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gaza humanitarian foundation
How the US Weaponizes Starvation and Aid in Gaza and Cuba
In both Cuba and Palestine, the United States is deploying its barbaric methods of producing mass suffering in order to bring about political and economic submission.
Feb 10, 2026
Last week, the US government announced it would be sending $6 million in aid to Cuba, on top of the $3 million it sent in January after Hurricane Melissa. This aid package might appear contrary to the significant escalation of the 66-year-long US criminal blockade, which has expanded to an all-out fuel blockade since December, with attacks on Venezuela, but it is in fact a core tenet of it.
This maneuver seeks to exploit the US-manufactured energy and fuel crisis to bolster opposition groups, substantiate propaganda against the Cuban government and revolution, and force the island into total dependency and submission to the United States. This frankly genocidal strategy closely mirrors that of the US and Israeli “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” and the weaponization of starvation and aid for colonial and imperialist ends. In both Cuba and Gaza, this is a deliberate strategy by the US to make people suffer from its actions, then place blame on the governing authority to justify regime change.
In November of last year, the US first announced an aid package to Cuba in response to Hurricane Melissa. While the hurricane hit the east of the island with force, Cuba did not suffer mass casualties and crisis because of the people-first policies of the Cuban government, which continues to distribute resources and prevent casualties from natural disasters, despite US suffocation.
Hurricane Melissa killed over 54 people in Jamaica, at least 43 people in Haiti, four in the Dominican Republic, yet only one person in Cuba. The success of the Cuban government’s response is not only totally ignored by the US organizations, but also used to justify operations and propaganda. For instance, the Archdiocese of Miami said about its aid distribution: “Dozens were killed, mostly in Jamaica and Haiti, but Cuba’s weakening economic situation prompted action from a small group of donors.” Surely, when a country’s response to a natural disaster is to successfully evacuate 735,000 people, prevent a major death toll, and prioritize people’s survival, it is worthy of praise. Of course, this would be in total opposition to the US propaganda line that Cuba is a “failed state.”
In Cuba and Palestine, the US is manufacturing a crisis in order to push blame onto the governments that the imperialist power seeks to topple.
When Hurricane Katrina hit the US in 2005, Cuba offered a medical brigade of 1,586 doctors and 37 tons of medical supplies. The US refused outright. The hurricane and lack of response led to the deaths of over 1,800 people, many due to a lack of medical assistance and supplies, some of which Cuba could have provided, and 1.5 million people were displaced—many have never returned. The US government was happy to let people die rather than to accept the unconditional help of a Cuban medical brigade, which underscores its willingness to sacrifice its own population to pursue its aggression against Cuba. The stark difference between the US and Cuba in responding to natural disasters is at its core the polarity between a war economy based on extraction and profit, and a peace economy based on solidarity and common well-being.
Siege on Cuba, Siege on Gaza
The same genocidal motivations for the US-Israeli siege on Gaza have been imposed to isolate and suffocate Cuba. The US has banned the entry of goods into Cuba, imposed a total blockade on oil, and increased sanctions, which cause billions of dollars in losses each year, which is impoverishing the country. While it suffocates the infrastructure of even and efficient food distribution in Cuba, the US aid is being given only to the Catholic Church and US-backed NGOs, specifically to bypass distribution through the state. This is eerily consistent with the US and Israel’s horrific and deadly “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).” In Gaza, they laid a total barbaric siege on Gaza, refused the entry of any goods and aid, and banned international aid groups in order to justify US mercenaries providing meager amounts of aid between firing bullets. The US and Israel massacred at least 2,603 people and wounded 19,034 more at GHF distribution points. There was absolutely no accountability for or action against these barbaric killing fields.
In both Palestine and Cuba, the US is overtly and brazenly violating the humanitarian principle of working with governments in affected countries. It is using the same propaganda lines to do so. For Cuba, the US says it is “bypassing regime interference, and ensuring transparency and accountability” and that the aid is “part of a broader effort to stand with the Cuban people as they seek a better future.” For Gaza, the US says it is “the only viable way to get aid into Gaza without empowering Hamas” and “is a results-focused alternative to a broken aid system.”
In both places, the US openly claims it is undermining governments and organizations that it claims “steal” the aid. This accusation is a confession. Israeli occupation forces (IOF) set on fire, burnt, and buried more than 1,000 trucks of aid in Gaza as Israel manufactured a famine that killed at least 10,000 people, and for which the United Nations described as the “failure of humanity itself.” An IOF reservist said he “accompanied aid convoys supplying a militia in Rafah” and Israeli security added “closed boxes with unknown contents” to justify lies that Hamas was weaponizing aid. Israel also funded and coordinated militia groups in Gaza to loot aid, and protected Israeli settlers looting and destroying aid from trucks. Not to mention the many videos of IOF soldiers gleefully and jeeringly consuming this food aid. All of these actions, with the brazen refusal to allow passage for thousands of aid trucks in Gaza, provided the conditions to justify the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” and its killing fields.
Similarly, it is the United States that is stopping goods from entering Cuba. Since 1962, the US has imposed a blockade that bans all trade and economic activity with Cuba. This is banned outright in the US with severe consequences, and spans the entire world, as the US imposes secondary sanctions, tariffs, and other punitive measures against any country, organization, company, or individual that does not comply with its blockade. In recent weeks and months, this has been tightened further. No oil has entered Cuba since December, and the government has rolled out a plan to ration limited energy for only the most urgent uses, such as hospitals, schools, and food. Cuba can no longer fuel airplanes, which may halt all air travel. The US, on one hand, is threatening tariffs and sanctions on any country that tries to trade oil and goods with Cuba, and on the other, it is pushing propaganda that the country is not able to feed and provide energy for its people. In Cuba and Palestine, the US is manufacturing a crisis in order to push blame onto the governments that the imperialist power seeks to topple.
Made in Israel and Miami
The aid is also political at its source. All supplies through the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” were from Israeli suppliers, directly creating profit for Israeli venture capitalists, tech investors, and other occupation personnel like Michael Eisenberg, Liran Tancman, and Yotam HaCohen. It also funneled public funds into private and shady mercenary companies, UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions. This strategy utilizes aid as a weapon of colonial regime-change efforts, with the US aiming to install its proxies firmly in power in Cuba and Palestine, in opposition to the interests and will of the people.
