Thread by @MouinRabbani

THREAD: On 11 June GHF, the US-Israeli project to seize control of humanitarian relief efforts in the Gaza Strip from specialized international agencies, in order to further Israel’s genocidal agenda, issued a press release. In it, GHF claimed that a bus “carrying more than two dozen” Palestinians working for the project was “brutally attacked by Hamas”, with “at least five fatalities” and “multiple injuries”, and that others “may have been taken hostage”. GHF additionally claimed the attack “did not happen in a vacuum”, because “For days, Hamas has openly threatened our team”.

In an updated statement the following day, 12 June, GHF claimed the attack resulted in eight dead and twenty-one wounded, and that Hamas was preventing the injured from receiving treatment at Nasir Hospital in Khan Yunis.

In a separate communique, also issued on 12 June, Hamas announced that its forces had killed at least twelve members of the Popular Forces, the militia led by convicted drug smuggler Yasir Abu Shabab, and which is armed by Israel and operates under its direction. The Hamas statement added that its forces had wounded many more of Abu Shabab’s gunmen and captured others. The Popular Forces for their part responded that there had in fact been an exchange of fire between its gunmen and Hamas, and that it managed to kill several Hamas attackers. Press reports however indicate that some if not all of the Hamas casualties resulted from Israeli forces intervening on their militia’s behalf. It remains unclear if GHF, Hamas, and the Popular Forces militia were referring to the same encounter or separate ones.

In its initial statement, GHF condemned “this heinous and deliberate act in the strongest possible terms,” insisting those targeted “were aid workers … simply trying to feed the Palestinian people”. Denouncing the incident as “an attack on humanity”, it “call[ed] on the international community to immediately condemn Hamas for this unprovoked attack and continued threat against our people for simply trying to feed the Palestinian people”.

The silence from the international community and established international aid agencies has indeed been deafening, and for good reason. From the outset, the GHF project was denounced by international relief agencies, with virtual unanimity, for violating every core tenet of humanitarian operations and adopting as its primary mission the weaponization and restriction of assistance in order to control its recipients.

The United Nations and its specialized agencies were not alone in condemning this project and in their categorical refusal to cooperate with it in any manner. Every other relief agency active in the Gaza Strip took a similar, and often identical position.

As noted by numerous specialists with extensive experience in humanitarian emergencies, such as @JeremyKonyndyk, the president of Refugees International and former head of disaster relief at USAID, the project was additionally doomed to failure, for multiple reasons. First and foremost, the standard practice in humanitarian emergencies such as that in the Gaza Strip is to flood the territory with relief efforst and supplies, not to restrict access to them to several locations that cannot meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of desperate and weakened recipients required to trek long distances under hazardous conditions to access aid.

Yet the latter approach is precisely the one adopted by GHF. As designed by Boston Consulting Group, a small number of distribution centers operated by GHF within an Israeli security perimeter would provide food packages during specified hours to tens of thousands more Palestinians than they were equipped to handle. It was not only a disaster waiting to happen, but a disaster by design, intended to dehumanize Palestinians, rob them of their dignity, and amplify their suffering and desperation to the maximum extent possible.

As senior Israeli leaders have publicly stated, GHF is also at heart a public relations exercise, designed to deflect international pressure on Israel with occasional crumbs in order to give the genocidal apartheid regime’s sponsors and allies a pretext to continue supporting it despite growing public outrage at Israel’s policy of starvation.

Previously, it might be recalled, Israel categorically rejected the observation that a months-long hermetic siege of the Gaza Strip could create significant hardship, while its flunkies, most notably UK Lawyers for Israel, insisted the siege was actually a beneficial public health initiative for which Palestinians should be grateful and for which the world owed Israel a debt of gratitude.

Similarly, Israel rejected the growing volume of reports from within the Gaza Strip about the growing humanitarian emergency as Hamas propaganda, and insisted all journalists it hadn't yet killed were either Hamas militants in press jackets or controlled by the movement. In order to ensure that it could continue with this slanderously lethal claim it has since October 2023 prevented foreign reporters from entering the territory, with only occasional, brief exceptions made for those willing to be embedded with its military.

