Feeding the Profits of Genocide: Gaza and the Rise of Authoritarian Capital

In Gaza, starvation has become strategy. According to the United Nations and humanitarian groups on the ground, two key famine conditions now exist in Gaza and are rapidly spreading. Israel’s months-long siege has blocked the flow of food, water, fuel, and medicine to a civilian population of over 2 million, resulting in catastrophic levels of hunger. Hundreds have died from malnutrition. More than a thousand more have died trying to access food.

This is not a failure of international governance. It is the result of deliberate policy choices by states and corporations. And increasingly, it is being managed not by traditional humanitarian institutions, but by private actors: contracted, credentialed, and corporatized. In March 2025, the United States and Israel launched the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a Delaware-registered nonprofit tasked with distributing aid in the territory. It bypasses the United Nations and replaces hundreds of aid points with a handful of militarized hubs guarded by private contractors. These sites, promoted as humanitarian lifelines, have instead become mass graveyards.

Gaza reveals the inner workings of a global system that transforms human suffering into a site of control and accumulation. At the center of this system is what I call the “Authoritarian-Financial Complex”—a fusion of militarized governance, financial extraction, and corporate logistics. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not a neutral aid vehicle but the logistical machinery of this complex, enclosing humanitarian relief within a tightly controlled, securitized, and profitable framework designed to manage crisis rather than resolve it.

AFC and the Economy of Genocide

The Authoritarian-Financial Complex (AFC) represents an evolution beyond the traditional military-industrial complex. Whereas the latter focused on state militarism and arms production, the AFC extends into finance, technology, and humanitarian logistics, embedding itself in the infrastructures of everyday life. It does not simply build weapons; it builds systems that manage populations through risk, fear, and data. The complex feeds on a manufactured sense of insecurity, framing entire communities as threats to be controlled, surveilled, or contained. This expanding logic of securitization creates new markets for biometric technologies, private security forces, AI-driven monitoring, and crisis management platforms. The AFC profits not only from actual war but from the perpetual anticipation of danger, turning fear itself into a renewable source of capital.

This transformation is powerfully illustrated in Francesca Albanese’s landmark U.N. report, From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, which shows how Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation in Palestine has become embedded in global networks of capital and control. What began as a project of territorial domination has developed into a transnational economic system fueled by arms manufacturers, surveillance firms, data brokers, and logistics corporations. Albanese makes clear that the machinery of genocide functions as a dynamic engine of profit, operating in lockstep with the broader structures of the Authoritarian-Financial Complex.

What is occurring in Gaza exemplifies how humanitarianism is being hollowed out, militarized, and turned into a platform for surveillance capitalism.

According to Albanese, genocide has become “economized.” The displacement and annihilation of Palestinians is not only political; it is materially profitable. Arms companies advertise their missiles and drones as “battle-tested” in Gaza. Data firms collect behavioral patterns and biometric information on Palestinians that is then exported globally. Real estate developers profit from newly “cleared” territory. Every phase of oppression has become monetized.

The economy of genocide outlined in Albanese’s report reveals a broader dynamic at work within global capitalism. This logic extends beyond Palestine and conventional war zones, operating as part of a larger architecture known as the Authoritarian-Financial Complex. In this configuration, private equity finances military supply chains, data analytics firms embed themselves in systems of border control, and NGOs are recast as instruments of state-aligned governance. The machinery of violence is streamlined into a process of extraction, turning organized destruction into a stable and repeatable source of profit.

Profiting from Killing and Starvation

While the world watches in horror at the deliberate weaponization of starvation in Gaza, there is an urgent need to confront the deeper system driving this policy. The spectacle of mass hunger, widely condemned as a moral catastrophe, is also the surface expression of a coordinated infrastructure that turns deprivation into a strategic and financial asset. This is the logic of the Authoritarian-Financial Complex: a system where the control of food, movement, and survival becomes a tool of governance and a source of capital. Beneath the headlines and humanitarian appeals lies a web of private contractors, military logisticians, and financial intermediaries who do not simply respond to crisis but operate through it. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is one such actor within this machinery, but the underlying mechanism is global, replicable, and expanding. To challenge the atrocity of enforced famine, we must also dismantle the economic and political order that finds in crisis not failure, but opportunity.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, for instance, has replaced more than 400 U.N. aid sites with just four militarized hubs. These hubs are located in Israeli-declared “safe zones,” which Palestinians were forced to relocate to after sustained bombing. They lack water, sanitation, fuel, and shelter. The food provided is often nutritionally deficient, heavily processed, and requires cooking infrastructure that many no longer have access to. In other words, aid is being distributed in a form that is difficult to consume, in locations that are difficult to reach, under conditions that are deadly by design.

