Inside Gaza’s ‘Death Traps’
A US-backed scheme forces hungry Palestinians to trek kilometres for food aid. Many never make it back
Heba Saleh in Cairo, Alison Killing, James Sandy, Aditi Bhandari, Gaku Ito and Chris Campbell in London and Neri Zilber in Tel Aviv
JUL 14 2025
Financial Times
Five times, Jihad has trekked through southern Gaza — past Israeli tanks, soldiers and sometimes drones overhead — to reach aid sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Five times, he has queued in caged alleys on the approach to the distribution sites, jostling alongside thousands of men preparing for the frantic sprint to snatch whatever food they can.
Five times, he has come away empty-handed. On one occasion, Jihad said a man walking beside him on the approach to a GHF hub in Khan Younis was shot: “His blood and intestines spurted all over me.”
On another, after he finally managed to grab a box of supplies, he was robbed at knifepoint by a Palestinian. “I have stopped going there, because what happens is beyond anything you can imagine,” said the 26-year-old medical technician, who did not want to use his full name.
Since GHF launched in May, the US and Israel have championed the controversial scheme as a lifeline for Gaza — a way to alleviate near-starvation in the shattered enclave, bypass the UN and stop aid getting to Hamas.
But testimony, satellite imagery and verified video compiled by the Financial Times show how for the likes of Jihad and much of Gaza’s 2.1mn population, the scheme has only deepened their desperation, forcing hungry Palestinians into a dangerous journey from which many never return.
Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked Palestinians travelling to the GHF’s centres, according to local authorities. More than 500 people have been killed, Gaza’s health ministry has said, and thousands injured.
Many of the casualties have been shot on the designated approach routes to the sites, which GHF publishes in maps on its Facebook page.
But Gazans, many of whom are on the brink of famine after the multi-month Israeli blockade that preceded GHF’s introduction, say the system not only risks their lives but fails to provide anywhere near enough aid, pitting thousands of people against each other in a free for all to grab food.
The GHF centres are “death traps”, said Hassan Abdallah, a barber displaced with his family to Al-Mawasi on the southern coast.
“If you secure any food and avoid being shot by the Israelis, you may not escape the gangs waiting outside,” said Abdallah, who has brought back supplies from only one of his seven trips.
GHF, which last month raised $30mn from the US, breaks with traditional humanitarian models. The operation was developed with involvement from Boston Consulting Group, though the consultancy has said the work was carried out by some of its staff without proper approvals, and has fired two partners who led the project.
GHF operates four sites concentrated in southern Gaza and staffed at least in part by US security contractors, working under Israeli military supervision.
The signal for Gazans to set off from their tents or the ruins of their homes often comes from GHF’s Facebook page, where it announces the opening times of its distribution sites.
These posts sometimes appear in the middle of the night and can give less than 30 minutes notice, an FT analysis found. A second post, often published only minutes after the scheduled opening time, announces the site is closed, with all aid distributed. In some cases, GHF has declared the site closed even before it was due to open.
Frequent internet outages in Gaza can also make it difficult for Palestinians even to access Facebook to see the posts.
But for aid seekers, who must walk for kilometres along barely discernible routes whose landmarks have been flattened by Israel’s 21-month offensive, there is little room for miscalculation.
“You don’t see where you are going in the dark,” said Jihad. “The route is provided as a map on your phone screen but on the ground the roads are all destroyed and you have to take a chance. So either you are on the right route, or you die.”
As people approach the GHF centres, they are expected to wait in a designated area for the sites to open, often in active military zones.
It is here that the most acute danger starts. Many Palestinians say they have been shot at by Israeli troops, with crowds swelling and jostling — often still in the dark — to get as close as possible and increase their chances of securing food.
Mohammed Daoud, who worked as a flower arranger before the war, said every time he has travelled to a distribution site there has been shooting. “It is not just once or twice. They give you a certain hour for the gates to open, but suddenly a tank or quadcopter drone could start shooting.”
Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, emergency co-ordinator in Gaza for MSF, which runs field hospitals in the strip, said he sees “an army of people” heading to the GHF centres before dawn every day.
