LAST Wednesday, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated the Zionist regime’s intention to completely occupy Gaza and announced that a new US-backed aid distribution scheme would be put into force to replace all United Nations humanitarian relief for the 2.2 million Palestinians being deliberately starved in the Gaza Strip.
This new scheme, run by an entity called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), will be directed from a base in Geneva and would manage the delivery of aid to pre-screened Palestinians at a number of distribution centres in the south of Gaza.
These ‘distribution centres’ would be run by private United States companies and Israeli occupation forces – private companies seeking to profit from starvation – there is no war crime too atrocious that capitalism will not turn into a profit opportunity.
According to the New York Times newspaper, the GHF claims to have been in Geneva since February and had emerged ‘from private meetings of like-minded officials, military officers and business people with close ties to the Israeli government.’
Under this plan, individual Gaza families would be forced to travel to get boxed meals every week from distribution centres run and policed by private US security contractors and the Israeli military.
According to a report in the Financial Times newspaper, ‘Hundreds of foreign contractors have arrived in Israel over the past week ahead of their planned deployment’ in these centres.
Announcing this plan in a televised speech, Netanyahu proclaimed he would create a ‘sterile zone’ in southern Gaza ‘free from Hamas’ where ‘the people of Gaza will receive the full range of humanitarian aid.’
This latest plan – hatched by the Israelis and the US to provide a smokescreen for the continued policy of using starvation as a weapon to force displacement into a tiny enclave in the south of Gaza – was immediately condemned by all the United Nations relief agencies.
The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, told the Middle East Eye that before the current siege imposed on food and aid by the Israelis, aid groups were able to bring in around 600 trucks per day – the minimum amount of aid required for Gaza’s population. In the past week only 90 trucks have been allowed to enter Gaza. Lazzarini described this GHF scheme as ‘an instrument of a forced displacement of the population’.
Hundreds of thousands of tons of aid, including food, medicine and medical supplies remain stuck on the crossing into Gaza, as Israel hinders and prevents delivery to Gaza warehouses.
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) emphasised that GHF is a deliberate attempt by Israel to ‘manage starvation’ and use humanitarian aid as a tool to pressure Palestinians and push them from northern and central Gaza, turning these into depopulated zones ruled over by Israeli military forces.
The backlash from the UN and all the international aid organisations over the GHF being nothing more than a tool for the Zionist regime’s efforts to drive Palestinians to a tiny enclave in the south of Gaza led to the abrupt resignation of GHF’s chief Jake Wood on Sunday.
Wood announced his resignation citing his concerns over GHF’s independence. In a statement, he said the organisation could not adhere ‘to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence, which I will not abandon.’
Wood may have resigned but the US and its Zionist ally are determined to carry on bringing in foreign mercenaries to bolster Israeli forces that are clearly unable to crush Palestinian resistance through genocidal bombings and deliberate starvation.
The working class internationally must now intervene to put an end to imperialist-backed Israeli genocide by forcing their trade unions to call general strikes throughout the US, UK and Europe to bring down their capitalist governments, replacing them with workers’ governments and socialism.
The only way to put an end to imperialist-backed genocide is for the working class to take power and dump imperialism in the dustbin of history where it belongs with the victory of the world socialist revolution.