This article was originally published on Tribune.

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In early March, Israel reinforced its blockade of Gaza, preventing entry of even the limited amount of food aid distributed by the UN and multinational NGOs during the previous weeks of ceasefire. With these agencies still facing severe restrictions, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation then initiated operations in late May, having recently registered as an organisation in the US. Over the next five months, its aid distributions became a key component in the international enterprise of Israeli destruction of Gaza, drawing Palestinians to sites, primarily near the border with Egypt, where they were subjected to deadly attacks. Condemning GHF, conventional aid agencies were quick to distinguish their own humanitarian practice.

Then, in mid-October, GHF suspended its operations, following the establishment of another ceasefire, which permitted entry of aid under UN coordination. Representatives of the US government suggested that it would not be renewing funding for the organisation, which nonetheless referred to ‘temporary closures’. It is possible that GHF will now become redundant to the strategy of Israel and its allies. But the harrowing episode of its activity is suggestive of a transformation not only in aid practice, but also in moral politics. The product of a tendency immanent within the aid industry, GHF has also reflected a genocidal impulse in global capitalism.

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Within days of the initiation of GHF’s operations, medics at hospitals and makeshift clinics in southern Gaza began reporting overwhelming caseloads of intentional traumas — in particular, gunshot wounds to the head, neck, and thorax — suffered by Palestinians seeking food. These medical facilities were soon obliged to manage a growing number of lifeless bodies as morgues filled up. By the end of July, the UN Human Rights office had recorded the killing of 859 Palestinians near GHF sites and a further 514 along the routes of aid convoys. Aseel Horabi, a Palestinian doctor working at a field hospital in Al-Mawasi, told the BBC that ‘the path to aid is the path to death’. Her husband had recently been shot on his way to a GHF site.

In early August, Médecins Sans Frontières launched a report on its response to these attacks. ‘The medical data is clear’, it affirmed. ‘This is not aid. It is orchestrated killing’. Among the testimonies gathered by MSF was that of a 39-year-old father of eight, also targeted as he sought food for his family:

We walked for hours. As you’re walking, you cry automatically. Not just for yourself — for the people, for all of us. In the sand near the sea, suddenly I was shot. I was shot twice in the leg. No one could help me or carry me. Because everyone — everyone — was exhausted.

In June, Israeli soldiers divulged to Haaretz that they had been ordered to shoot unarmed Palestinians at food distribution sites, which one described as ‘a killing field’. GHF presented the Israeli Defence Forces as providing ‘perimeter security’ at the sites. But it denied any responsibility for the injuries sustained by Palestinians in their vicinity. ‘There have been zero casualties at our sites. We have never fired a weapon at anyone’, insisted GHF spokesperson, Chapin Fay, in an interview with Channel Four News, in mid-August.

This claim was contradicted by Michael Milshtein, former head of the Department of Palestinian Affairs in the IDF’s military-intelligence wing, who told The New Yorker that there were almost-daily shootings ‘from both the IDF and American contractors’. Anthony Aguilar, a widely cited whistleblower, who worked for GHF for a brief stint, recounts the IDF shooting at ‘a massive tidal wave of people… rushing towards the site, because they [were] starving’. And he describes GHF contractors overseeing the distribution of food armed with fully automatic weapons, having entered Israel on tourist visas and without clear rules of engagement. ‘If you’re threatened, shoot’, he was told, during a briefing before his departure from the US. A video of a GHF site published by Associated Press, in July, captured an exchange between two men with American accents, amid the sound of gunfire. ‘I think you hit one’, shouts the first. ‘Hell yeah, boy’, cheers the other.

A former green beret, Aguilar was deployed 12 times to Iraq during his 25 years in the US Army. He received an unexpected invitation to work for GHF by UG Solutions, less than six months after retiring. Responsible for most of GHF’s deployment of personnel, UG Solutions primarily hired US military veterans, paying them upwards of $1,000 per day. It was founded in 2023 by another former green beret, Jameson Govoni, who once described himself as ‘a degenerate who joined the army to inflict pain on the people who inflicted pain on us’. GHF worked with two other contracting companies responsible for logistics. Safe Reach Solutions was involved in the early planning and set-up of GHF; and it has conducted military-intelligence operations inside Gaza. It is run by yet another former green beret, Phil Reilly, who also served 29 years in the CIA, before joining Constellis, a private military contractor that grew out of Blackwater, the company responsible for the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, in 2007. Arkel International, meanwhile, recruited and managed drivers for the trucks carrying aid to distribution sites. Most hailed from Georgia and Serbia, and they received roughly the same in one month as the army veterans hired by UG Solutions received in one day.

‘Those do not look like aid workers’, Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, told Haaretz, referring to GHF contractors. ‘And they’re not going to look like aid workers to the local population’. It is not only the weapons and the US military tactical vests adorned by some that distinguished them. Conventional aid workers are trained to maintain a strict brand discipline that simultaneously registers the presence of their agency and associates them with the ‘humanitarian principles’ that form what observers – sympathisers, as well as critics – have often called their ‘creed’. Designed to increase market share, brand is thus also deployed by aid agencies to maintain staff security and esprit de corps. There is a faith that professional humanitarians tend to invest in their categorical differentiation from other functionaries of crisis management – military personnel, in particular. And, though often dismissed as a reflection of wilful naïveté, the hope engendered in them by their self-identity cannot so readily be disaggregated from the effective pursuit of their ideals.

On 1 July, 171 NGOs, from a range of countries, issued a joint call for GHF to be dismantled. Citing a warning from Sphere – which provided the first definition of minimum professional standards for emergency relief, in 1997 – they contended that GHF ‘does not adhere to core humanitarian standards and principles’. In a rebuttal to GHF’s criticism of its report on attacks at distribution sites, MSF also averred that the new organisation ‘has operated in a manner that has seriously violated humanitarian principles’.

In defence of its humanitarian credentials, GHF has defined itself as ‘neutral and independent’, and it has invoked the experience of its executive director, John Acree, and other staff, who previously worked for USAID. But it has flagrantly participated in violations of international humanitarian law. While the UN-coordinated system of aid provision previously operated through 400 distribution sites, GHF maintained just four, one of which was rarely opened. All were to the south of the Netzarim Corridor, meaning that aid was inaccessible from Gaza City, which is to the north. And they were all in militarised zones, supplied via the routes used to supply Israeli military bases.

A report published by Forensic Architecture, in partnership with World Peace Foundation, has shown that, between 29 May and 4 July, sites were open for food distribution for an average of 23 minutes per day, with most announcements of opening times being published less than an hour in advance, and almost a quarter of imminent-closure announcements being published before stated opening times. This suggests not simply failure to take measures to protect civilians, but rather active support for their concentration in areas being targeted by the Israeli military; it suggests collusion in the active targeting of civilians. Another testimony, quoted in the report, starkly relays this predicament for starving Gazans:

He feeds me and shoots me. He feeds me and shoots me. People stand on the trucks, trying to fill their bags, and they get shot. We know what’s waiting for us, but we have no choice.

Meanwhile, as the report points out, the location of three of the GHF sites in the southwestern corner of the strip was consistent with Israeli government plans to concentrate Gazans in ‘humanitarian transit areas’, or even a ‘humanitarian city’, in Rafah, along the Egyptian border.

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In light of such horrors, conventional aid agencies have betrayed an essential impotence by contesting GHF through the demarcation of their professional terrain. In opposition to the material menace posed by the Israeli artillery that demarcated GHF sites, ethereal appeals to humanitarian principles and standards rapidly dissipated. GHF rightly identified resistance to its acceptance among aid agencies, but it was access to its own enclosures that was more decisive in Gaza. To recognise that there was something to the accusation of gatekeeping levelled at aid agencies is hardly, in this instance, a moral indictment against them, given the profile and record of the organisation seeking entry. Yet the gates have very often been opened to similar actors.

The Israeli government has denied that it contributed financially to GHF, which has remained secretive about some sources of its funding. But former ministers have stated otherwise. Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beitenu — a party that draws inspiration from Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism — has said that GHF received funding from Mossad, and from the Israeli Ministry of Defence, which he previously led. Just prior to the launch of GHF, The New York Times published an investigation into the organisation. Citing people involved in its conception, the authors described it as ‘an Israeli brainchild, first proposed by Israeli officials in the earliest weeks of the war’. A group referring to itself as Mikveh Yisrael Forum began to convene in Tel Aviv, in late 2023, with involvement of Israeli businessmen, as well as military officers. In July 2024, one of the group’s main organisers, Yotam HaCohen, assistant to a senior commander of COGAT – Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, the unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defence that controls entry of goods into Gaza – set out in an Israeli military journal his rationale for a controlled aid programme:

To meet the war’s goals over the long term, Israel needs to develop tools that will pull the rug out from under the Hamas movement… [which] will come once Israel begins to work directly with the civilian population, manages the distribution of aid itself, and begins to take responsibility for building the ‘day-after’.

By this point, he and other leading members of the group had been making this case to senior Israeli government and military officials for a few months, and they had met with Phil Reilly. Aid, it appeared, was to form the basis of a hearts-and-minds exercise.

Acknowledging the Israeli origins of GHF in an interview with The New Yorker, Amit Segal, a journalist close to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, riffed on the mendacious thesis of Israeli moral exceptionality: ‘Israel is the only country on earth that provides humanitarian aid to the enemy in the middle of a war. It’s the only country on earth. There isn’t a single country that ever did it’. Even were it not for his disregard of the explicit intention of Israeli leadership to starve Gazans – ‘the enemy’ – his claim would still have been historical hogwash. The tactical provision of aid in support of military occupation has been a frequent feature of modern warfare. The most obvious examples in the twenty-first century are the US aid programmes in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were by some way the largest in these countries. And, despite the handwringing of aid executives about political instrumentalisation of humanitarian action, NGOs and UN agencies were willing partners of the US military in both contexts.

The political currency of humanitarian reason grew in the late 1980s, with Western governments invoking the suffering of individuals in justification of their geostrategy. As NATO member-states invaded countries along their security frontier, and beyond, they sought to integrate aid provision into what were euphemistically called ‘stabilisation’ programmes. While large humanitarian agencies also disposed themselves to working more closely with Western militaries, this relationship had nonetheless been constitutive of the aid industry throughout the twentieth century. Notwithstanding one of its roots in Quaker pacifism, institutionalised humanitarianism grew in conjunction with Western military power, industry, and expertise. Focusing on Save the Children, historian Emily Baughan discusses this relationship in Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire (2021). Founded in 1919 by liberal-socialist pacifists, the organisation was conscripted to support British counter-insurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaysia, in the 1950s. And its senior ranks were filled with former members of the British Armed Forces until the 1980s. Today, though reduced, there is still a steady flow of military personnel into aid agencies – as medics, logisticians, and security analysts, in particular.

Led by the US, the Western military campaign in Somalia in 1992 was widely dubbed ‘Operation Shoot to Feed’, after The New York Times published an op-ed with this title, calling for invasion. In a radio interview in August of that year, a Belgian paratrooper returning from Somalia recounted his participation in aid distributions: ‘If you saw someone armed, you could fire, but in the air first. If he didn’t hand over his weapon, of course you could fire at him… But, towards the end, we would shoot straight away’. As aid agencies summoned Western military interventions in response to so-called ‘complex emergencies’ in the 1990s, they also more frequently sought armed protection for their staff and operations. It became more common for aid to be transported and distributed under watch of gun-wielding surveillants – often belonging to invading or host militaries, sometimes to local militias, and increasingly to private security firms.

The occupation of Iraq, from 2003 onwards, marked a watershed in the relationship of aid agencies to such firms. UNICEF, CARE, CARITAS, and the Red Cross all contracted ArmorGroup. Other firms, such as KROLL, Southern Cross, Erinys, and Blackwater, also worked with aid agencies, sometimes contracted indirectly through US government departments, to which they often provided military intelligence. By 2007, almost half of the largest multinational NGOs and UN agencies were directly contracting private security services in different sites across the world. In The Fort Bragg Cartel, published in August, Seth Harp provides a gut-wrenching account of the culture of US special-force operators, who played a growing role in the military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly under the presidency of Barack Obama. As they were granted licence to conduct covert operations anywhere abroad, except in Israel, their remit for summary executions expanded. And shielded from prosecution at home, they developed large illicit enterprises, not least the traffic of narcotics, for markets partly internal to their own social world of macho clubs and biker gangs, such as the anti-Muslim Infidels, identified by UG Solutions as a source of recruits for GHF. Often supplementing their income through private contracts, such hired assassins came to form the core of the paramilitary industry to which aid agencies turned for protection.

Questioned by Channel Four News about the reluctance of conventional aid agencies to work with GHF, its spokesperson, Chapin Fay, alluded to this history.

