source: Human Rights Watch

published: 13 June 2025

Image Credit: Pexels/Duda at www.Pexels.com

Footage of the newly opened Israeli-backed, US-supported aid distribution centers in Gaza is horrifying: Palestinians clamoring to get food; crowds being turned away; gunfire ringing out.

Israeli forces have in recent days gunned down Palestinians trying to secure food for their families and themselves, with at least 163 people reportedly killed.

Not only are these distribution centers deadly, but they fail to address the mass starvation taking place, which Palestinian officials have declared to be a famine. At least 60 children have already starved to death and the UN has declared that “Gaza is the hungriest place on earth.”

Rather than delivering food to the people who need it across Gaza, these distribution centers are furthering forced displacement, which some Israeli officials have already openly, unabashedly admitted is their ultimate goal.

But there is another way to get food to the people in Gaza: A humanitarian diplomatic convoy to break the Israeli-imposed siege of Gaza.

The current aid distribution centers came after more than 11 weeks of an Israeli-imposed total blockade on Gaza—no food, no medicine, just bombs and bureaucratic cruelty. The trickle of aid coming in has hardly made a dent. Mothers cradle skeletal infants and scour rubble for scraps. Fishermen are shot dead for casting nets, chronically ill patients left without access to medication. Aid trucks looted under the watch of Israeli drones.

This is not collateral damage – it is a deliberate strategy to create conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza in whole or in part. This did not just begin with the latest escalation – over 18 years of blockade on Gaza and 19 months of hostilities, Israeli authorities have carried out war crimes, crimes against humanity, including extermination, and acts of genocide.

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