SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
gaza humanitarian foundation
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."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'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."
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular