{"id":17440,"date":"2025-12-02T12:22:54","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T12:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/?p=17440"},"modified":"2026-04-22T17:11:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T17:11:37","slug":"quem-sao-os-humanitarios","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/type-article\/who-are-the-humanitarians\/","title":{"rendered":"Quem s\u00e3o os humanit\u00e1rios?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>This article was originally published on Tribune.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-post-date\"><time datetime=\"2025-12-02T12:22:54+00:00\">dezembro 2, 2025<\/time><\/div>\n\n\n<p>___<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"536\" src=\"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-1024x536.jpg.webp\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-28242\" style=\"aspect-ratio:1.9104976367522655;width:685px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-1024x536.jpg.webp 1024w, https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-300x157.jpg.webp 300w, https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-768x402.jpg.webp 768w, https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-18x9.jpg.webp 18w, https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-600x314.jpg.webp 600w, https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1.jpg.webp 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<div style=\"height:20px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2018temporary closures\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Within days of the initiation of GHF\u2019s operations, medics at hospitals and makeshift clinics in southern Gaza began reporting overwhelming caseloads of intentional traumas \u2014 in particular, gunshot wounds to the head, neck, and thorax \u2014 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 \u2018the path to aid is the path to death\u2019. Her husband had recently been shot on his way to a GHF site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In early August, M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res launched a report on its response to these attacks. \u2018The medical data is clear\u2019, it affirmed. \u2018This is not aid. It is orchestrated killing\u2019. 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: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>We walked for hours. As you\u2019re walking, you cry automatically. Not just for yourself \u2014 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 \u2014 everyone \u2014 was exhausted.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>In June, Israeli soldiers divulged to <em>Haaretz <\/em>that they had been ordered to shoot unarmed Palestinians at food distribution sites, which one described as \u2018a killing field\u2019. GHF presented the Israeli Defence Forces as providing \u2018perimeter security\u2019 at the sites. But it denied any responsibility for the injuries sustained by Palestinians in their vicinity. \u2018There have been zero casualties at our sites. We have never fired a weapon at anyone\u2019, insisted GHF spokesperson, Chapin Fay, in an interview with Channel Four News, in mid-August.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This claim was contradicted by Michael Milshtein, former head of the Department of Palestinian Affairs in the IDF\u2019s military-intelligence wing, who told <em>The New Yorker<\/em> that there were almost-daily shootings \u2018from both the IDF and American contractors\u2019. Anthony Aguilar, a widely cited whistleblower, who worked for GHF for a brief stint, recounts the IDF shooting at \u2018a massive tidal wave of people&#8230; rushing towards the site, because they [were] starving\u2019. 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. \u2018If you\u2019re threatened, shoot\u2019, 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. \u2018I think you hit one\u2019, shouts the first. \u2018Hell yeah, boy\u2019, cheers the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s 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 \u2018a degenerate who joined the army to inflict pain on the people who inflicted pain on us\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2018Those do not look like aid workers\u2019, Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, told <em>Haaretz<\/em>, referring to GHF contractors. \u2018And they\u2019re not going to look like aid workers to the local population\u2019. 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 \u2018humanitarian principles\u2019 that form what observers \u2013 sympathisers, as well as critics \u2013 have often called their \u2018creed\u2019. Designed to increase market share, brand is thus also deployed by aid agencies to maintain staff security and <em>esprit de corps<\/em>. There is a faith that professional humanitarians tend to invest in their categorical differentiation from other functionaries of crisis management \u2013 military personnel, in particular. And, though often dismissed as a reflection of wilful <em>na\u00efvet\u00e9<\/em>, the hope engendered in them by their self-identity cannot so readily be disaggregated from the effective pursuit of their ideals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On 1 July, 171 NGOs, from a range of countries, issued a joint call for GHF to be dismantled. Citing a warning from Sphere \u2013 which provided the first definition of minimum professional standards for emergency relief, in 1997 \u2013 they contended that GHF \u2018does not adhere to core humanitarian standards and principles\u2019. In a rebuttal to GHF\u2019s criticism of its report on attacks at distribution sites, MSF also averred that the new organisation \u2018has operated in a manner that has seriously violated humanitarian principles\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In defence of its humanitarian credentials, GHF has defined itself as \u2018neutral and independent\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 <em>the active targeting of civilians<\/em>. Another testimony, quoted in the report, starkly relays this predicament for starving Gazans:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>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&#8217;s waiting for us, but we have no choice.