Are you trying to tell me that the United Nations have never worked with groups like ours or militarised and armed security personnel? Because that’s also false. Congo, Haiti, Bosnia. This is the only place on planet earth that the United Nations has a problem with the way we are distributing aid. The American military in Iraq delivered aid itself, and you didn’t hear this kind of criticism of it.

I spoke with an experienced aid worker about GHF’s militarisation of aid and Israel’s involvement in it as an occupying power. She has been managing relief operations in Gaza since October 2023. ‘It’s not new’, she affirmed. ‘But it’s really blatant’.

Yet, beyond the impudence, there does seem to have been something novel in operation. In the long-1990s, during which Western-liberal enthusiasm for ‘humanitarian intervention’ reached its peak, proponents of the militarisation of aid justified it on the basis of a compatibility of ends — albeit a circumstantial one. The more wide-eyed of aid workers believed that Western militaries could be mobilised in support of the survival and rights of those left vulnerable by conflict and disaster. Western military strategists, meanwhile, generally understood that aid could be instrumental to counter-insurgency, regime-change, and neoliberal economic restructuring; as ‘force multipliers’, aid agencies could contribute to the pacification of civilian resistance and the reproduction of labour. Even if some of those involved with GHF have understood their aim to be the physical maintenance of a compliant population, it was evidently not set up to win over hearts and minds. Rather, it was organised and run as an operation for the concentration of Palestinians, and their eradication, in one way or another, from Gaza.

There have been few other instances in which the promise of aid and protection has been used so instrumentally to draw desperate people to killing fields. In 2008 and 2009, displaced Tamils were lured by the Sri Lankan government to designated ‘no fire zones’, where they were repeatedly bombed. Thousands died. Several large aid agencies accepted the invitation to work in these areas. I was in Myanmar in 2012, when the government was negotiating with UNHCR — the UN Refugee Agency — and other aid organisations to establish semi-permanent camps for Rohingya escaping the massacres it had itself facilitated. At the time, fears that they might become complicit in a repetition of the horrors in Sri Lanka produced among aid workers in the country a considerable reluctance to participate.

However, as an organisation composed of different profit-making interests, invented to administer aid operations in support of an extermination campaign, GHF reflects an emerging tendency. Notwithstanding the continuities in humanitarian practice it represents, GHF embodies an anti-humanitarian ethos formed in the fractures of contemporary society.

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Already in July of last year, Michael Fakri, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, spoke of Palestinians being ‘forcibly transferred, corralled and concentrated’. Israel had ‘used starvation… in the north… only to starve, bombard and kill [them] in newly created refugee camps in the south’. Launched ten months later, GHF did not put an end to Israel’s campaign of starvation but rather became its necessary complement in a moment of strategic uncertainty, in which stated military plans were being frustrated and allied governments were expressing criticism more openly. But even had it not enabled mass displacement, concentration, and slaughter, even had it provided more relief to Palestinians, GHF would not have marked a break in logic. Starvation and the administration of aid are different points on the continuum of Israel’s long-standing ‘humanitarian government’ of Gaza.

Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation, and a contributor to the report with Forensic Architecture, Alex de Waal has proposed that ‘the verb “to starve” should be understood primarily in its transitive sense to indicate that some (powerful) people have starved other (powerless) people, leaving them to die – from hunger, disease, exhaustion or violence’. In Mass Starvation (2017), he provides an account of modern famines, suggesting that, while mass-hunger events were once the result of omission — failure of government to respond effectively to environmental and economic shocks — they now require ‘acts of commission — political decisions’. He attributes a ‘near-eclipse of famine’ since the late 1980s to a burgeoning humanitarian sensibility: partly to the activities of professional aid workers, but more so to ‘the decline of megalomania and of political attitudes that regard people as dispensable’, to ‘the rise of democratic freedoms and a beneficent multilateral world order’. However, he also cautions that an era of ‘benevolent governance’ may now be passing, with a ‘return to the older premise that faraway human suffering, including mass starvation, can be tolerated and ignored’.

