Earlier this year, as northern Gaza hurtled towards famine under Israeli bombardment and siege, UN agencies undertook an emergency effort to try to deliver food aid safely to hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of starvation.
To secure deliveries, the agencies – including the World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN’s aid coordination body, OCHA – turned to the local Palestinian community, which formed emergency committees composed of members of prominent families and tribes, and other volunteers.
For a few days in mid-March, the system worked. UN convoys brought significant amounts of food aid into parts of northern Gaza that had been cut off since near the start of the war, without the looting or Israeli attacks and interference that had been impeding humanitarian relief efforts for months.
But then – less than 48 hours after the first successful delivery – an Israeli airstrike on 18 March hit a warehouse used to store aid for the initiative, killing two people working there. Over the next two weeks, in what appears to be a series of targeted strikes on individuals and key distribution points, the Israeli military went on to kill more than 100 Palestinians – those involved in the effort and, in many cases, family members and civilians who just happened to be nearby.
These repeated attacks forced the committees to back out, effectively crippling the plan, which came during a critical period in northern Gaza when children were dying of malnutrition and dehydration on an almost daily basis.
“Our committees were subjected to direct Israeli bombing, despite the UN informing us that they were in constant contact with Israel and that they were providing them with the coordinates of our presence and the details of our role,” said Yahya al-Kafarna, 60, a leader of a prominent family in northern Gaza. “The committees were targeted anyway, and a number of us were killed.”
The New Humanitarian spent seven months piecing together how UN agencies developed this aid plan with communities in northern Gaza – and how Israel destroyed it – combing through visual evidence and open-source information, and conducting dozens of interviews with the aid officials and Palestinians involved. We recorded the number of people killed – a conservative estimate – using updates from OCHA, ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), and media reports.
The investigation’s findings show how the Israeli military violently disrupted and impeded humanitarian efforts intended to prevent the starvation of civilians, leading directly to the state of anarchy that continues to engulf northern Gaza today.
Adil Haque, an international law professor at Rutgers University in the US – one of several experts The New Humanitarian shared the investigation with prior to publication – said it describes “a pattern of apparent war crimes” that is consistent with the allegations Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence secretary Yoav Gallant now face at the International Criminal Court (ICC), for which arrest warrants were issued on 21 November.
“All of those charges are ultimately about the restrictions on humanitarian aid,” Haque said.
The findings of the investigation are also relevant to the case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s top court, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
The ICJ ordered Israel in January to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” to Palestinians in Gaza.
“What you’ve presented is not only a failure to take affirmative steps, but actually further acts that have accelerated and entrenched a situation and made it difficult or impossible to get out of it,” said Haque.
Replying to detailed questions about the findings of this investigation, a spokesperson for the Israeli military, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), wrote: “In response to Hamas’ barbaric attacks, the IDF is operating to dismantle Hamas military capabilities. In stark contrast to Hamas’ intentional attacks on Israeli men, women, and children, the IDF follows international law and takes feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.”
But ultimately, how the UN-committee plan to secure aid deliveries collapsed under a barrage of attacks is a microcosm of Israel’s much broader obstruction and politicisation of humanitarian aid in the enclave and goes a long way towards explaining why relief efforts have never been able to get off the ground.
“Politicising aid is not new, but planning to use aid in the way the Israelis used it in Gaza, and eventually eliminating people – killing them – for organising a successful operation of receiving and distributing aid is something new,” said former UN official Ali Al-Za’tari, who also examined the findings prior to publication.
“This is unheard of,” repeated Al-Za’tari, who served as UN humanitarian coordinator in Syria between 2016 and 2018 and in other top UN aid roles in Libya, Sudan, and elsewhere during a four-decade career. “I mean, I have not seen anything like this.”
Today, the international effort to establish a safe, orderly, and effective response to the man-made humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is still limited by Israeli-imposed restrictions, insecurity, and the collapse of public order – a situation that the killing of aid committee members in March helped to cement.
In its place, a war economy based on price gouging, profiteering, and might-makes-right has taken root, culminating in recent events that have seen gangs, allegedly supported by the Israeli military, taking over aid routes and looting at will.