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2018humanitarian transit areas\u2019, or even a \u2018humanitarian city\u2019, in Rafah, along the Egyptian border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2014 a party that draws inspiration from Ze\u2019ev Jabotinsky\u2019s Revisionist Zionism \u2014 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, <em>The New York Times <\/em>published an investigation into the organisation. Citing people involved in its conception, the authors described it as \u2018an Israeli brainchild, first proposed by Israeli officials in the earliest weeks of the war\u2019. 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\u2019s main organisers, Yotam HaCohen, assistant to a senior commander of COGAT \u2013 Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, the unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defence that controls entry of goods into Gaza \u2013 set out in an Israeli military journal his rationale for a controlled aid programme:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>To meet the war\u2019s goals over the long term, Israel needs to develop tools that will pull the rug out from under the Hamas movement&#8230; [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 \u2018day-after\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Acknowledging the Israeli origins of GHF in an interview with <em>The New Yorker<\/em>, Amit Segal, a journalist close to the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, riffed on the mendacious thesis of Israeli moral exceptionality: \u2018Israel is the only country on earth that provides humanitarian aid to the enemy in the middle of a war. It\u2019s the only country on earth. There isn\u2019t a single country that ever did it\u2019. Even were it not for his disregard of the explicit intention of Israeli leadership to starve Gazans \u2013 \u2018the enemy\u2019 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2018stabilisation\u2019 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 <em>Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire <\/em>(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 \u2013 as medics, logisticians, and security analysts, in particular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Led by the US, the Western military campaign in Somalia in 1992 was widely dubbed \u2018Operation Shoot to Feed\u2019, after <em>The New York Times <\/em>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: \u2018If you saw someone armed, you could fire, but in the air first. If he didn\u2019t hand over his weapon, of course you could fire at him&#8230; But, towards the end, we would shoot straight away\u2019. As aid agencies summoned Western military interventions in response to so-called \u2018complex emergencies\u2019 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 \u2013 often belonging to invading or host militaries, sometimes to local militias, and increasingly to private security firms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 <em>The Fort Bragg Cartel<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Questioned by Channel Four News about the reluctance of conventional aid agencies to work with GHF, its spokesperson, Chapin Fay, alluded to this history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>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\u2019s 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\u2019t hear this kind of criticism of it.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>I spoke with an experienced aid worker about GHF\u2019s militarisation of aid and Israel\u2019s involvement in it as an occupying power. She has been managing relief operations in Gaza since October 2023. \u2018It\u2019s not new\u2019, she affirmed. \u2018But it\u2019s really blatant\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yet, beyond the impudence, there does seem to have been something novel in operation. In the long-1990s, during which Western-liberal enthusiasm for \u2018humanitarian intervention\u2019 reached its peak, proponents of the militarisation of aid justified it on the basis of a compatibility of ends \u2014 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 \u2018force multipliers\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2018no fire zones\u2019, 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 \u2014 the UN Refugee Agency \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Already in July of last year, Michael Fakri, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, spoke of Palestinians being \u2018forcibly transferred, corralled and concentrated\u2019. Israel had \u2018used starvation\u2026 in the north\u2026 only to starve, bombard and kill [them] in newly created refugee camps in the south\u2019. Launched ten months later, GHF did not put an end to Israel\u2019s 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\u2019s long-standing \u2018humanitarian government\u2019 of Gaza.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation, and a contributor to the report with Forensic Architecture, Alex de Waal has proposed that \u2018the verb \u201cto starve\u201d should be understood primarily in its transitive sense to indicate that some (powerful) people have starved other (powerless) people, leaving them to die \u2013 from hunger, disease, exhaustion or violence\u2019. In <em>Mass Starvation<\/em> (2017), he provides an account of modern famines, suggesting that, while mass-hunger events were once the result of omission \u2014 failure of government to respond effectively to environmental and economic shocks \u2014 they now require \u2018acts of commission \u2014 political decisions\u2019. He attributes a \u2018near-eclipse of famine\u2019 since the late 1980s to a burgeoning humanitarian sensibility: partly to the activities of professional aid workers, but more so to \u2018the decline of megalomania and of political attitudes that regard people as dispensable\u2019, to \u2018the rise of democratic freedoms and a beneficent multilateral world order\u2019. However, he also cautions that an era of \u2018benevolent governance\u2019 may now be passing, with a \u2018return to the older premise that faraway human suffering, including mass starvation, can be tolerated and ignored\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In an essay published in <em>London Review of Books <\/em>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\u2019s \u2018commission\u2019 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 \u2014 released only four years later, following a court order \u2014 into the number of calories needed by Palestinians in Gaza to avoid malnutrition. Entitled \u2018Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip \u2014 The Red Lines\u2019, it established 106 truckloads of food, medicine, hygiene products, and agricultural inputs as the \u2018daily humanitarian portion\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2013 including, in recent years, through petition for funding from the Qatari government. At the very least, the blockade suggests Israel\u2019s pursuit of another objective: the subjection of life \u2013 and death \u2013 in Gaza to its own sovereign power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2018a process of creating demand among the people of Gaza for humanitarian aid\u2019. \u2018Long before October 7\u2019, she pointed out, \u2018[Gazans were] at a significant deficit in their ability to produce their own food&#8230; In previous wars, Israel had bombed food factories, bombed livestock&#8230; but also had a very integrated system of humanitarian aid to fill in some of the gaps\u2019. 