05.06.2025

Food used as bait

Israel is starving the Gazan population to ready them for mass expulsion, warns Eddie Ford. After that it will be the West Bank and then the Arab-Palestinian population in ‘Israel proper’

Every day becomes a ghastly spectacle, as we watch the unfolding genocidal events. Desperate people are gunned down, as they attempt to get food, either by IDF troops on the ground or from the air by helicopters and drones - the perpetual buzzing emissaries of death. Then Israeli spokespersons appear on the media to blame Hamas and disseminate lies. Meanwhile, a UN-backed report warns that the entire Gazan population faces the threat of starvation.

The euphemistically named ‘food aid hubs’ set up by the US-founded ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ have, of course, become killing zones. At least 27 Palestinians were killed on June 3, as they went to get food at a hub, several witnesses reporting that there was no aid available when they arrived at the site.

This was the third such incident in just a few days, with more than 30 killed on June 1, as people gathered at a GHF ‘distribution point’. Some of the dead and injured were transported by a donkey cart to a Red Cross-run field hospital in Rafah, which confirmed that it had received a “mass casualty influx” of 179 people. GHF head Johnnie Moore - an evangelical leader and advisor to Donald Trump on ‘interfaith issues’ - declared on X that reports of Palestinians killed and injured, while seeking aid, was “a lie” being “spread by terrorists” (he had replaced Jake Wood, a former marine, who had resigned, saying that he could not “guarantee” the GHF’s independence from Israeli interests.

Even though it was a “lie”, Israel finally admitted that its forces shot at individuals who were moving towards them in a “threatening” manner, so action had to be taken - showing as justification a totally spurious video purported to be Hamas gunmen (!) on June 1 firing on Gazans going to collect aid, as Hamas “does everything it can” to prevent the success of the food distribution - totally untrue.¹

As people starve in front of them, GHF announced on social media that its distribution points would be closed on June 4 for “update, organisation and efficiency improvement work” and claimed that operations would resume the next day - saying it was in discussion with the Israeli military to boost “security measures” beyond the immediate perimeter of GHF sites that would include measures to “guide foot traffic” in order to reduce “confusion or escalation”. Expect more horrors to come.

There is now pressure on the UN, of course, to declare the Gaza killings a “war crime”, especially as the charity, Doctors Without Borders, said that the people it treated at the GHF site “were shot from all sides by drones, helicopters, boats, tanks and Israeli soldiers on the ground”. We are in a hellish situation when going to a supposed aid site is a potential death sentence - but the Gazan people have no choice, because if they are not killed by bullets or bombs, they will die in slow agony from starvation.

Trap

There is plenty of talk of the GHF system being chaotic and designed to fail, and there are obviously strong elements of truth to that. But there is more to it - as pointed out by journalist Jonathan Cook: Israel is fully integrating its Gaza ‘food aid hubs’ into the genocide by luring Palestinians into a death trap.² Of course, there is the added bonus that trapping Palestinians in what are effectively Israeli military zones mean that IDF soldiers can snatch anybody they want using biometric data - not to mention ‘disappearing’ Palestinians into Israel’s torture centres, and so on.

After all, as the whole world knows, Israel is deliberately holding back food supplies. At the very least, you need 500 lorries a day, but according to rough estimates the number being used is now more like 70. Even then, not all of them end up reaching their destination point - some get stopped and looted, and others are held back at Israeli checkpoints. As part of the Zionist project to finish what was started in 1947-49 - the total ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population - it had to get rid of the UN Relief and Works Agency, which had been operating from 400 distribution points in Gaza.

It was replaced by the militarised GHF and its four distribution points, going from a woefully inadequate delivery state, thanks to Israel, to a cynically much worse system that wants to dispense ‘aid’ to where the majority of Gazan population do not live, but to where the Israeli authorities want to displace them - the ultimate exercise in kettling. Aid as a weapon for ethnic cleansing.

Just take a look at the map. If you live in Gaza City, to get food you are meant to go to the south to near the boundary with Deir el-Balah, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians are already sheltering. None of the distribution points are located north of the Netzarim Corridor. What happens to the old or infirmed? ‘To hell with them’ is Israel’s answer.

The whole operation is, though, designed to move people. The food on offer is not there to end hunger, no it is being used as bait. People who are on the edge of starvation will, if they can, walk miles to feed themselves and their families for a day or two.

Human solidarity

Because food supplies are deliberately kept short, it is inevitable that there would not only be a complete breakdown of order, but a breakdown of human solidarity. People are not going to stand patiently for hours at the back of the queue as the food parcels run out. No they will, predictably, push and shove, elbow others aside, crush them under foot, so as to feed themselves and their families.