In an essay published in London Review of Books in May, de Waal affirmed that urban starvation in Gaza had reached a level not seen anywhere in 80 years. He also noted continuities between Israel’s ‘commission’ of starvation and its blockade, which has kept Gazans in hunger since the early 1990s. In 2008, the Israeli Ministry of Defence produced a study — released only four years later, following a court order — into the number of calories needed by Palestinians in Gaza to avoid malnutrition. Entitled ‘Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip — The Red Lines’, it established 106 truckloads of food, medicine, hygiene products, and agricultural inputs as the ‘daily humanitarian portion’. It became formal policy to permit the survival of Gazans, while maintaining them in a state of weakness and desperation. COGAT has often kept rations below this minimum level, since 2007, when it tightened the blockade.

Prior to October 2023, the Israeli government generally justified its slow and generalised starvation of Gaza as a means of undermining Hamas for its own security. But scepticism should be aroused by its continuous efforts to ensure the financial viability of Hamas – including, in recent years, through petition for funding from the Qatari government. At the very least, the blockade suggests Israel’s pursuit of another objective: the subjection of life – and death – in Gaza to its own sovereign power.

During an online event about GHF, hosted by the Palestinian policy network Al-Shabaka in early August, Yara Asi, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida, spoke of ‘a process of creating demand among the people of Gaza for humanitarian aid’. ‘Long before October 7’, she pointed out, ‘[Gazans were] at a significant deficit in their ability to produce their own food… In previous wars, Israel had bombed food factories, bombed livestock… but also had a very integrated system of humanitarian aid to fill in some of the gaps’. And it had effectively enlisted aid agencies in this endeavour. Through the reproduction of humanitarian subjects, Israel was able to maintain regulatory control over Gaza’s population, regardless of its expansion. The formation of a stringent biopolitical regime – a minimalist government of life – would thus become the prelude to conversion into its most probable end: a necropolitical one. The callous arbitrariness of Israel’s blockade was demonstrative of this power. In conversation with the BBC, in 2012, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Yigal Palmor confessed that he ‘never understood why the Ministry of Defence actually forbade coriander to enter Gaza’.

Upon release of the Israeli study into ‘the red lines’ of hunger, Robert Turner, director of operations in Gaza for UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestinian refugees), described it as ‘contrary to humanitarian principles’. But, within the aid industry, these principles are understood as guiding the emergency provision of life-saving relief. ‘Development’ — associated with human progress, beyond the realm of survival — is considered a distinct sphere of activity, more political for its greater interference in social process. In what way, then, might humanitarian principles have served Gazans in their besieged condition?

 In his contribution to a forthcoming dossier on Western humanitarianism’s containment of politics, published by Alameda, social theorist Mark Duffield discusses the development of famine early-warning technology in the 1980s. He argues that it contributed to consolidating the role of aid agencies in ‘regulating death’. ‘For a given population’, he contends, ‘prediction requires the existence of a quantifiable mortality benchmark that, once breached, allows a humanitarian emergency to be officially declared’. However, always subject to racialising bias, this benchmark has steadily risen over recent decades. De Waal’s humanitarian history of the ‘near-eclipse of famine’ thus invites a counter-history that tells of the normalisation of hunger and excess deaths in the post-colony. For Duffield, the creation in 2004 of the UN Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), ‘widely celebrated as the “gold standard” of humanitarian practice’, was a testament to this normalisation. Relying on formulas described by de Waal as ‘arcane’, the IPC sets the benchmark for famine remarkably high. (Until this year, it had only declared four famines.) Yet, the onset of famine has been treated by governments, international organisations, aid agencies, and news media as a necessary trigger for the prioritisation of resources.

A declaration of famine in Gaza was finally issued by the IPC in mid-August. Validating the gravity of the situation, it nonetheless blurred the starvation of previous decades into the normal order of things. Promptly rejecting it as ‘a modern blood libel’, Netanyahu offered no opening for aid operations to be scaled up.

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What defines humanitarians? Aid workers tend to emphasise their principles, their competencies, their intentions, and their political allegiances (albeit to an abstract humanity, believed to exist beyond ideology). And all of these should no doubt be considered in even the most unabashedly conceptualist of interpretations. But what of their social function, their relation to social structure?

Understood as an ethos forged through the novel social relations established under capitalism — through the kinds of interdependency brought about by capitalist production and exchange — humanitarianism is an expression of modern inequality and scarcity. Generating an affective, if not also material, tie between those with relative power and objects of their compassion, it simultaneously reifies and obscures the distinction between their respective social positions. It thus sets up an implicit form of government without representation, which has served a specific function in capitalism’s self-development: the reproduction of labour, through its maintenance of the surplus of humanity that, excluded from wage-employment, waits in the wings of the formal economy. As such, humanitarian government became the necessary counterpart to primitive accumulation during the most expansive phase of colonial imperialism.