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\u2019s population, regardless of its expansion. The formation of a stringent biopolitical regime \u2013 a minimalist government of life \u2013 would thus become the prelude to conversion into its most probable end: a necropolitical one. The callous arbitrariness of Israel\u2019s blockade was demonstrative of this power. In conversation with the BBC, in 2012, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Yigal Palmor confessed that he \u2018never understood why the Ministry of Defence actually forbade coriander to enter Gaza\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Upon release of the Israeli study into \u2018the red lines\u2019 of hunger, Robert Turner, director of operations in Gaza for UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestinian refugees), described it as \u2018contrary to humanitarian principles\u2019. But, within the aid industry, these principles are understood as guiding the emergency provision of life-saving relief. \u2018Development\u2019 \u2014 associated with human progress, beyond the realm of survival \u2014 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;In his contribution to a forthcoming dossier on Western humanitarianism\u2019s 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 \u2018regulating death\u2019. \u2018For a given population\u2019, he contends, \u2018prediction requires the existence of a quantifiable mortality benchmark that, once breached, allows a humanitarian emergency to be officially declared\u2019. However, always subject to racialising bias, this benchmark has steadily risen over recent decades. De Waal\u2019s humanitarian history of the \u2018near-eclipse of famine\u2019 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), \u2018widely celebrated as the \u201cgold standard\u201d of humanitarian practice\u2019, was a testament to this normalisation. Relying on formulas described by de Waal as \u2018arcane\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2018a modern blood libel\u2019, Netanyahu offered no opening for aid operations to be scaled up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Understood as an ethos forged through the novel social relations established under capitalism \u2014 through the kinds of interdependency brought about by capitalist production and exchange \u2014 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 <em>government without representation<\/em>, which has served a specific function in capitalism\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 &#8216;necessity\u2019 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 \u2018goods\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since the financial crisis of 2007-2008, capitalist democracies have been going through what Perry Anderson, earlier this year in <em>London Review of Books<\/em>, called \u2018regime change\u2019. Considering the current possibility of changes in \u2018the existing mode of production\u2019, he suggested that they might not occur in step with the formulation of a \u2018coherent set of economic and political ideas\u2019. But he barely acknowledged the fundamental transformations in the world of work that underlie challenges to neoliberalism\u2019s 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 \u2018flexibility\u2019 in labour markets. As precarious informality has massively increased in Western societies too, certain surplus populations have become <em>superfluous<\/em>, losing their instrumental function in accumulation in the formal economy. The growth of superfluous populations \u2014 not to be reproduced, but rather excised \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the twenty-first century, aid executives have spoken with enthusiasm about \u2018leveraging\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Published in June, a report by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, presented information on the contribution of private firms to Israel\u2019s \u2018economy of genocide<a>\u2019.<\/a> She cites many of the aid industry\u2019s biggest corporate partners, which have supported Israel\u2019s war-making through investment, surveillance infrastructure, and data provision, as well as cloud storage (described by an Israeli colonel, quoted in the report, as \u2018a weapon in every sense\u2019). 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2018coordination\u2019, \u2018complementarity\u2019, and even \u2018interoperability\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2018humanitarian access and operations in challenging environments\u2019. Critical of Fogbow \u2013 which has also been active in Sudan \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, in early August, <em>The New Humanitarian<\/em> 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 \u2018lower the public rhetoric\u2019 and to \u2018operate in parallel, complementary ways\u2019. Online responses to the publication from a few aid workers identified this as normal \u2018humanitarian diplomacy\u2019, 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 \u2013 politicians and priests, elders and <em>empresarios<\/em>, warlords and workers\u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I spoke with Tammam Aloudat, CEO of <em>The New Humanitarian<\/em>, who reported on the aid executives\u2019 meeting with GHF<em>. <\/em>\u2018Humanitarians are stuck on their slogans\u2019, he told me. \u2018These can be useful in some circumstances, but not in a genocide\u2019. 