For those of us invested in a better world based on humanity, it is imperative we stand steadfast with Palestinians and Cubans as they struggle against the most barbarous face of the US empire.
The US aid supplies to Cuba originate in Miami, Florida, long known as the site of the most vocal and brazen pro-US, fascist sentiments in the Cuban diaspora. The aid is being distributed by the Catholic Church and Caritas, a US-funded NGO set up in 1991 during the ‘Special Period’ in Cuba, which has funded regime-change operations on the island. Catholic Relief Services, one of the three organizations in Caritas North America, receives over half of its funding ($1.5 billion) directly from the US government. The other organization involved is the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, which was the architect of the covert CIA “Operation Pedro Pan,” where over 14,000 Cuban children were taken from their homes to the US in the years after the revolution. Also included on the board of the charity is Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida, John Couriel. The headline $9 million figure of aid to Cuba is being absorbed by organizations like this. In fact, in 2024, over 72% of all US aid to Cuba went to US organizations. This must pose the urgent question of how much of this aid is a way to direct resources to opposition groups in Cuba under the guise of sending food.
Gathering Intelligence
The strategy of deploying aid also pertains to a significant element of covert surveillance and intelligence. At the end of January last year, the US deployed around 100 mercenaries, mostly former US Special Forces soldiers, to patrol Gaza and set up the deadly “aid hubs.” US soldiers shot and killed starving Palestinians seeking aid while cheering and ordering Domino’s Pizza. These sites were death traps, used to lure Palestinians into an area where they were surveiled and shot at. People risked their lives to receive a meager amount of aid that was often rotten. It has been revealed that a significant element of this operation was surveillance. A UG Solutions contractor revealed that American and Israeli soldier-spies are using facial recognition software “on top of real-time footage of distribution sites” from CCTV and aerial surveillance footage. This was beyond merely a method of massacre, but of surveillance through the proxy of “aid.” The US and Israel confirmed there was surveillance after specifically recruiting intelligence operatives.
Similarly, the State Department announced that US government officials have been “making sure that the regime does not take the assistance, divert it, try to politicize it.” They went on to explain that “we have been watching” and “speaking with everyday Cubans…understanding the challenges they have been facing, both in the wake of the hurricane and due to the broader humanitarian crisis in Cuba.” This is worrying, as it is clear the US is using this as an opportunity, in tandem with NGO networks, to collect intelligence and push pro-US propaganda and lies across the country under the guise of “aid.”
In both Cuba and Palestine, the United States is deploying its barbaric methods of producing mass suffering in order to bring about political and economic submission. The tactics being used in distributing aid in Cuba now are a softer model of the killing fields in Gaza that seek to force the entire population into submission and occupy the entirety of Palestine.
Beyond this playbook, it is important to recognize the historic connections between Palestine and Cuba, particularly as they resist the violence of the US empire that seeks to starve them into submission. Cuba was one of 13 countries to vote against the UN partition of Palestine in 1947; in the months after the triumph of the revolution, Che Guevara and Raúl Castro traveled to Gaza; they were one of the first to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1964; they severed all ties with Israel in 1973; and labelled Israel’s action a genocide in 1979. Since 1982, Cuba has been providing education for Palestinian students in Cuba; it helped to get Palestine observer status at the United Nations in 2012; it supported South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice in 2024; and has been one of Palestine’s staunchest supporters diplomatically and materially.
This historic friendship and solidarity are what the United States fears. This is why it is hellbent on destroying the Cuban Revolution and its continued ability to provide for its people, while refusing to let US companies pillage and extract from the island and its inhabitants. For those of us invested in a better world based on humanity, it is imperative we stand steadfast with Palestinians and Cubans as they struggle against the most barbarous face of the US empire. The situation is urgent and requires action. Like Fidel Castro said to the UN in 1979: “If we do not resolve today’s injustices and inequalities peacefully and wisely, the future will be apocalyptic.”
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Probe Reveals Nearly 3,000 Gaza Aid-Seekers Killed by Israeli Forces
"These repeated attacks are grave violations of international humanitarian law that likely amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide."
Sep 17, 2025
An investigation published this week revealed that Israeli forces have killed nearly 3,000 Palestinian aid-seekers and wounded almost 20,000 others over 23 months of Israel's US-backed genocidal annihilation of Gaza.
The New Humanitarian's open-source investigation chronologically documents the killing of 2,957 Palestinian aid-seekers and the wounding of 19,866 others.
These figures include nearly 1,000 Palestinians who United Nations human rights officials say have been killed at or near aid sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Israeli soldiers have admitted to receiving orders to fire live bullets and artillery shells into crowds of civilians at GHF distribution points.
The New Humanitarian noted that these numbers represent approximately 4.6% of the more than 65,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures are likely a vast undercount.
“These are not isolated incidents. They're not just similar incidents. They are a pattern, and reflect policy and an acceptance on the part of the state that this should continue indefinitely,” Adil Haque, an international law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told The New Humanitarian.
Haque and other experts interviewed for the investigation called Israeli attacks on Gaza aid-seekers "grave violations of international humanitarian law that likely amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide."
Israel is the subject of an ongoing genocide case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. The International Criminal Court (ICC), also located in the Dutch city, last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation.
The New Humanitarian's investigation identified "clearly discernible patterns... showing how Israel has used attacks on people seeking aid as a tool for different purposes at different points in the war: deadly crowd control, forced displacement, and the destruction of the collective ability of Palestinians in Gaza to survive."
Haque said that "if Israeli leaders were simply indifferent to the killing of so many Palestinian aid-seekers, not caring one way or the other, then international condemnation and potential liability for war crimes should be enough to lead them to change their policies to prevent or repress such killings."
"Their willingness to bear such costs is some evidence that they intend for these killings to continue,” he added.
The New Humanitarian's investigation comes as Israeli forces ramp up their assault on Gaza City during Operation Gideon's Chariots 2, a campaign to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian exclave. Israeli leaders have publicly backed a proposal by US President Donald Trump to empty Gaza of Palestinians and transform the coastal strip into the "Riviera of the Middle East."