According to Médecins Sans Frontières, these aid hubs function as “death traps,” not relief centers. Amnesty International has said the model “risks violating international humanitarian law.” Yet the GHF remains active, even as hunger deaths increase. Why? Because in the Authoritarian-Financial Complex, aid is not about care. It is about profit and control.

Behind the GHF’s humanitarian branding lies a dense network of private actors. Its board includes figures linked to the U.S. military-industrial complex. Its security contracts are handled by firms with connections to the Pentagon. This is a business. The GHF’s operations generate value in multiple directions. Logistics firms get paid to move food. Security firms profit from guarding it. In the future, it paves the way for tech companies to “optimize” aid through distribution software and biometric ID systems. Meanwhile, states like Israel and the U.S. use GHF’s presence to deflect legal responsibility and deny the scale of the famine. The entire architecture serves both material and political functions.

This arrangement creates a powerful financial incentive to perpetuate, rather than resolve, genocide and crisis. As long as conflict zones generate demand for arms, logistics, surveillance, and privatized aid, the firms involved remain profitable. Humanitarian catastrophe becomes not an emergency to be addressed, but a market to be maintained. The longer the siege continues, the more contracts are awarded, the more data is harvested, and the more donor capital flows into securitized "relief" operations. In such a model, peace is not just inconvenient—it is unprofitable. The system thrives precisely because the suffering never ends.

And there is precedent. The AFC thrives in crisis zones. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, private security firms like Blackwater moved in faster than the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors like Halliburton and DynCorp profited both from the country’s destruction and its reconstruction. In border zones, companies build walls, run detention centers, and develop “smart” migration tracking systems. What Gaza reveals is that this model now applies not just to post-war contexts but to genocide itself.

What is occurring in Gaza exemplifies how humanitarianism is being hollowed out, militarized, and turned into a platform for surveillance capitalism. It represents the collapse of aid into a venture-backed economy of control.

Conclusion

The siege of Gaza, and the starvation it has produced, should compel us to ask a deeper question: What kind of global system allows mass death to be treated as a logistical problem to be outsourced and monetized?

In a functioning international order, the deliberate starvation of a civilian population would trigger universal condemnation, sanctions, and urgent intervention. Instead, we have subcontracted survival to a nonprofit with ties to defense contractors. Instead of upholding international law, we are beta-testing a new model for aid distribution that removes accountability and embeds profit into suffering.

This is the essence of the Authoritarian-Financial Complex. It is a system that no longer hides its violence. It administers it through platforms and contracts. It trades in crisis. It grows through enclosure. It repackages domination as delivery and presents militarized deprivation as humanitarian innovation.

This is the war not just on Gaza but on the idea that human life has value beyond capital.

The AFC connects Wall Street to war zones, hedge funds to hunger, and data brokers to refugee camps. In its world, Gaza is not a moral crisis. It is a scalable opportunity.

To break this system, we must do more than call for a cease-fire. We must demand the abolition of the GHF and all privatized aid regimes that serve siege rather than relief. We must insist on accountability for the corporations profiting from destruction and deprivation. We must rebuild international humanitarianism as a space of solidarity, not outsourcing.

Above all, we must understand that genocide is no longer an act of the state alone. It is a business. And in that business, silence is complicity.

Gaza is not only a test of conscience. It is a mirror held up to a world where profit reigns above life. If we fail to dismantle the Authoritarian-Financial Complex now, it will define the next century of planetary crisis—with each famine, each war, and each displacement event monetized, securitized, and outsourced.

This is the war not just on Gaza but on the idea that human life has value beyond capital. We must name it. And we must end it.