That has been followed by the sound of shooting. “It’s like three shots, ‘pa-pa-pa’, then wait, ‘pa-pa-pa’, then wait,” he said. The casualties start arriving by foot or “or they are being taken by donkey carts”.
Goher Rahbour, a British surgeon who volunteered at southern Gaza’s Nasser Medical Complex in June, said the hospital’s six operating theatres were often filled with casualties returning from trips to GHF sites with bullet wounds.
“We will be having our 7.45am general surgical meeting, and that’s when the mass casualty alarm will go off in the hospital,” he said. “And we’re going to theatres.”
Describing the general rules of engagement in Gaza, Joel Carmel of Breaking the Silence, an organisation of former Israel Defense Forces soldiers that campaigns against the occupation of Palestinian territories, said: “If it’s a man of fighting age . . . if they get close or if they’re in an area where they’re not supposed to be, [the orders] are shoot to kill.”
The IDF has acknowledged opening fire at crowds of Gazans who approached them in a “threatening” manner.
But it denied that its troops deliberately fired towards civilians, and said the death count is significantly lower than that put forward by Gazan health officials.
One senior military official disputed the characterisation of the access routes, saying they were clearly marked with signage, sand ridges and barbed wire.
“Off the road are combat zones . . . on which troops may fire warning shots and after that work to defend themselves,” the official said. “This is making sure there is no threat to our forces.”
The IDF has previously said it will examine and take necessary action on allegations of wrongdoing.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Saturday 31 people were killed and dozens injured “in the latest mass casualty incident linked to food distribution sites”. It said it was the largest “influx of fatalities” since its field hospital in southern Gaza began operations last year.
The UN and most major aid groups, which oversaw aid distribution for most of the war in Gaza, have refused to work with GHF.
They have accused it of “weaponising aid” and called it a “fig leaf” to force the displacement of Palestinians out of north and central Gaza to the south, a goal outlined by Israeli leaders.
Members of a private US security company, contracted by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, direct displaced Palestinians as they gather to receive relief supplies at a distribution centre in the central Gaza Strip on June 8 2025 © Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images
Humanitarian officials — who ran some 400 distribution centres in Gaza before Israel imposed a blockade in March — say they have seen no evidence of systematic diversion of aid by Hamas, whose October 7 2023 attack on Israel triggered the war.
“We protected the people we served,” Juliette Touma, a spokesperson for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, said of the traditional model. “We would go the people themselves to hand over aid . . . without armed people in the vicinity, and there were no mass casualty events.”
Since GHF’s launch, the UN has only been able to send a trickle of aid into Gaza, though the EU said on Thursday it had reached an agreement with Israel for a “substantial increase” in UN deliveries.
GHF is adamant that shootings and casualties have taken place away from its distribution centres, alleging that Hamas is purposefully fomenting chaos.
It said it was pressing Israel to increase aid flows and allow it to open additional hubs in north and central Gaza to ease logistical pressures.
“If there is more aid, and people know there will be enough at the sites, there will no longer be the need for long treks to the sites, no need to travel during unsafe times and no need to take dangerous shortcuts,” the group said.
GHF, which said it has distributed 70mn free meals, added that it was constantly “making enhancements”, including what it said was the creation of a “women and children’s only lane”.
But Chris McIntosh, with Oxfam in Gaza, argued that GHF’s hubs “are not about aid”. “They’re about control. They’re about instilling chaos into society,” he said.
Many Palestinians have no choice but to keep visiting GHF centres, even if they are likely to come away empty-handed.
Aref Farra, a former computer science student, only enters GHF stations in a “second wave” of people to decrease the chances of being shot. By the time he arrives, it is often too late.
He finds cardboard boxes on the ground ripped open, with valuable items like vegetable oil gone, and has twice had to fend off people trying to take food he did find. When he did chance upon a bag of sugar, he was robbed while walking home.
“It’s survival of the strongest,” he said. “You think about how you were and how you are now — like you’re an animal running around to get food.”
Additional reporting by Malaika Kanaaneh Tapper in Beirut