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'Shameful Assault on Human Rights': Trump Sanctions Palestinian Orgs That Called for UN to Investigate Israeli War Crimes
The former executive director of Human Rights Watch said Trump's "answer to Israeli atrocities is to censor reporting on them rather than to stop them."
Sep 05, 2025
Human rights groups around the world are reacting with horror after the Trump administration sanctioned three leading Palestinian human rights monitors who sought to bring evidence of Israeli war crimes before the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The three groups—Al-Haq in the West Bank and the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights—are considered among the leading human rights monitors in the region.
In an announcement on Thursday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the sanctions were imposed on these groups because they "directly engaged in efforts by the international criminal court to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel's consent."
In November 2023, the three groups petitioned the ICC to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials—including President Isaac Herzog and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
They cited Israel's widely documented use of indiscriminate airstrikes against densely populated civilian areas and its near-total blockade of humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip—acts that, over the next nearly two years, have made Gaza virtually uninhabitable and brought it to the point of mass starvation.
The ICC would eventually issue warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November 2024, which was met with threats of sanctions by the administration of then-President Joe Biden, who called the warrants "outrageous." Despite Netanyahu and his officials having visited multiple ICC member countries, which are obliged to carry out the court's warrants, no arrests have been made.
Since retaking office, US President Donald Trump has followed through on threats against the ICC, placing sanctions on the court as a body and threatening to sanction anyone who assisted in its prosecution or investigation into Israel or other US allies.
In August, as much of the world had begun to isolate Israel as it moved forward with an explicit ethnic cleansing campaign, the administration also sanctioned four of the ICC's judges, including the one who authorized the warrants against Israel's leaders.
Now, just days after the world's leading group of genocide scholars voted overwhelmingly for a resolution stating that Israel's actions meet the legal definition for the crime, the Trump administration is attempting to cripple the groups that are documenting those actions.
Former BBC radio journalist Sangita Myska noted that "this type of action is normally reserved for terrorists and drug traffickers," adding that it will "severely damage the organizations' ability to advocate for Palestinians."
It is not the first time the Trump administration has sanctioned a Palestinian human rights group. In June, it sanctioned Adameer, a Ramallah-based group focused on the rights of prisoners in Israel's brutal detention system.
At the time, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said the sanctions "would make day-to-day operations harder and harder, including for their employees, assisted communities, and service suppliers. This will also negatively affect their engagement with their partner organizations, locally and internationally, including US-based groups."
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said that the administration was acting "as if the answer to Israeli atrocities is to censor reporting on them rather than to stop them."
In a joint statement issued Thursday, Al Haq, Al Mezan, and the PCHR described it as "a coward[ly], immoral, illegal, and undemocratic act."
"As the world moves to impose sanctions and arms embargoes on Israel," the groups said, "its ally, the US, is working to destroy Palestinian institutions working tirelessly for accountability for the victims of Israel's mass atrocity crimes."
(Video: Al Jazeera)
"They want to silence Palestinian voices," said PCHR's Basel Al-Sourani in an interview with Al Jazeera. "They want to silence anyone who stands up to Israeli crimes, anyone who tries to advocate for Palestinian rights, anyone who tries to bring perpetrators to justice."
Other human rights groups around the world have joined them in condemning the decision.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, a director at Amnesty International, described the sanctions against these groups as a "shameful assault on human rights and the global pursuit of justice."
"These organizations carry out vital and courageous work, meticulously documenting human rights violations under the most horrifying conditions," Guevara-Rosas continued. "They have steadfastly continued to do so in the face of war, genocide, and the oppressive reality of Israel's apartheid regime, as well as malicious attempts to discredit their findings and cripple their funding with spurious terrorism accusations. They are the voice of Palestinian victims, amplifying stories of human suffering and injustice that would otherwise remain unheard."
The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, which in July joined the growing international consensus that Israel is perpetrating a genocide, said it stands "in full solidarity with our colleagues and partners working for human rights between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea."
The group described the US sanctions as "yet another move aimed at erasing fundamental norms of protecting human beings designed to enable Israel to continue harming Palestinians without restraint."
Al-Sourani said that the sanctions were "not a surprise, given the US administration being a partner in Israel's genocide."
Trump has endorsed Israel's stated goal to permanently displace most Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, with reporting earlier this week detailing plans to replace the destroyed enclave with a sprawling real-estate development.
Some of the developers of the plan are Israelis involved in the administration of the US-Israeli-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), where over a thousand Palestinian aid seekers have been killed, often in deliberate massacres by Israeli troops, in recent months.
Despite the new dangers they will impose, Al-Sourani said, "these sanctions, they will not deter us."
"We will continue documenting the Israeli crimes that are happening on the ground," Al-Sourani said. "We will continue our engagement with the ICC. We will continue advocating for justice, for the rule of law, and for the protection of the ICC judges and the prosecutors."
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Trump Admin Circulating Plan to Transform Depopulated Gaza Into High-Tech Cash Cow
Under the proposal, the US would take control after "voluntary" relocation of Palestinians from the strip, where proposed projects include an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone and Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands.
Sep 01, 2025
The White House is "circulating" a plan to transform a substantially depopulated Gaza into US President Donald Trump's vision of a high-tech "Riviera of the Middle East" brimming with private investment and replete with artificial intelligence-powered "smart cities."
That's according a 38-page prospectus for a proposed Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation (GREAT) Trust obtained by The Washington Post and published in a report on Sunday. Parts of the proposal were previously reported by the Financial Times.
"Gaza can transform into a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets... resources, and a young workforce all supported by Israeli tech and [Gulf Cooperation Council] investments," the prospectus states.
However, to journalist Hala Jaber, the plan amounts to "genocide packaged as real estate."
Here comes the Gaza Network State.A plan to turn Gaza into a privately-developed “gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub” with “AI-powered smart cities” and “Trump Riviera” resortgift link:wapo.st/4g2eATo
[image or embed]
— Gil Durán (@gilduran.com) August 31, 2025 at 10:18 AM
The GREAT Trust was drafted by some of the same Israelis behind the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose aid distribution points in Gaza have been the sites of deliberate massacres and other incidents in which thousands of aid-seeking Palestinians have been killed or wounded.
