas has attacked their operations, personnel, and the people of Gaza who have gone to them for food. … In parallel, the U.N. and pro-Hamas echo-chamber around the world have led a massive political and media campaign to undermine GHF, with false versions of events.”
Sides have clearly been drawn. So, it’s worth understanding what GHF is, what has actually been happening in Gaza, and why this young organization has so many enemies.
A GHF spokesperson characterized GHF as “an independent organization” whose “mission is simply to feed people.” The American and Israeli governments back its efforts, but GHF is “not part of the U.S. government and not part of the Israeli government.”
When President Donald Trump said “the United States was going to do something about” Hamas stealing aid from Palestinians in Gaza, GHF Executive Chairman Johnnie Moore explained, “GHF is … the doing something about it.” Hamas has hoarded and taxed aid, using it “as a tool for military purposes. … It is our privilege to deliver [free] aid directly to the people that cannot be stolen and diverted en masse by Hamas, and of course, that’s the problem GHF was created to solve. Just one problem.”
GHF has distributed 150 million meals and regularly does so at secure distribution sites. Andrew Fox, research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and retired British Army major, visited a distribution site in Rafah on July 28. Fox’s follow-up report described an organization that’s been learning and adapting. For example, Moore said it has successfully piloted distribution “directly to individual families or small communities through partnerships with local NGOs that are all vetted.” Fox told me that he observed “the GHF held back about 5% of the aid for the women and children” after young men had collected aid. A GHF spokesperson said there are now lanes exclusively reserved for women and children at all GHF distribution sites. And mid-August brought Palestinian families in Gaza the ability to reserve food boxes.
Adaptation is key, as Hamas remains a looming threat. It has targeted people working with GHF. By the end of June, 12 of GHF’s Gazan employees had been murdered, and two American veterans providing security for GHF were injured in a grenade attack on July 5.
Retired British military commander Col. Richard Kemp, who fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Northern Ireland, visited two GHF distribution sites in his personal capacity on two late June days. Kemp described the security setup, including Israel Defense Forces security from a distance and sentry positions closer in.
Fox’s report noted GHF “personnel are predominantly former special forces soldiers from the U.S. … They are armed with firearms and crowd-control equipment, but their rules of engagement prioritize restraint,” leaning decidedly toward “non-lethal methods” of crowd control.
Kemp estimated he “spoke to about 100 Gazans” at GHF’s distribution sites, including “a lot” of Gazan “civilians working for the GHF.” They told Kemp that “most of them … couldn’t go home. They had to stay in the vicinity of the GHF, sleep there, etc., because if they went home, they risk being killed. … When they appear in public, in front of the civilians, they wore face masks to conceal their identity.”
As for aid distribution, Kemp recalled seeing “large amounts of boxes of aid in several rows, separated quite a lot from each other, so people could easily take what they needed.” Palestinians in Gaza gather by “gateways” leading to “entry points … 500 or more meters from the actual aid points. When they let the people in, there was a big rush of thousands of people to come through the gates … a lot of people were running” for first pick of aid. “For the next two hours or so, thousands of Gazans are then there collecting aid. It was fairly chaotic … because the GHF tried to minimize control of the Gazans” to minimize “the chances of conflict.”
Fox agreed it was chaotic, calling his visit “a fairly sensory-overwhelming experience” that included body armor, heat, dust, and noise. Even so, “I didn’t see any violence. I didn’t see any physical altercations.”
Fox also described the crowd: “The people themselves, they weren’t skeletal, they weren’t Africa-level famine, nothing close to that. They were slim. They were clearly hungry, but they absolutely were not in that advanced state of starvation.” Kemp described Palestinians at the sites in Gaza as “very energetic, lively,” and “happy during their visit to the GHF.” He said, “They were very, very grateful to the U.S. … and there were things like ‘I love America! I love Trump!’ being shouted quite a lot, by a lot of people.” Another recurrent message was “how much they fear Hamas, and they hate Hamas, and there were lots of ‘Kill Hamas’ and ‘I hate Hamas,’ and a lot of cheers … [from] people nearby. I was told by several that Hamas hates the GHF and threatened to kill people who went to get aid from the GHF.”