On the edge of starvation
It was near midnight on 16 March, and Bilal*, a 34-year-old resident of Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, was waiting for a small convoy of trucks carrying flour to arrive. If they made it – which was far from guaranteed – it would be the first time humanitarian assistance reached the camp in four months.
Israeli bombing, ground operations, and evacuation orders had forced most residents to flee, reducing Jabalia to piles of rubble, torn-up roads, and gutted buildings. By the end of January, only about 100,000 people remained in the camp, beyond desperate from hunger.
“The children cried around the clock, without stopping,” Bilal said. He recalled seeing parents feeding their children coarse grain intended for animals; others walked around the ruins of the camp for days looking for scraps. Some stayed out all night, afraid to return to their tents and face their children empty-handed. Bilal’s own family was no exception. He said his mother, who is diabetic, nearly died of starvation.
“One night, a girl who had not yet turned seven years old knocked on my door and asked me if I had even one piece of bread or a single tomato that could satisfy her hunger,” he said. Bilal couldn’t just turn her away. He gave her some of his family’s last remaining supplies – a bit of bread and a few vegetables.
But after having endured this worsening situation for months, there was now a sliver of hope. The heads of prominent families and tribes in the area were asking for young men to help secure UN aid convoys.
Israeli forces had been regularly firing on people waiting for aid deliveries in the north. Bilal knew it might be dangerous, but he still volunteered to help. “There are thousands of people living here in the camp who have suffered,” he said. “All of this pushed me to take risks, under any circumstances.”
Thaer*, another resident of Jabalia who joined in the effort, felt a similar obligation. “People here reached the point where their bodies began to collapse and they fell in the streets due to extreme hunger,” he said.
“There was no one to protect the aid that was entering the north,” he added. “It was our duty to… help as much as we could. I am not exaggerating if I say that I was ready to die at that time in exchange for people here being able to live. The famine was killing children, the elderly, and the sick.”
Cut off from the south
The fact that average civilians like Bilal and Thaer were being called upon to try to secure deliveries of international aid showed how desperate the conditions in northern Gaza had become, and the enormous challenges facing humanitarian agencies trying to address them.
Before October 2023, around 1.1 million Palestinians – about half of Gaza’s population – lived in the northern part of the Strip, which includes the main metropolis of Gaza City. By March, after months of bombardment, starvation, and displacement to the south, around 300,000 people were left.
As an immediate response to the deadly 7 October 2023 attacks into Israel by Hamas – the Palestinian political party and militant group that has governed Gaza since 2007 – the Israeli military announced a “complete siege” of the enclave, blocking the entry of food, water, fuel, and other essential supplies. A few days later, Israeli authorities ordered everyone in the north to leave their homes, giving people 24 hours to evacuate south of Wadi Gaza, a wetland area below Gaza City.
In the following weeks, Israeli airstrikes pummelled the north, and ground troops bulldozed a route from east to west, just south of Gaza City. By early November, they had cut the Strip in half, leaving it divided all the way from the Mediterranean Sea to the Israeli border by a narrow zone called the Netzarim Corridor. Two Israeli checkpoints in the road created by the military have controlled access to the north ever since.
Israel did begin allowing extremely limited amounts of aid into Gaza at the end of October 2023, but this was all entering through border crossings in the south: Almost no supplies were reaching the north.
The foremost authority on food insecurity, the IPC, warned in mid-December that Gaza was on the path to famine. It described the situation in the north – due to the additional access constraints – as of “particular concern”. In January, the ICJ issued its order for Israel to take action to facilitate a humanitarian response.
Instead, Israel was denying the vast majority of the UN’s requests to send aid convoys to the north. The few convoys that were approved often came under Israeli fire, and the UN reported that Israeli soldiers were increasingly threatening and intimidating aid workers, including by pointing weapons at them at checkpoints, detaining them for questioning, and holding convoys at the checkpoints to the north for long periods of time for no apparent reason.
“The problem with these checkpoints is that they are not dependable,” Georgios Petropoulos, head of OCHA in Gaza, told The New Humanitarian in March. “There's incidents of violence. There are people getting shot from the checkpoints.”