According to the Post, financial modeling for the GREAT Trust proposal "was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group"—which played a key role in creating GHF. BCG told the Post that the firm did not approve work on the trust plan, and that two senior partners who led the financial modeling were subsequently terminated.
The GREAT Trust envisions "a US-led multirlateral custodianship" lasting a decade or longer and leading to "a reformed Palestinian self-governance after Gaza is "demilitarized and de-radicalized."
Josh Paul—a former US State Department official who resigned in October 2023 over the Biden administration's decision to sell more arms to Israel as it waged a war on Gaza increasingly viewed by experts as genocidal—told Democracy Now! last week that Trump's plan for Gaza is "essentially a new form of colonialism, a transition from Israeli colonialism to corporate" colonialism.
The GREAT Trust contains two proposals for Gaza's more than 2 million Palestinians. Under one plan, approximately 75% of Gaza's population would remain in the strip during its transformation. The second proposal involves up to 500,000 Gazans relocating to third countries, 75% of them permanently.
The prospectus does not say how many Palestinians would leave Gaza under the relocation option. Those who choose to permanently relocate to other unspecified countries would each receive $5,000 plus four years of subsidized rent and subsidized food for a year.
The GREAT Trust allocates $6 billion for temporary housing for Palestinians who remain in Gaza and $5 billion for those who relocate.
The proposal projects huge profits for investors—nearly four times the return on investment and annual revenue of $4.5 billion within a decade. The project would be a boon for companies ranging from builders including Saudi bin Laden Group, infrastructure specialists like IKEA, the mercenary firm Academi (formerly Blackwater), US military contractor CACI—which last year was found liable for torturing Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison—electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, tech firms such as Amazon, and hoteliers Mandarin Oriental and IHG Hotels and Resorts.
Central to the plan are 10 "megaprojects," including half a dozen "smart cities," a regional logistics hub to be build over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah, a central highway named after Saudi Crown Prime Mohammed bin Salman—Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states feature prominently in the proposal as investors—large-scale solar and desalinization plants, a US data safe haven, an "Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone," and "Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands" similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai.
In addition to "massive" financial gains for private US investors, the GREAT Trust lists strategic benefits for the United States that would enable it to "strengthen" its "hold in the east Mediterranean and secure US industry access to $1.3 trillion of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf."
Earlier this year, Trump said the US would "take over" Gaza, American real estate developers would "level it out" and build the "Riviera of the Middle East" atop its ruins after Palestinians—"all of them"—leave Palestine's coastal exclave. The president called for the "voluntary" transfer of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, both of whose leaders vehemently rejected the plan.
"Voluntary emigration" is widely considered a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, given Palestinians' general unwillingness to leave their homeland.
According to a May survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, nearly half of Gazans expressed a willingness to apply for Israeli assistance to relocate to other countries. However, many Gazans say they would never leave the strip, where most inhabitants are descendants of survivors of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948. Some are actual Nakba survivors.
"I'm staying in a partially destroyed house in Khan Younis now," one Gazan man told the Post. "But we could renovate. I refuse to be made to go to another country, Muslim or not. This is my homeland."
The Post report follows a meeting last Wednesday at the White House, where Trump, senior administration officials, and invited guests including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, investor and real estate developer Jared Kushner—who is also the president's son-in-law—and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer discussed Gaza's future.
While Dermer reportedly claimed that Israel does not seek to permanently occupy Gaza, Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation in Gaza—have said they will conquer the entire strip and keep at least large parts of it.
"We conquer, cleanse, and stay until Hamas is destroyed," Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said. "On the way, we annihilate everything that still remains."
The Israel Knesset also recently hosted a conference called "The Gaza Riviera–from vision to reality" where participants openly discussed the occupation and ethnic cleansing of the strip.
The publication of the GREAT Trust comes as Israeli forces push deeper into Gaza City amid a growing engineered famine that has killed at least hundreds of Palestinians and is starving hundreds of thousands of more. Israel's 696-day assault and siege on Gaza has left at least 233,200 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures are seen as a likely undercount by experts.
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US Lawmakers Urged to Follow Merkley and Van Hollen's Lead After Senators Denied Access to Gaza
CAIR said that they "have taken a bold and necessary step by confronting the Israeli-manufactured and US-backed humanitarian calamity in Gaza head-on. Their mission must not stand alone."
Aug 31, 2025
The largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group in the United States is calling on US lawmakers to follow in the footsteps of Sens. Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen, who on Saturday shared a video about their unsuccessful attempts to visit—or even just fly over—the Gaza Strip during Israel's ongoing assault.
"Sens. Van Hollen and Merkley have taken a bold and necessary step by confronting the Israeli-manufactured and US-backed humanitarian calamity in Gaza head-on," the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement late Saturday. "Their mission must not stand alone."
"Israel's barring them entry to Gaza underscores the urgency of taking decisive steps to end its rampage of death, violence, and destruction," CAIR continued. "Members of Congress must utilize every tool—diplomatic, legal, and legislative—to ensure that our nation's values and laws demand an end to civilian suffering. The crisis in Gaza is not abstract—it is a matter of life and death. We call on our representatives to act urgently and courageously."
Merkley (D-Ore.) and Van Hollen (D-Md.) documented their Middle East trip on social media, sharing updates from a United Nations World Food Program site in Israel; Kfar Aza, a kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023; the Kerem Shalom border crossing; the illegally occupied West Bank, where Palestinians face violence from Israeli settlers and soldiers; and a Jordanian air force base.
In the air force base video, Merkley and Van Hollen—both members of the Senate Appropriations and Foreign Relations committees—talk about their efforts to witness firsthand the sweeping destruction and famine in Gaza at the hands of Israeli forces armed and otherwise supported by the US government.
Both men have repeatedly backed Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) resolutions—introduced during both the Biden and Trump administrations—that would prevent the sale of certain offensive American weaponry to Israel, as have a growing number of Senate Democrats. The most recent vote was last month, and a majority of the chamber's Democratic caucus voted in favor.
In addition to reiterating their calls for a ceasefire and the return of remaining hostages that Palestinian militants took from Israel in 2023, in Saturday's clip, the senators discuss Jordanian airdrops—as Israel has limited the flow of food and other essentials—and stressed that, as Van Hollen puts it, "we need to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza."