In the decades following the Second World War, European states used overseas aid to maintain international influence as their colonial empires waned. But aid was also a means of consolidating imperial networks, particularly for the US, which sought channels for its surplus produce and capital. It was in the 1980s that the contraction of job markets and the growth of precarious informality on the periphery of the world-economy, accelerated by debt crisis, produced a systemic ‘necessity’ for expansion of humanitarian government to enable the reproduction of labour, as well as the geographical containment of underemployed populations. Modern aid already had a long history, with institutions that had gained strength with the development of mass society. But this was the moment in which, through the greater influx of Western surplus capital, aid agencies developed factory-like characteristics of industry, expanding their commercial infrastructure, accelerating professionalisation, rationalising their supply base, and standardising their practices and ‘goods’. As the state-engineered fragmentation of labour contributed to a dissolution of social-revolutionary horizons and a moralisation of politics, the aid industry became the embodiment of a humanitarian ethos shaping structures of feeling under neoliberalism.

Immanent in the aid industry, however, elements of an incipient anti-humanitarian tendency gradually asserted themselves. The practical jurisdiction over human lives is prerequisite to making them disposable. But it is specific interests that would use humanitarian government as a basis for initiating a more sinister form of demographic management.

Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, capitalist democracies have been going through what Perry Anderson, earlier this year in London Review of Books, called ‘regime change’. Considering the current possibility of changes in ‘the existing mode of production’, he suggested that they might not occur in step with the formulation of a ‘coherent set of economic and political ideas’. But he barely acknowledged the fundamental transformations in the world of work that underlie challenges to neoliberalism’s erstwhile regime. Flailing political leaders, with neither the courage nor the imagination to revive stagnating economies, have responded sympathetically to demands from advanced fractions of capital to enable greater ‘flexibility’ in labour markets. As precarious informality has massively increased in Western societies too, certain surplus populations have become superfluous, losing their instrumental function in accumulation in the formal economy. The growth of superfluous populations — not to be reproduced, but rather excised — has contributed more than anything else, over the last decade or so, to an explosion of anti-humantiarian sentiment, expressed most viscerally by political movements of the new right.

It is not that, in the period of their industrial expansion, aid agencies aligned themselves intentionally with groups seeking the permanent exclusion of working society’s human excess. It is rather that, in pursuit of money and influence, and often inspired by ideology, most of them positioned themselves as appendices of government and big business, incubating the interests of each, which now increasingly tend towards such exclusion.

In the twenty-first century, aid executives have spoken with enthusiasm about ‘leveraging’ the expertise and assets of private sectors that have done most to deconstruct the modern work society, by eroding its basis in formal wage-employment. Many aid agencies now manage portfolios of private investment funds, often in partnership with banks and asset management firms, such as BlackRock and Vanguard. As they have prioritised cash transfers over other forms of aid, in the name of consumer choice, they have worked closely with card-payment companies, such as Visa and Mastercard. Insurance companies, such as Allianz, Aeon, and AXA, have supported them in the development of rapid-response financing mechanisms. Tech firms, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, have contributed logistics capabilities, integrated artificial intelligence into their management systems, and granted them access to cloud and blockchain technology. And management consultancies have guided their organisational development, strategic planning, and human-resource administration.

Published in June, a report by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, presented information on the contribution of private firms to Israel’s ‘economy of genocide’. She cites many of the aid industry’s biggest corporate partners, which have supported Israel’s war-making through investment, surveillance infrastructure, and data provision, as well as cloud storage (described by an Israeli colonel, quoted in the report, as ‘a weapon in every sense’). The report does not mention Boston Consulting Group, which has been almost omnipresent in the aid industry over the last couple of decades. BCG participated in the set-up of Safe Reach Solutions and GHF, after being engaged by a subsidiary of McNally Capital, a private equity firm with a stake in the former. In July, the Financial Times revealed that BCG staff, together with members of the Tony Blair Institute, had been involved in a project with Israeli businessmen to model plans for the reconstruction of Gaza, which included costs for relocating its population to Somalia, Somaliland, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. Plan International, Save the Children, the International Rescue Committee, and the World Food Programme subsequently suspended activities with BCG, pending its own investigation into the project. Some other aid agencies did not even take this measure. By mid-November, Save the Children had resumed its relationship with BCG.