Juliette Touma, communications director for the UN’s agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), said Israeli delays often caused aid missions to be abandoned: “We had several incidents where we were waiting on that checkpoint with food supplies. People would just come and take stuff from the convoy. By the time the Israelis would give us the green light, we would have nothing on the convoy. So we’d turn back.”
In January, just 10 of the UN’s 61 planned missions to northern Gaza could be carried out because of Israeli denials and obstruction. In February, the number was just six of 24. UN agencies were forced to pause attempts to bring aid to the north towards the end of the month after an Israeli naval vessel shelled a UN food convoy waiting to cross one of the checkpoints, and then the Israeli authorities – who were pushing to end UNRWA’s role in Gaza for political reasons – froze the agency out of the north altogether.
With food supplies picked over and largely gone – and almost nothing getting through the blockade – people in the north were forced to eat grass and animal feed, several told The New Humanitarian at the time. By the end of February, at least 10 children had died of malnutrition and dehydration in northern Gaza, the World Health Organization reported, citing Gaza’s Ministry of Health. A week later, that number had doubled.
Creating a security vacuum
As starvation set in, civil order in the north began to collapse. When a rare convoy did make it across the checkpoints, hungry people trying to secure food for themselves and their families quickly stripped it bare.
“You can’t just expect people to wait in line while there are hundreds of thousands of people starving,” Nebal Farsakh, a spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, told The New Humanitarian in February.
The UN began referring to this as “spontaneous distribution”. Organised looting was also a threat, but it was far less common than it would later become. Despite frequent Israeli assertions that Hamas was stealing and reselling aid, there was little to no evidence to support those claims.
Before the war, the UN had not needed security for aid convoys in Gaza because its agencies, particularly UNRWA – by far the largest aid provider in the enclave – were known and trusted by the population, according to Touma, the UNRWA communications director.
The first place they turned when chaos started to set in was to Gaza’s civil police force, a logical partner for the UN, which routinely works with local governments and de facto authorities to facilitate and protect aid deliveries in war zones and other politically sensitive settings around the world.
“The UN thinks and acts on the premise that it should connect with any and all authorities… to enable humanitarian aid to go in,” said Al-Za’tari, the ex-UN official.
One of the main stated aims of Israel’s war, however, is to dismantle Hamas and end its governance of Gaza. As a result, the Israeli military has adopted a broad definition of who and what it considers to be legitimate targets. This apparently includes civilians working for local government authorities in Gaza – from water engineers to telecommunication workers. That definition flies in the face of international law, according to legal experts who spoke with The New Humanitarian.
When the civil police began providing security for aid convoys, they too came under attack. Following a series of deadly airstrikes in February, the police withdrew and aid convoys were left on their own. Security throughout Gaza deteriorated.
The UN noted that the Israeli army had taken a “firm stance that police are members of the armed opposition”. But the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) saw it differently, writing in a press release: “Members of law enforcement agencies, such as the civil police, are civilians and cannot be targeted on the basis of their status as members of a police force.”
The only way that police could become legitimate targets, OHCHR continued, is by “directly participating in hostilities and only for the duration of such participation.”
Israel’s targeting of the police even drew rare criticism from the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally in the war. The attacks were making it “virtually impossible” for the UN and other humanitarian agencies to move aid around safely, David Satterfield, the US envoy for aid in Gaza, said in February.
Other US officials warned that the attacks were creating a security vacuum that risked pushing the enclave into a state of anarchy and opening the door for armed gangs to gain power. But Israeli officials were unmoved. A colonel working with COGAT, the military body responsible for coordinating with aid organisations, said in March: “Hamas police is Hamas.”
Chaos and violence
Starvation and societal collapse accelerated in parallel. Crowds of desperate Palestinians began gathering at the Kuwait and Nabulsi roundabouts, just north of the Israeli checkpoints in the Netzarim Corridor, hoping for convoys carrying food to arrive.
