The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has sharply condemned the Israeli regime’s so-called aid distribution mechanism for the Gaza Strip, warning that it rather endangered civilian lives and undermined international humanitarian mechanisms and principles.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the movement described recent scenes of desperate Palestinians surging toward designated distribution points in Gaza as irrefutable evidence of the mechanism’s failure and its true intent.
“The plan has become a trap,” the statement read, “designed not to deliver aid but to impose security control over the Gaza Strip under the guise of humanitarian assistance.”
’Hungry Gazans targeted with live bullets’
Hamas said that the so-called aid centers, established under the “suspicious mechanism,” had been used to draw in starving civilians, only for some to come under live fire.
The movement denounced the Israeli regime for engineering a system of humiliation and coercion, referring to the distribution points set up in so-called “buffer zones” as nothing more than militarized corridors “booby-trapped” to degrade human dignity.
“This plan deliberately sidelines the role of the United Nations and its agencies,” Hamas said, regretting that it aimed to entrench the regime’s political and military objectives by controlling the population through food rather than serving their humanitarian needs.
The practice, the group lamented, amounted to blatant violation of the international humanitarian law.
The group also stressed that continued restrictions on aid entry through official crossings contradicted the norms of international legitimacy and called on the global community to intervene immediately.
“We urge the international community, the United Nations, and Arab and Islamic states to act swiftly to stop this dangerous plan,” Hamas said, demanding the opening of Gaza’s official border crossings for aid to enter through UN-affiliated humanitarian organizations.
Aid chaos in Rafah: Starvation, siege, and gunfire
A day earlier, video footage had emerged showing thousands of Palestinians rushing toward the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)” distribution center in Rafah in the south of the coastal sliver, driven by months of starvation and siege.
The Gaza Media Office blamed the incident on the Israeli regime’s policy of “weaponizing starvation,” and said the footage served as a damning indictment of the regime’s strategy of “siege, bombing, and deprivation.”
The GHF, a US- and Israeli-backed organization based in Geneva, was established as an alternative to traditional UN aid mechanisms, but has drawn strong opposition from major international relief agencies.
Many aid groups have refused to cooperate with the foundation, considering it to be in violation of humanitarian principles and condemning it for using aid as a tool of political control.
According to eyewitness Ahmed Abu Taha, chaos broke out at the Rafah center when crowds stormed the compound. “We heard gunfire. Israeli drones were flying overhead. It was chaos… people were panicked,” he said.
Several Palestinians were injured as a result of the live fire in, what the media office described as, the collapse of the so-called humanitarian track the regime claims to uphold.
The developments came as the regime has tightened its years-long siege of Gaza into a near-total blockade throughout the past several months, escalating the already dire circumstances in the Palestinian territory to insufferable proportions.