In March 2025, Israel imposed an 11-week total blockade on Gaza — no food, fuel, or medical supplies of any kind — which it described as pressure to force Hamas into a new hostage deal. By August, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) had confirmed famine conditions in Gaza Governorate for the first time it had ever applied that designation anywhere in the Middle East. In between, Israel and the Trump administration stood up an entirely new aid distribution system — and more than 2,600 Palestinians were killed seeking food at it.
This is the documented sequence of what happened, in order, with each claim sourced to the body that made it.
The blockade
Israel's total blockade from early March 2025 lasted 11 weeks. When it eased in late May, Israel did not resume the UN-led distribution system that had operated in Gaza for decades. Instead, it replaced it with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — an organisation registered in the US and Switzerland, backed financially and politically by both the Israeli government and the Trump administration.
The UN and every major established aid organisation declined to work through the GHF, citing concerns about the safety of its distribution model and the risk of using aid as a tool of population control rather than a neutral humanitarian service. Israel had separately accused UNRWA, the long-standing UN Palestinian refugee agency, of employing individuals involved in the October 7 attack — a claim a UN independent review found some limited support for regarding a small number of individuals, while also finding Israel had not substantiated its broader claim that UNRWA was systematically infiltrated by Hamas.
The famine
The IPC is the same standardised methodology used to declare famine in Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen — a technical system, not an advocacy body, with a deliberately high evidentiary bar precisely because a famine declaration is meant to be a last resort. On 22 August 2025, it confirmed famine conditions in Gaza City and the surrounding governorate: 100% of the population facing high levels of acute food insecurity, roughly a third projected to reach catastrophic levels. Oxfam and other agencies traced the famine directly to the blockade combined with strikes that had destroyed bakeries, mills, and food storage, pushing prices up by as much as 1,400%.
Israel's military body governing access to Gaza, COGAT, rejected the findings as based on unreliable, Hamas-affiliated sources. The IPC's technical committee — which includes the FAO, the World Food Programme, and independent food security experts — did not revise its finding in response. By December 2025, following the October ceasefire's improved aid flows, the IPC found famine conditions had eased, though it described the situation as still "highly fragile," with 100,000 people remaining in the most severe, catastrophic category.
The killings at the distribution sites
Between 27 May and 9 October 2025, more than 2,600 Palestinian civilians seeking aid were killed, and thousands more wounded, in shootings at or near GHF sites — by the IDF, US-hired contractors, and armed groups. The UN's human rights office recorded that of the first 1,760 people killed while seeking food, 994 died specifically in the vicinity of GHF distribution points.
In June 2025, Haaretz reported that IDF soldiers described being ordered to fire on unarmed crowds specifically to keep them away from the distribution centres, rather than in response to any identified threat. Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz called the report a "blood libel," without offering an alternative account of the hundreds of deaths documented at these sites. CNN's video and munitions analysis of one mass-casualty incident found evidence consistent with Israeli gunfire. Amnesty International's July 2025 report on the crisis was titled, simply, "Starvation or Gunfire — This Is Not a Humanitarian Response."
The GHF has repeatedly stated that no incident has occurred "at or in the surrounding vicinity" of its sites during operating hours — a denial the UN's own site-specific casualty data directly contradicts. Médecins Sans Frontières documented the aftermath from its own clinics, describing repeated mass-casualty arrivals of patients with gunshot wounds coming directly from GHF site incidents.
What no one has fully verified
No independent international investigation has been permitted to operate freely enough inside Gaza to fully reconcile every competing account of every individual incident — itself a direct consequence of Israel's restriction of independent foreign press access to Gaza throughout the war, documented separately in this project's Israel timeline. That gap in verification cuts against easy certainty in either direction: it means some individual incidents remain genuinely disputed in their particulars, even as the aggregate pattern — recorded independently by the UN's human rights office, Amnesty, and MSF — is not.
Sources
- OHCHR / Amnesty International — Gaza: Starvation or Gunfire, This Is Not a Humanitarian Response
- NPR — Famine Confirmed in Northern Gaza
- CNN — Videos, Expert Analysis and Witnesses Point to Israeli Gunfire in Deadly Gaza Aid Site Shooting
- Doctors Without Borders — US-Backed Aid Distribution Points in Gaza Are Sites of Orchestrated Killing