As they waited or jostled to collect aid, Israeli soldiers would often open fire, setting off stampedes and killing people. In the worst of these incidents – the 29 February “Flour Massacre” – more than 100 people were killed and at least 700 injured as Israeli troops fired on people waiting for aid near the Nabulsi roundabout.
Between the 29 February and 15 March, OHCHR recorded at least 10 attacks targeting people waiting for aid around the Kuwait and Nabulsi roundabouts.
In the report, OHCHR noted that “Israel, as the occupying power, has the duty… to ensure the provision of food and medical care” for Palestinians in Gaza. Echoing the ICJ’s order, it added: “If it is unable to provide these, Israel has the obligation to facilitate humanitarian relief activities, including by ensuring the conditions of safety required for such activities.”
Ahmed Kouta, 24, a Palestinian-Canadian nurse working at that time at al-Shifa Hospital – the main hospital in Gaza City – said gunshot wounds suffered by people waiting for aid at the roundabouts were some of the most common injuries he saw.
When he wasn’t working, hunger drove him to the same roundabouts. He said Israeli soldiers at the nearby checkpoints would often open fire for no apparent reason. “They don't care who's there,” he said, speaking by phone from Canada after managing to leave Gaza in April. “Whatever they feel like doing, they do. Sometimes with the drones, the quadcopters, they just shoot randomly.”
People would stay near the checkpoint after trucks passed through, hoping that more might be on the way. That’s when troops would often open fire, Kouta recalled, adding: “They would shoot at them, or they would throw a grenade at them, and then people would understand, ‘Okay, trucks aren't coming.’”
“Imagine you're running for food, to try and grab a bag of flour, and then all you find is a bullet in your chest,” Kouta said. “That's how desperately people wanted to go and get food and stuff for their families. It's do-or-die.”
A plan takes shape
Towards the end of one of the few aid missions to the north that was approved and actually took place during this time period, a small convoy of UN vehicles picked its way through rubble-strewn streets lined with buildings pancaked or hollowed out by Israeli airstrikes.
As the convoy came to a halt at the Israeli checkpoint, waiting to be allowed back into the south, hundreds of hungry people surrounded the vehicles.
This happened often, but because this particular convoy was coming back from a mission and had no food to offer, aid workers were able to get out and have a real conversation with the people who had gathered. One man who stepped forward identified himself as a representative of a prominent family in the north. As he and Petropoulos talked about the insecurity and chaos surrounding aid deliveries, an idea began to solidify. “We realised we need to just talk straight to the communities," Petropoulos recalled.
Prominent families and tribes in Gaza hold substantial political and social power. Early in the war, many had already organised themselves into committees to provide basic security in their neighbourhoods as Israeli attacks forced police and other government authorities underground. They were one of the few remaining social institutions in Gaza with the authority and manpower to secure aid deliveries.
“These people at the heads of communities, they're trusted by the people,” said Touma, from UNRWA.
By working with them, the UN hoped to deliver the little assistance being allowed in without so much chaos and to make sure it was distributed fairly – to help stabilise the rapid escalation of starvation. From there, if everything went well, the UN agencies hoped they would be able to scale up the response to address a broader spectrum of needs, according to Petropoulos and other UN officials leading the effort.
With no sign on the ground that Israel was interested in facilitating a meaningful humanitarian response, the plan may have been a long shot. But faced with the growing starvation and chaos, the agencies felt they had no other choice.
“We have left no stone unturned to find every possible way for us to deliver assistance to people,” Touma said. “And this was one of them.”
But if this last-ditch plan was to work, the UN would have to navigate a political hornet’s nest.
The political maze of Gaza aid
Earlier in the year, Israeli officials had floated the idea of creating local government structures to replace the Hamas-affiliated authorities in Gaza. Theoretically made up of some of the same families and tribes the UN now wanted to work with, the first step in the initiative was supposed to be for Israel to arm them to secure aid deliveries.
Israel tried to recruit some families into this effort as late as the end of February, a member of one of the families told The New Humanitarian, but representatives publicly rejected the overtures. Hamas also warned that if the tribes and families worked with Israel it would be “a betrayal of the nation that we will not tolerate”.
