内容摘要：“They stopped them from working. They stopped them from coming to get food. They were not getting results. They were not bringing in the money they wanted. So they saw them as useless,” she said.

“They stopped them from working. They stopped them from coming to get food. They were not getting results. They were not bringing in the money they wanted. So they saw them as useless,” she said.

The problem with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s failed initiative was not only the dehumanising and dangerous way in which it attempted to deliver aid at gunpoint. The aid itself was humiliating in both quality and quantity.What people were given was not enough to survive on, let alone to restore any sense of human dignity. The boxes handed out contained just enough calories to prevent immediate death – a calculated cruelty designed to keep people alive on quarter-full stomachs while their bodies slowly consume themselves. No vegetables for nutrition. No seeds for planting. No tools for rebuilding. Just processed food, engineered to maintain a population in permanent crisis, forever dependent on the mercy of their destroyers.

Photos from the distribution centre – showing desperate human beings visibly worn down by hunger, disease, and relentless war, corralled into metal lanes like livestock, waiting for scraps as they stared down the barrel of a gun – drew comparisons with well-known images of suffering and death from the concentration camps of the last century.The similarity is not accidental. The “aid distribution centres” of Gaza are the concentration camps of our time – designed, like their European predecessors, to process, manage, and contain unwanted populations rather than help them survive.Jake Wood, the foundation’s executive director, resigned days before the collapse of the Tal as-Sultan operation, stating in his resignation letter that he no longer believed the foundation could adhere to “the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence”.

This was, of course, a damning example of bureaucratic understatement.What he meant – though he could not say it outright – was that the entire enterprise was a lie.

An aid initiative to help an occupied and besieged population can never be neutral when it coordinates with the occupying army. It cannot be impartial when it excludes the occupied from decision-making. It cannot be independent when its security depends on the very military that engineered the famine it is trying to address.

Tuesday’s choreographed humiliation was months in the making. Of 91 attempts the UN made to deliver aid to besieged North Gaza between October 6 and November 25, 82 were denied and 9 were impeded. Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, accused Israel of conducting a “starvation campaign” against Palestinians in Gaza as early as September 2024. In a report to the UN General Assembly, he warned that famine and disease were “killing more people than bombs and bullets”, describing the hunger crisis as the most rapid and deliberate in modern history. Between May 19 and 23, only 107 aid trucks entered Gaza after more than three months of blockade. During the temporary ceasefire, 500 to 600 trucks were needed each day to meet basic humanitarian needs. By that measure, over 40,000 trucks would be required to meaningfully address the crisis. At least 300 people, including many children, have already died of starvation.Limited water and electricity

Water is scarce and electricity is almost non-existent in Gaza, making it nearly impossible for people to use the limited supplies they manage to obtain.Reporting live from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum explained that it is “impossible to cook any dry food in Gaza - including lentils, rice, or even pasta - without having water".

"And if you had water, you would also need electricity or a fuel source, which have both been completely cut off entirely from Gaza," he said.The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is a newly established, US- and Israeli-approved organisation that is distributing food to Palestinians in Gaza. The organisation has already been marred with delays and difficulties, with the United Nations saying the group does not have the ability to deal with the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, following Israel’s three-month blockade of supplies into the besieged Strip.