So, have Gazans’ opinions of Hamas changed? “I’m sure there’s a lot of sympathy for Hamas, and there was at the beginning. And a lot of Gazans, probably a majority of Gazans, I would guess, supported Hamas and supported the actions of the 7th of October 2023,” Kemp observed. “Most of the population of Gaza has been indoctrinated by Hamas and also intimidated by Hamas.” However, “there seems to be an increasing resentment among the population of Hamas. They recognize that Hamas brought this on them. They recognize that Hamas’s actions of the 7th of October created the situation they’re in now, and if they hadn’t done it, this wouldn’t be the situation.”
“A lot of” Gazans additionally told Kemp that “they just want to get the hell out of Gaza. They don’t see any future in Gaza,” which looks like “a demolition site.” A Gazan GHF manager told Kemp that he thought “at least 60% to 70% of people that he knew wanted to leave Gaza.”
GHF is “filling an essential need,” Kemp believes. Its operations enable Israel to balance “humanitarian considerations and moral considerations” with withholding aid from Hamas. GHF also addresses a central problem Fox flagged: “The numbers are really clear: There is enough food in Gaza for everyone.” The challenge “has always been distribution.”
Noor Dahri, executive director of the United Kingdom’s Islamic Theology of Counter Terrorism think tank, visited the Kerem Shalom crossing in early July as part of a European imam delegation organized by the European Leadership Network, which promotes strong European-Israeli relations. Dahri recalled the imams “observed trucks carrying humanitarian food supplies overseen by the GHF.” The IDF detailed the truck inspection procedures for the delegation, and the imams inspected “food intended for delivery to the people of Gaza. The items included rice, flour, potatoes, onions, and boxes of mixed food, each labelled with the name ‘GHF.’ The potatoes were cut into two pieces and identified as high-quality potatoes that are less commonly available, even in Israel. We also found high-quality rice that was being prepared for loading onto lorries.”
By contrast, the U.N.’s data show it and allied organizations have not effectively delivered aid to Palestinians in Gaza. Of 5,371 trucks “collected from any of the crossings along Gaza’s perimeter” between May 19 and Aug. 31 this year, 4,619 were “intercepted” inside Gaza “by hungry people or forcefully by armed actors.” Put differently, only about 14% of trucks arrived at their destinations, even as perishable food aid has collected in Gaza, awaiting retrieval. It surely doesn’t help that “at least 12% of all U.N. employees in Gaza are members of Hamas or other terrorist organizations, and many of the workers identified for the Free Beacon as Hamas members drive the aid trucks themselves.”
The U.N.’s opposition to GHF doesn’t surprise Faran Jeffery, the deputy director of ITCT: “Right now, the strongest opposition the GHF is facing is from Hamas and the U.N. So it begs the question, how is Hamas on the same page with the U.N. on this? … The U.N. is more concerned about its [yearslong] partnership with Hamas than it is about Gazans, many of whom do genuinely need aid.”
Moore would still like to cooperate with the U.N. and other humanitarian organizations to maximize the number of Palestinians in Gaza being fed. He told me in mid-July that he’d encountered resistance, though: “The U.N. never boycotted Hamas, but they’ve maintained this sort of profane boycott against GHF,” Moore said. “They just won’t work with us. Every single day, we invite them to work with us,” offering “to deliver the food for them” if necessary. Contrary to “all their lofty words, it seems to me they’d rather people of Gaza starve … than cooperate with us, and I just think that’s only politics.”
Kemp, who participated in U.N. humanitarian aid operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan, observed, “The U.N. [has] … their procedures and protocols … for delivering aid … and this [GHF] doesn’t fit their template. It’s basically taking control away from the U.N., and they don’t like that at all. And they don’t like the dynamic of the aid organization, which is trying to deliver aid to the Gazan population, at the same time as denying control of the aid to Hamas.”
Moore specified in mid-July that he hadn’t managed to schedule a meeting with Tom Fletcher, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. At that time, Moore also expressed frustration with two Americans leading U.N. agencies: Cindy McCain, executive director of the World Food Program, and Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF. Moore said, “They are actively obstructing U.S. policy in the Middle East.” OCHA, WFP, and UNICEF did not respond to requests for comment, but Axios reported that the U.S. government convened a meeting on Aug. 6 between “Moore and representatives of the World Food Program, UNICEF, the International Organization for Migration, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the International Red Cross.” There still appears to be no evidence of GHF-U.N. collaboration.
Even so, “our message to them every day is the same,” Moore said. “Let’s start working together to help these people, and then we will settle our disagreements later on.”