Rebuffed by the tribes and prominent families, Israel began working with private contractors, attempting to create a parallel aid system under its control that would circumvent the UN and existing powerbrokers in the north. Meanwhile, there were rumours and reports that the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, controlled by Hamas’ rival political faction, Fatah, was also trying to work with prominent families in Gaza to build its own security force in the enclave.
Against this backdrop, the tribes and families were wary of working with the UN because they didn’t want to be seen as trying to muscle in on the Hamas-affiliated government’s authority. But they were also watching with growing concern as Israel’s efforts to remove the government drove Gaza into anarchy, and they worried that families would soon end up fighting for control of resources in a violent free-for-all.
It took some time and political capital to overcome the families' initial wariness, according to Petropoulos, but aid officials managed to organise a series of meetings in February and March in northern Gaza with community leaders.
The meetings took place in family homes, and at least once at al-Shifa Hospital, according to numerous people present.
Israeli authorities were informed that the meetings were taking place as part of the deconfliction process and were aware that the UN was working with communities to secure aid deliveries, according to UN aid workers.
The result of the meetings was the formation of a semi-official entity called the Popular and Tribal Committees for Securing Aid in Gaza Governorate and Northern Gaza.
The committees had to have at least tacit approval from Hamas, or else it would risk looking like the UN and the committees were being co-opted into Israel’s war aims or dangerously putting their fingers on the scales of political power in Gaza.
Referring to the UN-committee plan, Ismail al-Thawabta, director of the government media office in Gaza, said there was a “unified vision at the international and local levels for the United Nations and tribes to participate in delivering aid with general supervision from government agencies in Gaza”.
The Ministry of Social Development, which oversees social protection programmes in Palestine, was also involved in coordinating the effort, relaying messages from the UN to the tribal committees. The ministry has employees in Gaza but is largely directed by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which is not associated with Hamas.
People directly involved in securing the deliveries also said that Hamas was not involved in the on-the-ground implementation of the plan that developed.
“Regarding Hamas' involvement, there are no elements officially affiliated with the government in Gaza among us. But we said, and we say, that we will not be an alternative to the government in Gaza,” said al-Kafarna, the tribal official.
In conversations with The New Humanitarian, eight Palestinians who participated in the effort – including a member of the civil police force – said they and others were acting in an individual capacity, not under the instructions of Hamas-affiliated authorities.
“I was not officially directed by the government, and it was an initiative by me and the youth of my family,” said Thaer, the Jabalia resident, who was also a police officer but hadn’t been working since the war began.
“We broke through”
The plan that took shape went as follows: When a convoy set out, the UN would alert the tribal committees, who would then dispatch people along the route to protect it from being looted and ensure its cargo was delivered safely to warehouses.
“Our mission was only to secure the trucks and ensure their arrival to the warehouses of international organisations in a safe and sound manner,” al-Kafarna said, explaining that the security effort worked like a relay, with one local committee securing a particular area along the route and then turning the duties over to another as the trucks moved further north from the Israeli checkpoints.
Translation
Important circular for all citizens
For your safety and to ensure the safe arrival of aid we emphasise the following:
- It is strictly prohibited to go to the Kuwait roundabout to receive aid.
- It is prohibited to gather on Salah al-Din Street while aid is arriving.
- Anyone who violates the previous instructions will be held accountable and the aid in their possession will be confiscated.
My fellow citizens: Be responsible, do not violate the instructions, and do not participate in spreading chaos and starving our people.
Know that “no soul will die until it has fulfilled its allotted time and provision”.
Your brothers,
The Palestinian Security Forces
(Source: @safaps/Telegram)
The aid effort used the same deconfliction system with the Israeli authorities that the UN uses to communicate with and seek approval for all convoy movements, according to Jamie McGoldrick, the UN humanitarian coordinator at the time.
“We explained the details of plans [and] operations and what we needed in terms of access in discussions with COGAT, as we do with any other convoys,” McGoldrick told The New Humanitarian. Once the aid reached storage facilities, it would be distributed using a standard administrative system that allocates food to registered Palestinians based on their family size and needs, he added.