As predicted by Konyndyk and others, the distribution centers also doubled as kill zones. On every single day since GHF commenced operations, Israeli snipers and tanks have killed Palestinians, often dozens, on the pretext that they deviated from authorized pathways, entered the distribution centers before they opened, or simply because soldiers were confident they could shoot, shell and kill men, women, and children with total impunity. A daily Flour Massacre.

The GHF project was designed for maximum opacity. Its funders and finances have not been revealed, although it was quickly confirmed as a US-Israeli project that functioned as an arm of the Israeli security services. Its staff consisted primarily of US mercenaries, typically with zero experience in humanitarian operations, zero knowledge of the Gaza Strip and Palestinian society, and zero knowledge of local needs. Thus, for example, their aid packages consisted of various dry goods, such as rice and lentils, but neither the water nor fuel required to prepare them. Given that it is common knowledge that Israel had since 2 March prevented the supply of any food, water, fuel, or medicine into the Gaza Strip, and that GHF was an Israeli project, this was hardly an inadvertent oversight.

@JeremyKonyndyk As if to emphasise the propaganda nature of the GHF project, it is currently being led by Johnie Moore, a fanatic Christian Zionist with no relevant experience but a demonstrated fealty to Israel.

Israel defended the project on several grounds. First and foremost, it claimed that GHF was necessary to prevent Hamas from looting humanitarian supplies and subsequently selling them at inflated prices to fund its military operations. A perfectly convincing explanation, except that the UN and other relief agencies have consistently stated that Israel never presented them with any evidence Hamas was looting supplies, either publicly or privately. (Israel did finally on 12 June release a “captured document” it claims include minutes of a Hamas leadership meeting that demonstrate the movement’s military wing, the Martyr Izz-al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was pilfering no less than twenty-five per cent of relief supplies, but as with other documents Israel claims to have captured and released to trusted journalists these have all the authenticity of the Protocols of The Elders of Zion.)

Perhaps more importantly, the UN, relief agencies active in the Gaza Strip, as well as Palestinian truck drivers who were bringing in relief supplies in from Egypt, all stated that while there was indeed significant looting, almost all of it took place in areas of the Gaza Strip under Israeli control. (In some cases the seizure of relief supplies was simply the work of desperate crowds of ordinary Palestinians). Truck drivers have testified they would be held up at check points, forced at gunpoint to pay a hefty “transit fee”, and forcibly relieved of their cargo or shot at if they refused or were unable to pay. All under the watchful eyes of the Israeli military. As the Washington Post reported late last year, an internal UN memo it obtained found that gangs “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” or “protection” from Israeli troops, and had established a “military-like compound” in an area “restricted, controlled and patrolled” by the Israeli military.

In contrast to the looting and destruction of relief supplies entering from Jordan by organized groups of Israeli vandals, the looting within the Gaza Strip was being conducted by Palestinians. Aid officials and truck drivers also noted that during the suspension of hostilities between mid-January and mid-March of this year, during which Hamas was able to re-assert a measure of law and order, the looting virtually stopped. During the ceasefire, in fact, Hamas arrested and summarily executed a number of looters, to howls of outrage from cheerleaders of genocide who interrupted their celebration of Palestinian deaths to suddenly became champions of the Palestinian right to life. The dead, it emerged, were men working for Abu Shabab, denounced by Hamas as “collaborators” with Israel.

Israel’s other claim is that the UN and other relief agencies are essentially functioning as front organizations for Hamas, and have been working in league with the Palestinian Islamist movement. Israel apologists who instinctively repeat every claim by the Israeli government as gospel truth notwithstanding, every serious researcher, analyst, and investigator who has examined this allegation has concluded it is at best thoroughly preposterous. Yet some persist in the belief that the International Court of Justice repeatedly ordered Israel to provide full and free access to the Gaza Strip to the notorious terrorist organization known as the United Nations.

