MSF accuses US, Israel of turning Gaza food aid into ‘orchestrated killing’
“This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing.” That is the stark conclusion of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Doctors Without Borders, in a new report accusing Israeli forces and private American contractors of carrying out targeted and indiscriminate violence against starving Palestinians at food distribution points in Gaza.
The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) sites, set up by Israeli authorities in May and secured by US private armed contractors, have become “a laboratory of cruelty” where food is weaponised, civilians are gunned down, and desperation is exploited by design, says MSF.
Between 7 June and 24 July 2025, MSF’s Al-Mawasi and Al-Attar clinics, both located near GHF distribution points, treated 1,380 casualties from these sites, including 28 people who died. Seventy-one children were treated for gunshot wounds, 25 of them under 15. Injuries included a 12-year-old with a bullet passing entirely through his abdomen and an eight-year-old girl shot in the chest.
Anatomical analysis of the wounds shows that 11 per cent were to the head and neck, and 19 per cent to the chest, abdomen and back, patterns MSF says point to deliberate targeting rather than crossfire. At Khan Younis, wounds were more often to the lower limbs, suggesting different targeting strategies at different sites.
“Children shot in the chest while reaching for food. People crushed or suffocated in stampedes. Entire crowds gunned down at distribution points,” said Raquel Ayora, MSF General Director. “In nearly 54 years of operations, rarely have we seen such systematic violence against unarmed civilians.”
MSF also recorded 196 injuries from stampedes and suffocation, and so many assaults and thefts of food that medics added a new acronym to their registry, BBO (“Beaten By Others”). The report recounts how on 1 August, the same day a US special envoy visited the Al-Shakoush GHF site, 15-year-old Mahmoud Jamal Al-Attar was shot dead while trying to collect food.
The charity says the GHF scheme replaced the UN-led humanitarian mechanism and is being used to enforce Israel’s policy of starvation imposed since 2 March. MSF is calling for the GHF to be dismantled immediately, for the UN system to be reinstated, and for all financial and political support for the GHF, particularly from the US, to be suspended.
“We treat only a fraction of those killed and injured at these sites,” said Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Gaza. “There is no other way to describe the murder of children as anything but intentional… Despite condemnations, the global inaction to stop GHF is baffling.”
MSF warns that support for the GHF amounts to complicity in a deliberate campaign of dehumanisation, where food has been turned into a weapon and aid into a death trap.
Earlier this week UN experts called for the immediate dismantling of the GHF, warning that its operations are deepening the suffering of Palestinians and undermining international humanitarian law.