To avoid inviting Israeli attack, the tribal committees forbade members from carrying firearms, but some of their operatives did carry sticks or iron bars in case they needed to fend off looters. “We absolutely reject the issue of arming any of our members because that exposes them to danger and attack by the Israeli army,” al-Kafarna said.
Flyers, signed by the “Palestinian Security Forces”, were also passed out in northern Gaza in the days before the first aid delivery in mid-March, asking people not to wait for aid along the convoy route and warning them that aid would be confiscated from anyone who tried to take it.
“We asked the citizens… not to go to wait for the trucks, so that we could work and deliver the aid in a calm manner to the homes,” said Hamed*, another aid committee member.
Just before midnight on 16 March, a UN convoy of nine trucks loaded with food reached northern Gaza, followed on 17 March by another 18 trucks carrying flour, ready-to-eat rations, and food parcels. Some of the trucks made it all the way to the Jabalia refugee camp.
It came at a crucial moment. On 18 March, the IPC task force issued a dire warning: Famine was imminent in northern Gaza; without a dramatic increase in humanitarian access, more than 200,000 people were at immediate risk.
A report from Al Jazeera showed trucks emerging from the pitch dark of bombed-out Jabalia and lining up outside a warehouse. Other videos posted on social media show young men inside the warehouse – many who appear to be just teenagers – unloading pallets, stacking 25-kilogram sacks of flour by flashlight, and celebrating; their clothes covered in flour and the air thick with flour dust.
Reporting live from northern Gaza as the first trucks arrived, Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul explained that this was a “test phase” for aid deliveries to the besieged north. “If there are no massacres by the occupation forces, international organisations will be encouraged to send more trucks to the northern areas,” al-Ghoul said.
“The aid trucks arrived at the Jabalia camp and were stored inside UNRWA warehouses, and in the morning they were distributed in an organised and fair manner to the residents,” Bilal said.
“People were desperate for food. At first, they started crowding to get it,” Thaer recalled. “But after we spoke to them in a decent way, their fears were calmed. We promised them to provide everything that could be provided to them, and we asked them to line up in regular lines to get their food ration.”
For the first time in months, the deliveries and distribution went off “without any reported incident”, OCHA noted. And for the first time since the beginning of March, no killings were reported at the Kuwait and Nabulsi roundabouts on either day.
“We broke through; we got some food in there. We got a proof of concept,” said Petropoulos.
A series of strikes
Less than 48 hours later, the warehouse in Jabalia – where the young men had been celebrating among sacks of flour – was the first to be struck.
The following night, Israeli forces shot at aid committee members and others gathered near the Kuwait roundabout in Gaza City, killing at least 30 people, including Amjad Hathat, a committee director. Also killed was Mahdi Abdel – a maths teacher who had volunteered to help secure the convoys.
These strikes came just days after Gallant, then Israel’s defence secretary, had signed a letter to the US government promising that Israeli authorities wouldn’t obstruct humanitarian aid and would use American-supplied arms in accordance with international law.
More attacks followed in rapid succession. These included strikes that killed individual people at their homes as well as tribal committee members gathered at key locations to secure aid arriving in the north – particularly at the Kuwait roundabout.
Those killed included senior members of the tribal committees, heads of families involved in the aid effort, their family members, and other civilians, according to media and UN reports.
As the effort to safely deliver aid began to fall apart under the bombs and bullets, people returned to the Nabulsi and Kuwait roundabouts, and the daily Israeli attacks on people waiting for aid in those locations resumed.
UN aid workers said they couldn’t say for sure that Israel was deliberately targeting tribal committee members because of their role in securing aid deliveries. “What I can say is that we know that in a similar situation… the police were targeted,” UNRWA’s Touma said, referring to the attacks on civil police that prompted the formation of the tribal committees.
McGoldrick added that many of the people involved in the tribal committees were prominent figures in Gaza and likely already on target lists.
But for members of the tribal committees, there was no question. Al-Kafarna said he believed the committee leaders and members were “specifically and deliberately targeted because Israel wants to impose chaos in the Gaza Strip”.
“It seems that Israel wants to create chaos and starve people until we are expelled to southern Gaza,” Mamoun*, another aid committee member, added.
