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A secret meeting earlier this month between UN agencies, international aid organisations, and the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has been met with a mixture of outrage and disbelief by humanitarian figures and observers.
They say the 6 August meeting marks a new low for humanitarian independence and legitimacy as it risks normalising the GHF, which is implicated in alleged war crimes for contributing to the killing of hundreds of Palestinians by the Israeli security forces amid concerns about ethnic cleansing.
“It’s, first, shocking that the meeting [took place] and that the GHF was part of this meeting,” Amjad al-Shawwa, director of the Palestinian NGO Network in Gaza, an umbrella group for local aid organisations, told The New Humanitarian. “We need clarifications from the UN about that meeting and what happened. Since that meeting till now, still people – aid seekers – are killed every day on the GHF sites.”
Despite coordinating closely on a day-to-day basis with the UN and international aid agencies, al-Shawwa was unaware that the meeting had occurred until The New Humanitarian published a leaked email summary of what had been discussed on 8 August.
The meeting was arranged by the US diplomatic mission to the UN and attended by officials from the UN’s emergency aid coordination office (OCHA), the World Food Programme, the UN’s migration agency (IOM), UNICEF, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the NGO InterAction, and Johnnie Moore, the executive chairman of the GHF.
In the leaked readout, Joyce Msuya, the second-most senior official at OCHA, and Tom Hart, president of InterAction, wrote that participants had agreed to “lower public rhetoric and focus on moving forward” and that “there was a sense” that the UN-led humanitarian system in Gaza and the GHF “could and should operate in parallel, complementary ways”.
Until the meeting, the UN and international aid agencies had maintained a united front on their strong criticism of the GHF, saying it went directly against humanitarian principles and served Israel’s military strategy. OCHA spokesperson Jens Laerke had called it a “deliberate attempt to weaponise aid”. Dozens of NGOs also repeatedly criticised the programme, including after the 6 August meeting.
Since the GHF began operating at the end of May, over 1,000 people have been killed by the Israeli military and US security contractors staffing its four distribution sites, according to the UN’s human rights office. Amnesty International has described the organisation as “another tool in Israel’s campaign of genocide”.
“The problem is not simply how the GHF is contributing towards death traps and killing fields for Palestinians seeking aid, but how it normalises brutal, corporatised humanitarianism,” Dustin Barter, a senior research fellow at think tank ODI Global’s Humanitarian Policy Group, told The New Humanitarian, giving his response to the 6 August meeting. “This is an existential threat for a sector that is already facing a crisis in legitimacy.”
Notably absent from the meeting was the UN’s agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA – historically the largest UN agency in Gaza and previously described by other UN agencies as the “backbone” of the humanitarian response in the territory. UNRWA has increasingly seen its ability to operate hamstrung after being banned by Israel as part of a long-standing campaign to try to have the agency dismantled for political reasons.
In a 12 August letter obtained by The New Humanitarian, UNRWA director Philippe Lazzarini warned OCHA head Tom Fletcher of a potential “fracturing of the humanitarian community in Gaza” if OCHA fails to clarify the outcome of the meeting with the GHF. Lazzarini also said that UN “silence in the face of incidents that may amount to war crimes” at GHF sites “may be perceived as complicity”.
In response to a post on LinkedIn by The New Humanitarian’s CEO Tammam Aloudat sharing the article about Lazzarini’s letter, Fletcher – the head of OCHA – wrote: “I want to reassure you – as I’ve reassured Philippe [Lazzarini] – that in our discussions before, during, and since the Gaza briefing last week, we have underlined our unwavering and unequivocal commitment to IHL [International Humanitarian Law] and humanitarian principles.”
The humanitarian principles Fletcher is referring to are: humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.
In response to Fletcher’s comment, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, an associate professor in the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Amsterdam, wrote: “Can you at least acknowledge that OCHA meeting with GHF – an entity designed explicitly to both undermine UNRWA and to use humanitarianism to carry out genocidal goals – gives GHF both legitimacy and gives the impression that the rest of the UN humanitarian system has hung UNRWA out to dry?”