There is, needless to say, nothing to celebrate in this chaotic “flood” - to do so is perverse.³ It is not resistance. It is desperation.

The chaos is no accident, no mistake, whatever the BBC and others suggest - actually making themselves complicit in the genocide, as Cook says, since it is willingly reproducing Israeli lies.

The Israeli war cabinet knows perfectly well what it is doing: getting Gaza ready for mass expulsion (presumably over the border into the Sinai). That or starve. And the green light has been given by Trump when he talked about transforming Gaza into the “Riveria” of the eastern Mediterranean. This had nothing to do with him seeing an unmissable real estate opportunity. Only the incurably naive would fall for that. No, Benjamin Netanyahu and the entire spectrum of Zionist opinion knew what Trump was saying: ‘go ahead and finish the job’. That is why Netanyahu grinned like a Cheshire cat at his White House press conference with the US president.

It is the same with the GHF operation. It is not incompetence that has left so many dead … and many more hungry. That is the plan, that is the intention. Uproot people, draw them south with the promise of a little food … and then keep them there for when Israel opens the border with Sinai.

After Gaza it will be the West Bank, then the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel ‘proper’. Some far-right Zionists are already agitating for them to be expelled, despite holding Israeli passports and sometimes being used as a propaganda asset, showing how ‘tolerant’ Israel is, compared to the nations surrounding it.

We need to understand Israel as also an American colonial-settler project, not just a Zionist one - its war machine is to a very considerable degree an extension of the American one.

So demands for David Lammy to sanction Israel, for example, are in effect demands for him to sanction the US war machine.

Take the $100 million F-35, America’s top end combat aircraft (and Israel’s and the UK’s and 18 other countries). Fifteen percent of it is made in British factories. Is Lammy going to put an embargo on F-35 parts going for assembly in the US because they are then sent from there to Israel? Is Lammy going to embargo spare parts for Israel’s F35s? Hardly likely, except, perhaps, under circumstances where the Starmer government faces a cabinet schism. So Lammy huffs and puffs, sheds a few crocodile tears and carries on with business as usual.

Of course, workers can impose their own sanctions. Perhaps people working in BAE, Teledyne, GKN and Martin-Baker will go on strike and walk out? Not to be expected anytime soon. Picketing such workplaces is symbolically important … but carries the danger of blaming workers who rely on their work to keep themselves and their families fed, clothed and housed. However, workers at ports and airports are well placed to stop arms deliveries to Israel. That would take organisation … and, of course, workers at ports and airports are relatively well organised and might be expected to give a sympathetic ear to pro-Palestine activists.

Zionism

Now we come to a point worth repeating. While we have written about Netanyahu and his six-party far-right coalition, we should recognise that ethnic cleansing and the drive towards genocide is not something unique to Likud, United Torah Judaism, Shas, Otzma Yehudit, the Religious Zionist Party and New Hope. It something that is common to the whole Zionist project, left, right and centre. Why? Because, in terms of political economy, Israel is an exclusion colony: the indigenous population is not wanted - an obstacle that has to be removed one way or another.

Nor should we forget that Israel began under the domination of Labor Zionism, which oversaw not only the declaration of independence, but the ethnic cleansing of three quarters of a million Palestinians. It was a Labor Zionist government in the 1967 Six-Day War that defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and took over the whole of Jerusalem - and occupied the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights.

They gave up, of course, their initial plans for the colonisation of Gaza - put that business off. But now they are returning to it with a vengeance - alongside the remorseless swallowing-up of the West Bank. Remember, however, that this is all part of the Zionist vision going back to before 1947-49 with Theodor Herzl and what he outlined in his famous 1896 pamphlet, The Jewish state, and what British imperialism sponsored with the Balfour Declaration.

You can also say that the disgusting abomination being played out in real time before our very eyes on the media means that the old taboo about comparing the Israeli state to the Nazi regime is broken. In fact, you cannot describe what is going on without comparing it to the Nazi holocaust. But at the same time you have to say that it is not just like the Nazis: what about the German empire’s genocide of the Herero and Nama people in what is now known as Namibia⁴, the Ottoman empire’s Armenian genocide of 1915. Not to forget the extermination of the indigenous Australian and north American populations.

Once we thought that was all a matter of history. Now we know better.

Israel can be stopped. However, that fundamentally relies on the international working class movement, crucially in the Arab Mashreq.