The New Humanitarian asked the Israeli military to comment on the rationale and details of seven specific strikes and attacks during this period, sending coordinates of where they took place where possible. "The IDF is not aware of the alleged strikes in question," a spokesperson wrote.
The strikes on the tribal committees coincided with attacks on police officers and officials in northern Gaza. Among those killed was senior police official Raed al-Banna in Jabalia, who was responsible for facilitating and securing the arrival of aid to northern Gaza. He was killed alongside his wife and children when an airstrike flattened their home on 18 March.
Also on 18 March, Israeli forces began a two-week raid of al-Shifa hospital, where they killed senior police official Faiq al-Mabhouh. Al-Thawabta, the government spokesperson, said al-Mabhouh had been tasked with coordinating aid deliveries to northern Gaza. Israeli authorities have insisted that al-Mabhouh was a senior Hamas militant.
It’s unclear whether al-Banna or al-Mabhouh were involved in coordinating with the tribal committees, although both were important figures in the overall aid effort in Gaza.
On 22 March, OHCHR wrote that the rights agency was “alarmed by the recent series of attacks on aid warehouses and police officers and others reportedly providing security for the delivery of humanitarian aid”.
Many of the family and tribal leaders being killed in the flurry of attacks were the same people the Israeli authorities had tried to recruit just weeks before.
While the intent is difficult to establish, the Israeli strikes on the tribal committee members, police officers, and other community leaders during this period had the effect of killing a significant number of the individuals who had commanded enough authority to marshal a civic-minded effort to secure aid deliveries and prevent northern Gaza from descending into anarchy.
“From that time on, we’ve gone downhill,” Touma said.
Petropoulos, with OCHA, was on the phone regularly with leaders of the tribal committees throughout this period. “I swear to you, it was the worst day of my life,” he said, recalling one agonising call after an Israeli strike had killed dozens of civilians, including committee members securing aid.
“I’m really sorry for the losses,” he remembered saying. “I need you back there tomorrow… I don’t know what to tell you. These are martyrs, and they’re dying so their families can eat.”
Bilal, the volunteer from Jabalia, kept going back. He said he knew that people like him had been targeted and killed. “I had no other choice,” he said. “We would either die of starvation or murder.”
Finally, on 30 March, an Israeli strike killed at least 19 Palestinians securing aid, including several committee members, as well as nearby civilians, at the Kuwait roundabout, according to a statement released by the tribal committees. The next day, the committees said they were done. After two deadly weeks, they were officially ending their involvement in the joint effort with the UN to secure aid.
“The truth is that we expected that we would be secured and not be exposed to attack, because we agreed to play this role at the request of international organisations,” said al-Kafarna. “Despite that, the committees were targeted.”
Asked if the UN agencies expected that the tribal committees would be protected from Israeli attacks while securing aid deliveries, Touma said simply: “That's the whole point of being a humanitarian convoy.”
In a statement responding to the allegations in this investigation, a spokesperson for COGAT wrote: “Claims suggesting that Israel is attempting to starve civilians in the northern Gaza Strip are incorrect and baseless. The IDF, through COGAT, operates in full compliance with international law to allow and facilitate the provision of substantial humanitarian aid via international organisations.”
Aftermath
On 1 April, an Israeli drone strike killed seven aid workers from the NGO World Central Kitchen in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, south of the Netzarim Corridor. Six of those killed held Western passports, and one was Palestinian. The deaths drew a level of international outrage that the starvation in the north and the killing of dozens of Palestinians involved in the aid effort had failed to generate.
"The reason the Israeli military thought the World Central Kitchen convoy was fair game was because they allege they saw two gunmen on the trucks, which turned the whole convoy into fair game in their eyes,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the NGO Refugees International.
“In the killing of tribal committee members there is a similar logic of targeting aid convoys on the thinnest of pretences, with no precautions to protect humanitarian personnel," added Konyndyk, who also reviewed the investigation before publication.
Within days, under US pressure, Israel agreed to allow bakeries in northern Gaza to begin operating again and said it would open new aid routes into the enclave, including one directly into the north – something aid agencies had been advocating for since the beginning of the war.
