What happened
The GHF was set up as an explicit alternative to the UN's established aid infrastructure, which had operated in Gaza for decades through UNRWA. Israel had accused UNRWA of employees participating in the October 7 attack — a claim a UN independent review found some support for regarding a small number of individuals, while also finding Israel had not provided evidence for its broader claim that UNRWA was systematically infiltrated by Hamas. Rather than working to reform the existing system, Israel and the US stood up an entirely new one, concentrating aid distribution at a handful of militarised sites rather than the dispersed network UNRWA had used, and the UN and major aid organisations refused to participate, citing both the site design and the risk of using aid distribution as a tool of population control.
What followed was, by multiple independent accounts, a sustained pattern of lethal violence against people seeking food. Haaretz reported in June 2025 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 specific threat — a report Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz publicly denounced as a 'blood libel,' without offering an alternative account of the hundreds of documented deaths at these sites. CNN's video and munitions analysis of specific incidents found evidence consistent with Israeli gunfire in at least one mass-casualty shooting. Amnesty International's July 2025 report, titled 'Starvation or Gunfire,' concluded that the choice facing Gaza's population at these sites was effectively between the two.
The GHF itself has repeatedly stated that no incident has occurred 'at or in the surrounding vicinity' of its sites during its operating hours — a denial that OHCHR's site-specific casualty mapping directly contradicts. Médecins Sans Frontières documented the aftermath at its own clinics, describing repeated mass-casualty influxes of patients with gunshot wounds arriving directly from GHF site incidents. No independent, on-the-ground international investigation has been permitted to operate freely enough in Gaza to fully reconcile the competing accounts — itself a direct consequence of the press-access restrictions documented elsewhere in this file.