"People are starving, and anybody who tells you that people are not starving in Gaza is lying to you," he continues. "And it's outrageous that the United States of America, at the UN, was the country that voted no on a resolution saying that we need to end the manmade starvation in Gaza. Anyone who denies that is lying to you."
In a separate video, Merkley addresses the dishonesty they have encountered during their trip. At the Kerem Shalom crossing, they attended a briefing that Merkley says "was designed to tell us everything that we would like to hear about the best organized process for getting aid into Gaza."
"No mention of any obstructions or frustrations," he notes. "Unfortunately, it didn't reflect reality at all. And that makes it just extremely difficult to listen to what essentially amounted to pure propaganda."
At the crossing, they met with representatives from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the private entity now responsible for distributing food aid in the strip. Israeli soldiers have killed or wounded thousands of Palestinians around the four GHF sites, which have been described as "death traps."
In a Friday video, Van Hollen says that he and Merkley "made it clear" to GHF "that the idea of having only four sites open, mostly in the southern part of Gaza—and by the way, only three are open today—that that is just a way to use food for population control purposes."
"And so, we had a disagreement with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation folks," he adds. "But our goal here today is to be witness to what the system is, and to make sure that we can try to fix what is clearly a broken system for everybody, because there are people in Gaza who are desperately hungry and starving."
The Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday that 10 more people had died of starvation, plus 15 Palestinians were killed and over 206 others were injured by Israeli fire while trying to get humanitarian aid. The agency puts the overall death toll since October 2023 at 63,371, though experts believe the true figure is far higher. At least 159,835 Palestinians have been wounded.
Israel's assault on Gaza has led to a genocide case at the International Court of Justice and an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces accusations that he is dragging out the war in an effort to avoid a corruption trial in Israel.
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Global Outrage Grows Over Israel's 'Preventable' US-Backed Genocidal Famine in Gaza
"This is not an unavoidable famine, this is a campaign of mass extermination," said Jewish Voice for Peace.
Aug 22, 2025
International outrage mounted Friday following the official declaration of full-blown famine in Gaza, with human rights defenders underscoring the preventable nature of a crisis caused by Israel's 22-month US-backed obliteration and siege of the Palestinian territory.
As Common Dreams reported, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—the world's leading authority on hunger crises—issued a "special snapshot" on the situation in Gaza confirming the embattled Palestinian enclave has entered Phase 5, or catastrophic famine, characterized by "starvation, death, destitution, and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels."
According to the IPC, more than 500,000 Gazans are suffering Phase 5 conditions, more than 1 million Palestinians are currently in Phase 4 ("emergency"), and nearly 400,000 others are in Phase 3 ("crisis").
Hundreds of Palestinians have starved to death in Gaza, including at least 112 children, according to local health officials. Thousands more Palestinians have been killed or wounded while seeking food aid, including more than 850 people slain at or near distribution points run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—described as "death traps"—where Israeli soldiers said they were ordered to fire live bullets and artillery shells into crowds of civilians.
"It is a famine on all of our watch. Everyone owns this."
The starvation crisis is so severe that even Israeli media and US President Donald Trump and senior members of his administration have addressed it, with Vice President JD Vance recently acknowledging that "you've got little kids who are clearly starving to death."
Critics—some of whom noted warnings of imminent starvation in Gaza dating back to late 2023—stressed that the Gaza famine is entirely the result of Israeli policies and practices.
"It is a famine that we could have prevented, if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel," United Nations Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher said during a Friday press briefing.
"It is a famine we could have prevented"
UN emergency coordinator Tom Fletcher says people should read the IPC report "in sorrow and in anger"
pic.twitter.com/X1dekCrQFh
— Peter Stefanovic (@PeterStefanovi2) August 22, 2025
"It is a famine within a few hundred meters of food, in a fertile land," he continued. "It is a famine that we repeatedly warned of, but that the international media has not been allowed in to cover. To bear witness. It is a famine openly promoted by some Israeli leaders as a weapon of war."
"It is a famine on all of our watch. Everyone owns this," Fletcher contended. "The Gaza famine is the world's famine. It is a famine that asks, 'But what did you do?' A famine that will and must haunt us all. It is a predictable and a preventable famine. It is a famine that must spur the world to more urgent action."
"My ask, my plea, my demand to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and anyone who can reach him: Enough," he added. "Ceasefire. Open the crossings, north and south, all of them. Let us get food and other supplies in, unimpeded and at the massive scale required. End the retribution. It is too late for far too many. But not for everyone in Gaza. Enough. For humanity's sake, let us in."
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Harris—who is also defense minister and the equivalent of deputy prime minister—called the situation in Gaza "heartbreaking and devastating."
"It is sickening and despicable," Harris continued. "In [Ireland], we have called it out for what it is—a genocide."
Erika Guevara Rosas, the senior director for research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns at Amnesty International—one of many international human rights groups accusing Israel of genocide—said Friday that "this famine is the direct consequence of Israel's deliberate campaign of starvation in Gaza."
"It is all the more harrowing that this famine is an entirely man-made, deliberately orchestrated, and preventable catastrophe," she continued. "The deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid, the destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure, and the direct killings of civilians are a clear manifestation of how Israel is inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza as part of its ongoing genocide."
"With every hour that passes without decisive international action, more Palestinian lives are lost, and Gaza City edges closer to complete annihilation," Guevara Rosas added, referring to Israel's launch of Operation Gideon's Chariots 2, a campaign to conquer, occupy, and ethnically cleanse 1 million Palestinians, possibly into a concentration camp proposed for construction over the ruins of Rafah.
"History will never forgive us for standing by as emaciated children die, while food remains just miles away, yet blocked by Israel," Guevara Rosas asserted. "To even begin reversing the devastating consequences of Israel's inhumane policies and actions, the world must take action now."
The US group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which has led many protests against the Gaza genocide, said on the social media site Bluesky, "This is not an unavoidable famine, this is a campaign of mass extermination."
Today, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN body, declared a state of famine in Gaza. While this is horrific news, it does not come as a surprise.