The first delivery via the new route took place on 12 April. If Israel had agreed to open crossings directly to the north earlier and allowed in more aid, the effort using the tribal committees would not have been necessary in the first place. “People paid with their lives for this,” Petropoulos said, referring to the committee members who were killed.
As bakeries got up and running, and Israeli authorities allowed more aid and commercial trucks into the north, UN teams saw kids and elderly people returning to the streets. But there still wasn’t enough to eat. Israeli authorities were still blocking almost everything other than flour from entering – including nutritional supplements needed to treat acute malnutrition, which almost two thirds of children in the north were suffering from. What food began to appear in the markets was sold at shockingly high prices. Israeli strikes continued to kill civilians daily, and aid workers continued to regularly face Israeli fire.
Still, the change was notable, Petropoulos recalled. “Suddenly, people were smiling at the cars. We were getting out of the cars; we were shaking hands,” he said.
Kouta, the nurse, remembered seeing tomatoes, cucumbers, and fruit in the markets in early April, for the first time in months. “That's when I thought, the situation has gotten a little bit better,” he said.
The improvements were reflected in an IPC analysis released at the end of June. The food security situation throughout Gaza was still critical, but the IPC’s prediction that famine would occur in the north had not come to pass because of increased food deliveries in March and April, the analysis said.
However, those improvements would prove to be short-lived.
Even as the hunger crisis eased, the violent free-for-all that the community leaders in the north had feared began to set in. With the few Palestinians capable of securing aid deliveries and upholding a degree of public order out of a sense of civic responsibility killed or deterred by Israeli strikes, the “spontaneous distributions” of starving people scrambling to take what they could soon morphed into organised attacks by armed gangs, who would then sell the looted goods at exorbitant prices.
At the beginning of October, Israel announced a total siege of the three northernmost population centres in the enclave – Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia – and ordered the remaining residents to leave. Since then, it has waged a brutal military offensive there, while blocking virtually all humanitarian assistance from entering, prompting OHCHR to warn of the “potential destruction of the Palestinian population” in the area.
Throughout the enclave, in both the north and the south, a situation of violent chaos now reigns. “The fabric of society has already torn apart,” Petropoulos said. “The violence has gone off the deep end.”
Northern Gaza, before (7 October 2023) and after (30 November 2024). Satellite data: European Union, contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2024, processed with EO Browser.
In tandem with continued Israeli restrictions and siege, the rise of gangs raiding aid convoys has caused the availability of food to completely collapse. In November, the IPC determined that famine is once again imminent in northern Gaza and the food supply “sharply deteriorated” in the rest of the territory.
The threat posed by the gangs, and Israel’s role in enabling them, was dramatically illustrated when armed looters hijacked 98 out of 109 UN trucks in a food aid convoy that entered Gaza in mid-November.
On the route to the border, Israeli army quadcopters hovered over vehicles carrying aid workers as they rotated in and out of the enclave, several aid workers told The New Humanitarian, adding that they also appeared to turn a blind eye to the looters as they attacked aid convoys in broad daylight.
“The idea of coming together with the community leaders was to help us to not reach the point where we are right now,” Touma said, adding that the UN no longer has anyone it can rely on to provide security for aid convoys. “Every time we bring in trucks, we take a risk,” she said.
The string of killings in March was a prime example of how Israeli actions have systematically undermined local leadership and humanitarian actors for a chaos-endgame, according to a UN aid worker involved in the effort, who asked to remain anonymous to be able to speak candidly.
“Things are so bad and so deliberate and so cynical that no one outside of Gaza believes it can possibly be true. Israel has strategically turned the situation into exactly what it wants the world to perceive Gaza and the Palestinians as,” the aid worker said. “It’s abhorrent and criminal.”
*First name pseudonyms are being used to identify sources whose names are being protected for security reasons.
Omar Nabil Abdel Hamid reported from Cairo, Riley Sparks from Paris, Hajar Harb from London, and Eric Reidy from Cairo and Boston. Edited by Eric Reidy.