“Galling” or business as usual?
A minority of aid workers and experts contacted by The New Humanitarian – as well as some people commenting on public posts – viewed the meeting between UN agencies and the GHF as business as usual in the aid sector.
“This should actually be welcome news,” Elie Abouaoun, a scholar and practitioner with a two-decade long career in the humanitarian sector, wrote in response to a post on LinkedIn by The New Humanitarian about the meeting. “Don't we usually negotiate with warlords and criminals? What is different in this meeting? Advocacy with non-ethical parties does not mean endorsing their agenda.”
“The GHF is an abomination that should be disbanded and defunded immediately. Any effort to normalise its existence must be opposed.”
Some NGOs working on the ground in Gaza that The New Humanitarian contacted were hesitant to comment on the meeting, worrying about potential retaliation for publicly criticising the UN agencies they depend on to get even limited amounts of aid into Gaza.
Most people The New Humanitarian spoke to, however, expressed concern.
“The secret meeting is another nail in the coffin of humanitarian legitimacy, and it’s galling how many UN agencies attended,” Barter told The New Humanitarian. “The GHF is an abomination that should be disbanded and defunded immediately. Any effort to normalise its existence must be opposed.”
Meanwhile, Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Global Affairs at Tufts University in the US, said the meeting was not only “a sign of desperation by the UN” but “may also be a shift by the GHF”.
US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee recently announced a plan to increase the number of GHF food distribution sites from four to 16, and to run them 24 hours a day. After slashing almost all global US humanitarian funding, the administration of US President Donald Trump pledged $30 million at the end of June to the GHF.
The GHF also said it was piloting a new system to control food distribution in Gaza that would require people seeking aid to enter their information in a database and submit a photo so they could be issued with an ID card that would allow them to “reserve” aid packages in advance – raising concerns about surveillance.
Throughout Israel’s nearly two-year military campaign in Gaza – which has decimated the enclave, precipitated a starvation crisis, and killed at least 62,000 people from direct violence – the UN-led aid system has faced consistent obstruction from Israel.
Since the beginning of March, when Israel imposed a two-month long total siege, refusing to allow any aid or commercial goods to enter Gaza, Israel has sought to sideline and replace the UN-led response entirely with a system under its control, led by the GHF.
Kholood Khair, Sudanese political analyst and the founding director of Confluence Advisory, a think-and-do tank formerly based in Khartoum, told The New Humanitarian the 6 August meeting was a sign that “the UN inherently bows down to power”.
“The US doesn't even need to be the kind of big international donor that it used to be in order to effectively force or coerce these big UN agencies to work with GHF, which is absolutely what the US is putting all of its energies into,” Khair continued.
Al-Shawwa, from the Palestinian NGO Network, shared a broader warning: “[The GHF] is an unprecedented mechanism. If this is allowed to happen here in Gaza, it could be copied in other contexts.”
Sudan is, already, perhaps one of those other contexts.
Khair described the for-profit logistics company Fogbow as “the Sudan equivalent” of the GHF. Fogbow’s first project was trying to develop a floating pier to deliver aid by sea to Gaza, and it was involved in a similar, US-led effort last year widely regarded as a distraction and failure.
Fogbow – mostly staffed, like the GHF, by former US military and intelligence personnel – has since worked with the South Sudanese government to air drop food in the country. Its model is also raising concerns about a new approach to aid delivery that serves the political agendas of belligerent governments while distorting and displacing the existing humanitarian architecture.
These actors “are looking to cow the humanitarian and international order, both politically and financially, without even using funding”, said Khair. “They don't even have to fund these agencies to get them to kowtow to them. It's very, very disturbing to see that.”
Eric Reidy reported from Boston, United States. Will Worley reported from Oslo, Norway. Edited by Andrew Gully.