As more private firms have entered the humanitarian marketplace, the aid industry has sought to share in the benefits of their competitive advantages while emphasising its distinct characteristics. Terms such as ‘coordination’, ‘complementarity’, and even ‘interoperability’ are used to denote a division of labour between different actors that might involve themselves in the provision of aid. But aid agencies tend not to acknowledge openly the potentially unfavourable political and programmatic implications of their partnership with more powerful institutional interests. And, with few exceptions, this has produced a passivity in their relationship with governments and businesses alike.

In May 2024, the US military constructed a floating pier, extending into the Mediterranean Sea from the Netzarim Corridor, with the stated purpose of using it to get aid into Gaza. The initiative, which soon proved a practical failure, had been proposed by Fogbow, a private company involving US military veterans, launched in 2022 claiming to enable ‘humanitarian access and operations in challenging environments’. Critical of Fogbow – which has also been active in Sudan – conventional aid agencies were unusually reluctant to engage with it. And they generally seemed reluctant to participate in any activity with GHF that could be perceived as coordination.

However, in early August, The New Humanitarian published an email relating details of a meeting of senior aid executives with representatives of GHF. Cosigned by Tom Hart, the president and CEO of InterAction (an alliance of American NGOs), and Joyce Msuya, the second-ranking official of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, it was addressed to the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (the principal coordination forum for emergency response, involving UN agencies and the largest NGOs). It referred to agreement on the need to ‘lower the public rhetoric’ and to ‘operate in parallel, complementary ways’. Online responses to the publication from a few aid workers identified this as normal ‘humanitarian diplomacy’, an application of humanitarian principles. A totem of ideology before an operational tactic, humanitarian neutrality elevates the pragmatism of its exponents to a virtue unassailable to properly political concerns. Openness to speaking with everyone – politicians and priests, elders and empresarios, warlords and workers– becomes not just the necessary means for professional humanitarians to get their job done, but also the surest indication of their even-handed commitment to humanity.

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I spoke with Tammam Aloudat, CEO of The New Humanitarian, who reported on the aid executives’ meeting with GHF. ‘Humanitarians are stuck on their slogans’, he told me. ‘These can be useful in some circumstances, but not in a genocide’. I heard a similar assertion from James Smith, a British medic and researcher, who has been deployed to Gaza by aid agencies twice since October 2023. ‘There is no such thing as a functional humanitarianism in genocide’, he said, clearly piqued by his experience. ‘But there was nothing functional to humanity about the aid system here before’, he went on. ‘Working under conditions of occupation – regardless of the designation of genocide – there is an intrinsic complicity that you then need to undo to the greatest extent possible’. As Smith recognised, the history of catastrophe in Gaza exposes not only the limits of contemporary humanitarianism, but also its contradictions. ‘More than anywhere else in the world right now’, Smith averred, ‘Gaza demonstrates the ways in which humanitarianism becomes a form of violence’.

A product of contestation, as well as domination, international humanitarian institutions bear the ambiguous legacy of modern reformist egalitarianism. This was demonstrated early in the war on Gaza by the equivocation of large aid agencies, financially dependent on states and ruling classes complicit in it. But it is international humanitarian law that has been most undermined by Israel’s unregulated campaign of destruction.

Notwithstanding the imperial origins of IHL, it has been reconfigured, at various points in its development, by struggles ‘from below’. Legal scholars, such as Balakrishnan Rajagopal and Amanda Alexander, have shown how anti-colonial and Third-Worldist movements influenced international law. Through the Geneva Protocols of 1977, for example, national liberation struggles played a key role in forcing recognition of guerrillas as combatants, subject to the provisions of IHL, albeit only under certain conditions. But while IHL has often been invoked in campaigns to hold powerful states to account for their violence, it has also been designed and applied to reproduce global hierarchies – constituted not only by states, but also by unsovereign peoples.