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— Jewish Voice for Peace (@jvp.bsky.social) August 22, 2025 at 9:23 AM
"The legacy of this genocide will last beyond any of our lifetimes," JVP added. "We've arrived at this point after decades of the US doing everything in its power to defend and fund the Israeli government's policies of ethnic cleansing, land theft, and now starvation and genocide. This depravity must end."
These statements follow similar condemnations earlier Friday by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, UN human right chief Volker Türk, and many others around the world on the 686th day of Israel's assault and siege, which have left more than 228,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Coinciding with the IPC designation, a report published Friday by Forensic Architecture and the World Peace Foundation detailed how Israel has dismantled the time-tested civilian aid distribution model and replaced it with a military-based system in which many Palestinians are not only dying from starvation but are also being killed while trying to obtain food.
The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem—which, along with Physicians for Human Rights-Israel recently became the first two groups in Israel to acknowledge the Gaza genocide—also published a report Friday on Israel's weaponized starvation of the strip.
Meanwhile, Israeli government officials responded to the IPC announcement in the same manner in which they've dismissed accusations of genocide for the past 22 months.
Netanyahu—who is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court wanted for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation—called the IPC report "an outright lie."
"Israel does not have a policy of starvation," the prime minister incredulously claimed. "Israel has a policy of preventing starvation."
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, two more Palestinians starved to death in Gaza within the past 24 hours, including a 5-month-old infant.
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Report Details Israel's 'Architecture of Genocidal Starvation' in Gaza
The new report comes as the world's top authority on hunger crises officially declared a full-blown famine in the Palestinian territory.
Aug 22, 2025
As the world's leading authority on hunger crises officially declared a catastrophic famine in Gaza, a report published Friday details how Israel has dismantled the time-tested civilian aid distribution model and replaced it with a military-based system in which many Palestinians are not only dying from starvation but are also being killed while trying to obtain food.
Forensic Architecture (FA)—a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London—and World Peace Foundation (WPF), a philanthropic organization affiliated with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts—published The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation in Gaza, March-August 2025, "revealing how... Israel has dismantled the proven and internationally-backed 'civilian model' of aid distribution, replacing it with a 'military model' which furthers Israel's military and political objectives in Gaza while starving the region's civilian population."
"Aid can be lethal when used in a manipulative way," an introduction to the report states. "We have unpacked the architecture of starvation imposed by Israel in Gaza. It is composed of acts of construction and destruction: the destruction of Palestinian agriculture and food sovereignty, the destruction of Palestinian civil society, and the construction of death traps."
A report by @forensicarchi.bsky.social & WPF examines two models for aid in #Gaza, showing how Israel has dismantled the internationally-backed ‘civilian model’, replacing it with a ‘military model’ which furthers Israel’s objectives while starving civilians.Read more here: shorturl.at/DYpkA
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— World Peace Foundation (@worldpeacefdtn.bsky.social) August 22, 2025 at 5:07 AM
The report opens by noting a March 2024 provisional order by the International Court of Justice in The Hague—a product of the tribunal's ongoing genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa—directing the Israeli government to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel ignored the order and ramped up its forced starvation of Gaza.
"In Gaza, under the Israeli system of aid distribution, intentional mass starvation is happening on two levels, the biological starvation of individuals through the provision of starvation rations, or no rations at all," the report's authors wrote, as well as "the destruction of the group as a whole, through collective dehumanization, separating the population from its land, and the disintegration of a functioning Palestinian society in Gaza."
According to the report, Israel has dismantled the "civilian model" of aid distribution by:
- Attacking essential aid infrastructure like warehouses, distribution points, kitchens, and bakeries;
- Restricting the supply of aid into Gaza by international humanitarian organizations; and
- Creating the conditions for aid diversion, including attacking groups tasked with securing aid routes, and failing to intervene in the diversion of aid in areas controlled by the Israeli military.
The report says Israel has implemented a "dangerous and deadly" system in which there are only four ration stations run by the US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), "all located in military zones."
Described by many as "death traps," GHF's aid points have been the sites of regular Israeli massacres of desperate Palestinian aid-seekers. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded while trying to obtain aid in Gaza, including more than 850 people slain at or near GHF centers. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) whistleblowers have said they were ordered to fire live bullets and artillery shells into crowds of desperate aid-seekers, even when they posed no security threat—accounts corroborated by a former US special forces colonel who resigned from GHF.
The new report found at least 64 incidents of Palestinian civilians "being attacked by the Israeli military while seeking aid, including 25 incidents at and around GHF ration stations," as well as dozens of attacks on aid infrastructure, humanitarian workers, and police.
Gaza's Government Media Office said earlier this year that more than 1,500 humanitarian workers were killed in Gaza since October 2023, including medical and civil defense personnel. The United Nations humanitarian affairs office said this week that 181 aid workers were killed while working in Gaza last year—accounting for nearly half of all such fatalities worldwide. Israel has baselessly accused many of these slain aid workers—especially employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—of being members of Hamas or other militant groups.
The new report also notes that "airdropped aid landed in active combat zones, or in densely populated areas, where airdrops have killed people, and destroyed shelters." Palestinians have also drowned while trying to reach aid airdropped into the Mediterranean Sea, which the IDF has prohibited Gazans from entering under penalty of death.
Furthermore, the report's authors found that Palestinians must walk an average of more than three-and-a-half miles to the nearest GHF aid point, with such centers being open for an average of just 10 minutes at a time between June 19 and July 4.
The publication also highlights the 58 evacuation orders to which Gazans have been subjected. Critics have called "evacuation" a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Israeli operations, including Gideon's Chariots and the newly launched Gideon's Chariots 2, are aimed at conquering Gaza and ethnically cleansing its residents to locations including a proposed concentration camp that would be built over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah.
The report concludes that Israel is "instrumentalizing aid" in order to:
- Enforce displacement and reconcentration;
- Make reaching aid deadly and dangerous;
- Undermine civil order, dismantle the social fabric of Palestinian society, and dehumanize Palestinians; and
- Permit and enable the diversion of aid.
"The dehumanization of Palestinians, the stripping of basic dignity, and the tearing apart of the fabric of the community are not accidental byproducts of the mass starvation inflicted on the people of Gaza," the report's authors assert. "There is every reason to believe that these are what Israel intends through its militarized ration system."