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. \u2018There is no such thing as a functional humanitarianism in genocide\u2019, he said, clearly piqued by his experience. \u2018But there was nothing functional to humanity about the aid system here before\u2019, he went on. \u2018Working under conditions of occupation \u2013 regardless of the designation of genocide \u2013 there is an intrinsic complicity that you then need to undo to the greatest extent possible\u2019. As Smith recognised, the history of catastrophe in Gaza exposes not only the limits of contemporary humanitarianism, but also its contradictions. \u2018More than anywhere else in the world right now\u2019, Smith averred, \u2018Gaza demonstrates the ways in which humanitarianism becomes a form of violence\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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\u2019s unregulated campaign of destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Notwithstanding the imperial origins of IHL, it has been reconfigured, at various points in its development, by struggles \u2018from below\u2019. 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 \u2013 constituted not only by states, but also by unsovereign peoples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In an article published by <em>n+1 <\/em>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 <em>status quo<\/em>. Israel has thus been able to deploy \u2018the obfuscating discourse of proportionality\u2019, 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, \u2018condemn entire peoples to the rule of violence, to a life beyond the very limits that the law purports to set\u2019. That is, the very protective principles of IHL are conditional upon the possibility of their <em>de facto <\/em>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To recognise this contradiction is not to deny the political salience of appealing to legality as such. (\u2018Cynicism is something we cannot afford\u2019, 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\u2019s 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 <em>this <\/em>pragmatism lies in its guidance by an explicit politics of liberation. \u2018The answer is not simply to allow UNRWA to operate and let the aid flow in\u2019, affirmed Tareq Baconi, president of Al-Shabaka, in July. \u2018Rather, it should be to undo the system of control and killing that Israel has forced on Palestinians\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the conclusion to <em>Mass Starvation<\/em>, de Waal adjures humanitarians to \u2018turn conservative&#8230; and applaud the huge benefits brought by the liberal-humanitarian world order\u2019. But such conservatism would imply a complacency about the contribution of humanitarian institutions not only to Israel\u2019s decades-long biopolitical government of Palestinians, but also to a nascent ecology of genocide \u2013 in Gaza and beyond. It is from \u2018the liberal-humanitarian world order\u2019 that today\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2013 agricultural workers from Thailand, domestic workers from Philippines, India, and Nepal, construction workers from Romania and China. Schemes of bonded labour, akin to the <em>kafala <\/em>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 \u2013 as well as foreign aid \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 \u2018Identity Card\u2019, published in 1964, are emphatic: \u2018Beware\u2026 \/ Beware\u2026 \/ Of my hunger \/ And my anger\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n<div data-is-block=\"jet-engine\/dynamic-image\"><div class=\"jet-listing jet-listing-dynamic-image\" ><a href=\"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/type-article\/who-are-the-humanitarians\/\" class=\"jet-listing-dynamic-image__link\"><img decoding=\"async\" width=\"1200\" height=\"628\" data-src=\"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1.jpg.webp\" class=\"jet-listing-dynamic-image__img attachment-full size-full wp-post-image lazyload\" alt=\"thumb- juliano&#039;s article - who are the humanitarians\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1.jpg.webp 1200w, https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-300x157.jpg.webp 300w, https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-1024x536.jpg.webp 1024w, https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-768x402.jpg.webp 768w, https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-18x9.jpg.webp 18w, https:\/\/alameda.institute\/wp-content\/smush-webp\/2025\/12\/thumb-julianos-article-who-are-the-humanitarians-1-1-600x314.jpg.webp 600w\" data-sizes=\"auto\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 1200px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 1200\/628;\" data-original-sizes=\"(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px\" \/><\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This article was originally published on Tribune. ___ 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":28242,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"author-name":"Juliano Fiori","choose-language":"EN","wds_primary_category":36,"wds_primary_alameda-themes":0,"wds_primary_projects":0,"wds_primary_dynamic-publications-cat":0,"wds_primary_type-tax":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[22,26,109,172],"alameda-themes":[166,168],"projects":[170,163],"dynamic-publications-cat":[],"type-tax":[],"class_list":["post-17440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-type-article","tag-en","tag-humanitarianism","tag-juliano-fiori","tag-politics-of-aid","alameda-themes-development-and-de-development","alameda-themes-sovereignty-order-and-justice","projects-emergency","projects-the-limits-of-humanitarianism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17440"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28244,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17440\/revisions\/28244"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17440"},{"taxonomy":"alameda-themes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/alameda-themes?post=17440"},{"taxonomy":"projects","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects?post=17440"},{"taxonomy":"dynamic-publications-cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dynamic-publications-cat?post=17440"},{"taxonomy":"type-tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alameda.institute\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type-tax?post=17440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}