The mystery of the Palestinian looters was finally revealed last month. Several weeks ago, Hamas militants in Rafah successfully attacked what they believed to be a base for “musta’rabeen”, undercover Israeli agents who disguise themselves as local Palestinians to carry out their dirty work. Those it killed, it later emerged, were in fact actual Palestinians, gunmen operating freely in an area fully controlled by Israel. Several days later Avigdor Lieberman, a far-right Israeli opposition politician who during the 1990s was once among Israeli Prime Minister Binyamnin Netanyahu’s closest associates, but like everyone else who deals with him eventually had a bitter falling out with Israel’s longest-serving leader, publicly stated that "Israel has provided assault rifles and light weapons to crime families in Gaza, on Netanyahu's orders … We're talking about the equivalent of ISIS in Gaza." Netanyahu responded with a confirmation, but claimed he was acting upon a recommendation from the security services. That last statement was widely ridiculed by Israeli commentators, who noted that the decision to support Abu Shabab had not been brought before Israel’s cabinet as such recommendation normally would be.

Israeli critics have likened the government’s sponsorship of Abu Shabab’s Popular Forces to Israel’s encouragement of the Muslim Brotherhood and later Hamas during the 1980s in order to weaken the Palestine Liberation Organisation and its constituent factions, divide and polarize Palestinian society, and thus strengthen Israel’s grip over the occupied territories. The implication, that Israel’s past policies contributed to the development of a more formidable enemy and that it risks so doing so once more, doesn’t really hold water.

Israel may have taken a liking to the Muslim Brotherhood because of its political quiescence and passivity during the period in question, but the movement had a fairly defined ideology and popular constituency, and aspired to play an active role in Palestinian society and ultimately lead it. Abu Shabab’s Popiular Forces, by contrast, is a criminal network dedicated to guns, drugs, and money, with no ideology or political aspirations. It is true it has links with ISIS, but these are motivated by mutual benefit rather than ideological conviction. As for the gang being embedded in a clan, Abu Shabab and his senior lieutenants have been publicly disowned and repudiated by their own families. As such the group has much more in common with the Village Leagues, the Israel’s failed 1980s experiment to supplant the PLO with a network of collaborators drawn from rural leaders – who were also repudiated by their own and during the 1987-1993 uprising were expelled, forced to repent, or hunted down by nationalist activists.

Even the analogy with the Village Leagues however only goes so far. During the 1980s Israel assumed that even if its annexationist ambitions were realised, the majority of Palestinians would remain because they could not be expelled. The Leagues’ function was thus population control. In the Gaza Strip today, by contrast, the role assigned to Abu Shabab’s Popular Forces is to sow chaos and anarchy, precisely in order to make expulsion, and failing that departure, a realistic option.

Like any other society, Palestinians don’t need Hamas hostility to Abu Shabab and his gang to recognize them for the collaborators they are, and to wish them dead or otherwise gone. It’s hardly surprising people would accept food from them, just as they previously went to the Village Leagues to obtain permits (required by the Israeli military for virtually any activity apart from breathing) that were otherwise unavailable.

Given the Abu Shabab gang’s direct complicity with the murderous GHF project, which it is worth repeating was designed for Israel by Boston Consulting Group, it was entirely to be expected that its members would be attacked. This has, after all, been the fate of collaborators since the dawn of time. Israel’s South Lebanon Army militia is but a recent example of this phenomenon.

Thus far GHF has not released the names of its Palestinian staff who it stated were killed by Hamas. We thus don’t know if they were civilians, or armed Abu Shabab collaborators working for the genocidal occupation and providing perimeter defence services for the GHF project’s US mercenaries. Given the nature and purpose of the GHF project, it should come as no surprise if the GHF is spinning a tall tale and passing off armed gangsters as humanitarian workers.

It would be of a piece with claims by the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra Orwellian Concerto that the GHF project’s sole purpose is to feed starving Palestinians, and that anyone opposed to its mission wants to see Palestinians die of hunger in order to make Israel, which is the party actually starving them and seeking to eliminate relief agencies from the Gaza Strip, look bad.

With Israel’s attack on Iran and the war between them now dominating the headlines, and Israel imposing a communications blackout on the Gaza Strip, there are real fears that the daily GHF massacres will, along with Israel’s ongoing genocide, intensify under cover of darkness. Just as Israel’s rampages throughout the West Bank are also increasing in size and scope. END