The report's publication adds to the body of research on Israel's weaponized starvation—one of the alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Earlier this week, Amnesty International—one of a growing number of human rights defenders around the world accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza—said the country's government is "carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being, and social fabric of Palestinian life."
Last month, WPF executive director Alex de Waal, a leading global authority on famine, asserted that "there is no case since World War II of starvation that is being so minutely designed and controlled" as Israel is doing in Gaza.
"This is preventable starvation. It is entirely man-made," de Waal added. "And every stage of this has been predicted, and at every stage action could have been taken—by Israel, by the international authorities, [the] international community, those who back Israel—to prevent what is happening now... Those steps have simply not been taken."
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Israel Waging 'Deliberate Campaign of Starvation' in Gaza: Amnesty
A senior official at the global rights group implored members of the international community to "uphold their moral and legal obligations to bring an end to Israel's ongoing genocide."
Aug 18, 2025
Amnesty International on Monday published new testimonies of Palestinians suffering from Israel's "systemic and intentional" campaign of starvation in the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of people—including more than 100 children—have died of malnutrition over 682 days of US-backed genocide.
Israel "is carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being, and social fabric of Palestinian life," Amnesty said in an introduction to the testimonies of starved and forcibly displaced civilians in the embattled enclave.
Amnesty said that the victims' accounts underscore the group's "repeated findings that the deadly combination of hunger and disease is not an unfortunate byproduct of Israel's military operations."
"It is the intended outcome of plans and policies that Israel has designed and implemented, over the past 22 months, to deliberately inflict on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction—which is part and parcel of Israel's ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza," the group added. The statement used language found in the treaty under which the International Court of Justice is currently determining whether Israel is committing the crime of genocide.
Among the 19 Palestinians interviewed by Amnesty are Hadeel, a 28-year-old pregnant mother of two, who said, "I fear miscarriage, but I also think about my baby: I panic just thinking about the potential impact of my own hunger on the baby's health, its weight, whether it will have [birth defects], and even if the baby is born healthy, what life awaits it, amidst displacement, bombs, tents."
Aziza, age 75, told Amnesty: "I feel like I have become a burden on my family. When we were displaced, they had to push me on a wheelchair. With toilet queues extremely long in the camp where we stay, I need adult diapers, which are extremely expensive. I need medication for diabetes, blood pressure, and a heart condition, and have had to take medicine which has expired."
Nahed, who is 66 yearsc old, said that "people I knew were almost unrecognizable" due to the effects of famine, and that "the experience of hunger and war has changed Gaza completely."
Adding that the desperate scramble for food "has denied people their humanity," Nahed described what she saw at an aid distribution site. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded while seeking aid, including more than 850 people slain at or near sites run by the US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) whistleblowers have said they were ordered to fire live bullets and artillery shells into crowds of desperate aid-seekers, even when they posed no security threat.
"I had to go there because I have nobody to look after me," Nahed explained. "I saw with my own eyes people carrying bags of flour stained with the blood of those who had just been shot."
One emergency doctor at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City—which has endured multiple IDF attacks, including the alleged execution of children in and around the facility—told Amnesty that many patients would be leading "reasonable lives" were it not for the "combination of starvation, destruction, and depletion of the healthcare system, unsanitary conditions, and multiple displacements under inhumane conditions."
Referring to Israel's imminent US-backed reoccupation of Gaza and plan to ethnically cleanse 1 million Palestinians from in and around Gaza City, Erika Guevara Rosas—Amnesty's senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns—said Monday that "as Israeli authorities threaten to launch a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza City, the testimonies we have collected are far more than accounts of suffering, they are a searing indictment of an international system that has granted Israel a license to torment Palestinians with near-total impunity for decades."
Such impunity was implicit in a recording broadcast on an Israeli news channel Sunday in which former IDF Gen. Aharon Haliva said that for every Israeli killed during the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, "50 Palestinians must die," and "it doesn't matter" if "they are children."
Guevara Rosas continued:
To even begin reversing the devastating consequences of Israel's inhumane policies and actions, which have made mass starvation a grim reality in Gaza, there must be an immediate, unconditional lifting of the blockade and a sustained ceasefire. The impact of Israel's blockade and its ongoing genocide on civilians, particularly on children, people with disabilities, those with chronic illnesses, older people, and pregnant and breastfeeding women is catastrophic and cannot be undone by simply increasing the number of aid trucks or restoring performative, ineffective, and dangerous airdrops of aid.
"In the face of the horrors Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian population in Gaza, the international community, particularly Israel's allies... must uphold their moral and legal obligations to bring an end to Israel's ongoing genocide," Guevara Rosas added. "States must urgently suspend all arms transfers, adopt targeted sanctions, and terminate any engagement with Israeli entities when this contributes to Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza."
The new Amnesty report came as the Gaza Health Ministry said the Palestinian death toll from Israel's 22-month annihilation and siege of the strip topped 62,000—mostly women and children—although experts say the actual toll is likely far higher. The ministry also said Monday that at least 263 people, including 112 children, have starved to death since October 2023.
Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation—deny Gazans are starving. However, even as staunch a supporter as US Vice President JD Vance has acknowledged that "little kids... are clearly starving to death" in Gaza.
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Rights Group Pushes Delaware AG to Revoke Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's Corporate Charter
A Center for Constitutional Rights lawyer called on Kathy Jennings to "use her power to stop this dangerous entity that is masquerading as a charitable organization while furthering death and violence in Gaza."
Aug 13, 2025
A leading U.S. legal advocacy group on Wednesday urged Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings to pursue revoking the corporate charter of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose aid distribution points in the embattled Palestinian enclave have been the sites of near-daily massacres in which thousands of Palestinians have reportedly been killed or wounded.
Last week, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) urgently requested a meeting with Jennings, a Democrat, whom the group asserted has a legal obligation to file suit in the state's Chancery Court to seek revocation of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's (GHF) charter because the purported charity "is complicit in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide."
CCR said Wednesday that Jennings "has neither responded" to the group's request "nor publicly addressed the serious claims raised against the Delaware-registered entity."
