‘Not seen as fully human’

But it’s not just delivering aid that can be deadly. Many civilians have been killed while collecting it. In February, more than 100 Palestinians seeking food from aid trucks in north Gaza were killed and hundreds more injured after Israeli forces opened fire on them. It became known as the “flour massacre”. And Fault Lines found many more similar incidents.

Fault Lines partnered with open-source investigators at Forensic Architecture, a research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, to examine the data behind attacks on people seeking aid. Using social media videos, news reports, health ministry data and satellite imagery, researchers were able to document more than 40 attacks on civilians seeking aid.

“So when we hear of the flour massacre, it’s not one isolated incident that was an accident,” Peter Polack, a researcher with Forensic Architecture, explains. “As we looked into more of these attacks, we started to see that they were systematic in nature and not arbitrary.”

The investigation also revealed that Israeli attacks didn’t just kill civilians seeking aid. They also destroyed key infrastructure that received humanitarian assistance. Forensic Architecture documented 16 attacks on bakeries between October and November 2023, sometimes while people queued for bread. And 107 shelters that received aid had been destroyed up until January.

“When aid is initially distributed, flour is distributed to bakeries. Bakeries are targeted. When it starts to be distributed to schools, then schools become the target,” Forensic Architecture’s Julia Ngo says.

Then, at the start of the new year, there were attacks on police and civilians who escorted humanitarian convoys. Police suspended their operations. Local kinship networks of influential families took over the escorts, but then they were attacked.

“They’re creating essentially a chilling effect so that it sends a clear message, that if you’re receiving aid, if you’re planning aid, if you’re working with it in any capacity, you are at risk,” Polack says.

We asked Israeli authorities about the findings of this investigation. They did not respond.

But we know that the decision to withhold humanitarian aid from Gaza is popular in Israeli politics. Our team analysed hundreds of posts in Hebrew on X from members of the Israeli government. We found that a majority of Israeli Knesset members oppose humanitarian aid to Gaza.

There were 40 posts supporting the use of starvation as a weapon of war and 12 advocating for a complete siege of Gaza. An additional 234 posts expressed opposition to humanitarian aid altogether and 65 other posts advocated for aid to be conditioned on the return of the captives.

South African prosecutors have submitted comments like these to the International Court of Justice in The Hague as evidence of Israel’s intention to starve the people of Gaza.

“The distinctive feature of this case has not been the silence as such but the reiteration and repetition of genocidal speech throughout every sphere of state in Israel,” South African prosecutor Tembeka Ngcukaitobi told the court in January.

“It’s sort of like a murderer just holding a knife and saying, ‘I’m going to kill these people’ and doing it … and we’re still wondering if there’s intent in this particular crime,” Alex Smith, a specialist in child and maternal health and former USAID contractor, says. USAID is the agency responsible for deploying US humanitarian aid.

Smith was scheduled to give a presentation at a USAID conference in March on maternal health in Gaza, but was told the day before that his lecture had been cancelled. After that, he resigned.

“Decisions are made based on politics and who people are, and certain people, depending on their race and their ethnicity and their geography, where they happen to live, are not seen as fully human,” he says.

The US ‘deliberately denies the facts’

The US gives Israel about $4bn in security funding each year, but the Biden administration has refused calls to condition US security assistance to Israel on improving the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Instead, the US has relied on ineffective measures, such as airdrops and a now-defunct pier.

Humanitarian groups have long insisted that the most effective way to get aid into Gaza is through established ground routes.

The administration even faced unprecedented levels of dissent from within for its unyielding support of Israel despite mounting evidence of it committing war crimes in Gaza. At least a dozen officials resigned in protest and several dissent memos rejecting Biden’s policies had been circulated at the State Department from USAID.

In April, Gilbert, the former State Department official, was asked for her input on a Biden administration report to the US Congress on whether Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza. Based on the reporting from her partners on the ground, she advised that Israel was blocking aid. But when the report was released the following month, it determined that Israel was not obstructing the flow of humanitarian assistance. Gilbert resigned as a result of that report.

“The administration deliberately denies the facts on the ground because it would trigger consequences to cut off security funding,” Gilbert says. “The weapons are the engine that fuels this war, and we are not taking responsibility for our role.”

There is a US law called 620I that prohibits arms transfers to countries that are blocking humanitarian assistance. If the Biden administration acknowledged that Israel was denying aid to Palestinians in Gaza, it would trigger the law and arms would have to be cut off immediately.

When asked by Fault Lines at a press briefing about how the US continues to support Israel with arms despite the evidence that it is breaking its own laws, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the US had pressured its ally to open border crossings to let more aid in. “So I would encourage you to read the report that we issued on this very question a few months ago that looked into Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law and their work and whether they had done a good enough job to let humanitarian assistance in, where we said that there were some roadblocks that needed to be overcome,” Miller said. “And we had worked to overcome those. And we had seen Israel take steps to allow humanitarian assistance in.”