Does that message resonate with the U.N.? Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch, a Geneva-based monitoring organization, told me, “If the U.N. truly respects humanitarian principles, then it should be working with any and all credible groups willing to deliver aid, regardless of politics. By blocking groups like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and by centralizing aid through Hamas-linked actors, U.N. agencies are not only enabling a terrorist organization, they’re abandoning the very civilians they claim to serve.”
GHF Interim Executive Director John Acree shared, ”Surprisingly, the hardest part is not delivering food, though that certainly is a difficult challenge in an active war zone. It has been responding to the lies from Hamas, the mainstream media, and the United Nations. Trying to understand the lack of empathy towards a desperate population is incredibly hard.”
As Acree referenced, defamatory news stories about GHF have been a problem. A GHF spokesperson said, “We’ve had AP, Reuters, and the Washington Post routinely get things wrong.” In one June incident, fatalities were reported, but it “turned out to be a U.N. site. Even MSNBC was forced to make an on-air correction.”
Moore reflected, “With every war, there’s an information component to the war.” However, “the press have participated willfully, and I don’t think blindly,” in spreading false information. “There’s one story,” Moore recalled, that was “a crazy, crazy piece of propaganda, that we had put drugs inside the flour. I mean, this is insane.” Still, “that lie was published by media outlets all over the world, and it was actually quoted in the U.N. Security Council.” Moore said, “It’s one thing if it’s happening in the hands of nonstate actors or terrorist organizations … but when it’s coming from the press?!”
The Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University studied this pattern. NCRI found that “within days of GHF’s first meal deliveries, it became the target of a deliberate narrative assault. … Reports and evidence of violence at aid sites began to surface … that ascribed blame to the Israel Defense Forces or GHF for intentional violence against civilians, war crimes, and complicity in the crime of genocide.” NCRI found “narrative backlash” didn’t follow failure but rather “closely tracked U.S. operational success on the ground.”
The media repeatedly cited the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry as a credible source. “Unverified claims of IDF atrocities were then systematically amplified, often uncritically, by NGOs, U.N. agencies, and mainstream media platforms, many of which have ideological reasons to oppose GHF’s independent success. In effect, U.S. humanitarian leadership was reframed as a war crime … to uproot any challenge” to Hamas’s grip on aid.
Simon Plosker, editorial director at Honest Reporting, observed: “Whether one agrees or not with the way the GHF works inside Gaza, it doesn’t change the fact that the organization is backed by two democratic states — the U.S. and Israel. So why is it that international media are automatically dismissive of GHF statements while choosing to treat allegations and unverifiable casualty figures provided by Hamas — a terrorist organization — as credible? It really does appear as if the media have become an active part of the campaign to delegitimize the work of the GHF instead of simply reporting on it.”
There’s a widespread willingness to believe the worst about an American-led humanitarian organization operating with Israel’s blessing. Author Gerald Posner, who has written about conspiracy theories, reflected, “The GHF is conspiracy central for a lot of the anti-Israel zealots. It feeds on the current revival of old-fashioned antisemitism mixed into an online tsunami of disinformation and deception. U.N. officials are to blame for having fanned the flames of half-truths. … The background is that this narrative is painted across charges that GHF is really just an Israeli government front or some shell company private military operation.”
The global pro-Israel community, by contrast, has sounded largely supportive of GHF. One striking exception is Israeli journalists: Haviv Rettig Gur of the Free Press, along with Nadav Eyal and Amit Segal, two journalists whom Dan Senor regularly interviews on his Call Me Back podcast.
On the July 28 episode of Call Me Back, conservative-leaning Segal called GHF “a half-baked solution” that “collapsed.” Meanwhile, liberal-leaning Eyal elaborated, calling GHF an Israeli mistake. Eyal said Israel disregarded advice about moving aid to the people within a war zone, and instead, GHF’s sites were established outside Gaza’s Hamas-controlled population centers. Eyal said an “indescribable” number of people started moving, even running, toward unfamiliar locations at 4 a.m., in the hopes of being early for 5 a.m. food distribution. This has created unsafe situations for Palestinians in Gaza seeking food, when small groups of Israeli soldiers are startled by sudden crowds. Soldiers have shot to disperse people, and, Eyal said, there have been casualties. Eyal noted that the people most willing and able to do these risky treks are healthy, young men, who he believes are taking GHF aid, which is then sold in Gaza’s markets at inflated prices, thereby subsidizing Hamas.