In an article published by n+1 in January 2024, lawyers Jake Romm and Dylan Saba eloquently discuss the essential conservatism of IHL, arguing that it subordinates the rights of those seeking liberation from colonial rule to maintenance of the formal status quo. Israel has thus been able to deploy ‘the obfuscating discourse of proportionality’, violently appropriating the right to self-defence, while leaving Palestinians with no legal recourse to violent contestation of an intolerable normality. The limits of conduct established under IHL, Romm and Saba contend, ‘condemn entire peoples to the rule of violence, to a life beyond the very limits that the law purports to set’. That is, the very protective principles of IHL are conditional upon the possibility of their de facto contravention in the service of hegemony. And IHL has rarely, if ever, appeared so dependent on a hegemonic power as it has appeared over the last two years, amid a genocide enabled by the US.

To recognise this contradiction is not to deny the political salience of appealing to legality as such. (‘Cynicism is something we cannot afford’, wrote legal theorist Shahd Hammouri in February, in discussion of Palestine and international law.) Rather, it is to endorse the instrumentalisation of IHL from below against its instrumentalisation from above. It is to accept that, supported by overwhelming evidence and the authoritative judgement of lawyers, scholars, rights organisations, and UN commissions, the identification of Israel’s campaign as a genocide need not reflect unbending commitment to legal principle so much as political calculation. And a similarly tactical posture is to be expected towards other humanitarian institutions. A British-Palestinian human-rights activist recently spoke to me of the current need to strengthen UNRWA, even as she recognised its historical role in managing Palestinians as a population excluded from provisions of international refugee law. The virtue of this pragmatism lies in its guidance by an explicit politics of liberation. ‘The answer is not simply to allow UNRWA to operate and let the aid flow in’, affirmed Tareq Baconi, president of Al-Shabaka, in July. ‘Rather, it should be to undo the system of control and killing that Israel has forced on Palestinians’.

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In the conclusion to Mass Starvation, de Waal adjures humanitarians to ‘turn conservative… and applaud the huge benefits brought by the liberal-humanitarian world order’. But such conservatism would imply a complacency about the contribution of humanitarian institutions not only to Israel’s decades-long biopolitical government of Palestinians, but also to a nascent ecology of genocide – in Gaza and beyond. It is from ‘the liberal-humanitarian world order’ that today’s anti-humanitarianism emerged. And the destruction of Gaza tells of this antithetical movement. In doing so, it presents an existential question to the aid industry, which has become a potential hindrance to accumulation with the expansion of superfluous populations. It also, then, seems to prefigure a more catastrophic social reality under capitalism.

In the twenty-first century, a growing proportion of Palestinians in Gaza has been transformed into an exemplary superfluous population. The Israeli economy has long benefitted from the superexploitation of Palestinian workers. But cheap labour has increasingly been imported from other regions of the world – agricultural workers from Thailand, domestic workers from Philippines, India, and Nepal, construction workers from Romania and China. Schemes of bonded labour, akin to the kafala system, which have entrapped Palestinian workers through debt, despite Israeli legislation prohibiting them, now subject other foreign workers to a similar plight. And so, while Palestinians in Gaza have remained largely dependent upon Israeli circuits of capital – as well as foreign aid – their instrumentality to accumulation in Israel has reduced. This is the context in which, by participating in the destruction of Gaza, transnational capitalists are not only seeking new profits, but also defending the interests of their class. Notwithstanding the specific political, geostrategic, and ethno-religious factors in its execution, the genocide in Gaza represents a foreboding model for the future management of superfluous populations everywhere.

But the presage of a Gazafication of the world should also be understood as pregnant with the possibility of a generalised negation of the tendency to genocide. The denial of this would imply a reification of Palestinian victimhood, as would the denial of agency in Palestinian political organisation, the denial of consequence to its particular contemporary forms and strategies. But, as humanitarian institutions have proven incapable of effectively contesting the emergent anti-humanitarianism, the fact of Palestinian endurance, forced by experience of violence and dispossession, can inspire not only international solidarity, but also future struggles. Among the cruellest of collective acts, the commission of mass starvation also betrays the impossibility of extinguishing the base human impulse to emancipation. In the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish hunger symbolises not only injustice, but also the militancy of Palestinian endeavour to survive. The final lines of ‘Identity Card’, published in 1964, are emphatic: ‘Beware… / Beware… / Of my hunger / And my anger’. Spectacular mass-starvation events, as de Waal warns, might be returning. But now, as in the past, it is in the struggle for food that the seeds of freedom can be found.