"GHF woefully fails to adhere to fundamental humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence and has proven to be an opportunistic and obsequious entity masquerading as a humanitarian organization," CCR asserted. "Since the start of its operations in late May, at least 1,400 Palestinians have died seeking aid, with at least 859 killed at or near GHF sites, which it operates in close coordination with the Israeli government and U.S. private military contractors."
One of those contractors, former U.S. Army Green Beret Col. Anthony Aguilar, quit his job and blew the whistle on what he said he saw while working at GHF aid sites.
"What I saw on the sites, around the sites, to and from the sites, can be described as nothing but war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of international law," Aguilar told Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman earlier this month. "This is not hyperbole. This is not platitudes or drama. This is the truth... The sites were designed to lure, bait aid, and kill."
Israel Defense Forces officers and soldiers have admitted to receiving orders to open fire on Palestinian aid-seekers with live bullets and artillery rounds, even when the civilians posed no security threat.
"It is against this backdrop that [President Donald] Trump's State Department approved a $30 million United States Agency for International Development grant for GHF," CCR noted. "In so doing, the State Department exempted it from the audit usually required for new USAID grantees."
"It also waived mandatory counterterrorism and anti-fraud safeguards and overrode vetting mechanisms, including 58 internal objections to GHF's application," the group added. "The Center for Constitutional Rights has submitted a [Freedom of Information Act] request seeking information on the administration's funding of GHF."
CCR continued:
The letter to Jennings opens a new front in the effort to hold GHF accountable. The Center for Constitutional Rights letter provides extensive evidence that, far from alleviating suffering in Gaza, GHF is contributing to the forced displacement, illegal killing, and genocide of Palestinians, while serving as a fig leaf for Israel's continued denial of access to food and water. Given this, Jennings has not only the authority, but the obligation to investigate GHF to determine if it abused its charter by engaging in unlawful activity. She may then file suit with the Court of Chancery, which has the authority to revoke GHF's charter.
CCR's August 5 letter notes that Jennings has previously exercised such authority. In 2019, she filed suit to dissolve shell companies affiliated with former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Richard Gates after they pleaded guilty to money laundering and other crimes.
"Attorney General Jennings has the power to significantly change the course of history and save lives by taking action to dissolve GHF," said CCR attorney Adina Marx-Arpadi. "We call on her to use her power to stop this dangerous entity that is masquerading as a charitable organization while furthering death and violence in Gaza, and to do so without delay."
CCR's request follows a call earlier this month by a group of United Nations experts for the "immediate dismantling" of GHF, as well as "holding it and its executives accountable and allowing experienced and humanitarian actors from the U.N. and civil society alike to take back the reins of managing and distributing lifesaving aid."
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European Soccer League Criticized for 'Insulting' Tribute to 'Palestinian Pelé' Killed by Israel
Suleiman Al-Obeid was killed by the Israel Defense Forces while seeking humanitarian aid.
Aug 10, 2025
Mohamed Salah, the Egyptian soccer star who plays for Liverpool's Premiere League club and serves as captain of Egypt's national team, had three questions for the Union of European Football Associations on Saturday after the governing body acknowledged the death of another venerated former player.
"Can you tell us how he died, where, and why?" asked Salah in response to the UEFA's vague tribute to Suleiman Al-Obeid, who was nicknamed the "Palestinian Pelé" during his career with the Palestinian National Team.
The soccer organization had written a simple 21-word "farewell" message to Al-Obeid, calling him "a talent who gave hope to countless children, even in the darkest of times."
The UEFA made no mention of reports from the Palestine Football Association that Al-Obeid last week became one of the nearly 1,400 Palestinians who have been killed while seeking aid since the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an Israel- and U.S.-backed, privatized organization, began operating aid hubs in Gaza.
As with the Israel Defense Forces' killings of aid workers and bombings of so-called "safe zones" since Israel began bombarding Gaza in October 2023, the IDF has claimed its killings of Palestinians seeking desperately-needed food have been inadvertent—but Israeli soldiers themselves have described being ordered to shoot at civilians who approach the aid sites.
Salah has been an outspoken advocate for Palestinians since Israel began its attacks, which have killed more than 61,000 people, and imposed a near-total blockade that has caused an "unfolding" famine, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. At least 217 Palestinians have now starved to death, including at least 100 children.
The Peace and Justice Project, founded by British Parliament member Jeremy Corbyn, applauded Salah's criticism of UEFA.
The Palestine Football Association released a statement saying, "Former national team player and star of the Khadamat al-Shati team, Suleiman Al-Obeid, was martyred after the occupation forces targeted those waiting for humanitarian aid in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday."
Al-Obeid represented the Palestinian team 24 times internationally and scored a famous goal against Yemen's National Team in the East Asian Federation's 2010 cup.
He is survived by his wife and five children, Al Jazeera reported.
Bassil Mikdadi, the founder of Football Palestine, told the outlet that he was surprised the UEFA acknowledged Al-Obeid's killing at all, considering the silence of international soccer federations regarding Israel's assault on Gaza, which is the subject of a genocide case at the International Court of Justice and has been called a genocide by numerous Holocaust scholars and human rights groups.
As Jules Boykoff wrote in a column at Common Dreams in June, the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) has mostly "looked the other way when it comes to Israel's attacks on Palestinians," and although the group joined the UEFA in expressing solidarity with Ukrainian players and civilians when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, "no such solidarity has been forthcoming for Palestinians."
Mikdadi noted that Al-Obeid "is not the first Palestinian footballer to perish in this genocide—there's been over 400—but he's by far the most prominent as of now."
Al-Obeid was killed days before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved a plan to take over Gaza City—believed to be the first step in the eventual occupation of all of Gaza.
The United Nations Security Council was holding an emergency meeting Sunday to discuss Israel's move, with U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Europe, Central Asia, and the Americas Miroslav Jenca warning the council that a full takeover would risk "igniting another horrific chapter in this conflict."
"We are already witnessing a humanitarian catastrophe of unimaginable scale in Gaza," said Jenca. "If these plans are implemented, they will likely trigger another calamity in Gaza, reverberating across the region and causing further forced displacement, killings, and destruction, compounding the unbearable suffering of the population."
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