A GHF spokesperson said, “At this time, there is no system anywhere in Gaza that is capable of screening individuals by political affiliation at the point of delivery. … The real concern we are addressing is not whether individual actors manage to receive food, but whether Hamas is able to systematically control aid flows.”
Fox told me, “There’s no guarantee what happens to the aid once it’s left” GHF’s secure sites. Fox also confirmed, “The IDF is using live fire for crowd control, which is where some of the casualties have come from.” Fox said the number of casualties remains unclear, though it’s expected to be lower than reported, and the IDF is investigating.
Fox explained, “Civilians are having to come through the front line to the rear areas, behind the front line, to collect the aid. That makes sense to GHF security. It means the sites are much harder to attack by Hamas, but it also means that there’s a vulnerability to the IDF there, if people start trying to approach their vehicles or … base locations. And obviously, they’re not hugely numerous in those military positions, and there’s a real danger that they might get overrun by that many thousands of people. So, they’re really, really twitchy, and I kind of get it. By the same token, it points to a really critical flaw in the design of the project that they have to use live fire to keep people on the path they’re supposed to be on, to stop them advancing towards IDF positions. And, of course, Hamas are in the crowd, and they are absolutely 100% trying to make … the IDF open fire.” As proof, Fox recounted, “they’ve taken pot shots from within the crowd at the GHF, I’m told, and also, the fact they’re driving crowds towards IDF locations. It’s just not normal crowd behavior.” Time will tell if the IDF’s access route reorganization, “new fencing and signage along with additional paths,” cited in Fox’s report, will redress these problems.
Meanwhile, Jerusalem Post reporter Michael Starr posted in mid-August about having protected those GHF sites as an IDF reservist. He agreed with Fox about terrorists hiding within crowds. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Starr criticized the IDF for “poor logistics,” which left “soldiers in Schrodinger’s battlefield,” but he also reported seeing “fences, barbed wire, and warning signs … to prevent civilians from entering military zones.” Starr wrote, “Almost all shots being fired in surrounding areas are warning shots at the ground near people attempting to infiltrate closed military zones and get close to the [GHF] site when it’s closed.” Starr described warning shots as “an unreliable and risky tool, because at the end of the day, it’s still live fire,” but added that “in a war zone, alternatives to warning shots are risky.”
Writing in the Free Press, Rettig Gur declared, “This effort [GHF] has now comprehensively failed.” Asked for clarification, Rettig Gur posted, “It didn’t fail on its terms. It delivered 100 million meals. But the strategy of making it the sole distributor in order to bankrupt Hamas failed miserably.”
Is sole distributorship Israel’s strategy? NGO Monitor’s Steinberg replied, “[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, [Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron] Dermer, Ambassador [to the U.S. Yechiel] Leiter and others have repeatedly stated that the aid mechanism led by UNRWA and its NGO partners are used by Hamas and must be replaced. GHF is that replacement.”
Replacement may be the Israeli government’s goal, as “there is zero trust between the U.N. entities and Israel,” Moore said. However, a GHF spokesperson told me, “GHF was never intended to solve this problem alone, nor was it established to replace the U.N. No one organization can solve this problem.”
Perhaps the problem then is differing expectations. Others sounded impressed by what GHF has accomplished. For example, ITCT’s Jeffery commented, “The GHF stepped in rapidly when other agencies could not. GHF has reached tens of millions of meals across Gaza in weeks — something legacy humanitarian groups were unable to do due to access constraints. GHF attempts a bold new model centered on monitoring, accountability, and bypassing alleged corrupt networks, even at significant risk. None of this is an ideal situation, but the GHF is doing what nobody else could do, and people and governments should be supportive of their selfless efforts in this messy situation in Gaza.”
USAID FUNDS FLOW TO TERRORIST-TIED ORGANIZATIONS
Fox was likewise impressed by the caring medical treatment GHF offered and by “how the Americans comported themselves.” He also considers it a notable, related change that “the Al-Qassam Brigades” started “begging for money on Telegram.” Fox urged patience: “I think it’d be ludicrous to say that it’s failed, because it’s only just started,” and “there are things that show GHF is making a difference.”
After nearly two years of war, the only answer for most people may be “hurry up and wait.” As a new organization operating in a war zone, GHF will need some time to revise as necessary and grow. The press and public officials should be more skeptical of Hamas’s claims. And established humanitarian organizations should start proving they actually believe in their mission statements.
Melissa Langsam Braunstein is a columnist for London’s Jewish Chronicle.
