“This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing,” a new report from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), documents the horrors witnessed by MSF staff at two clinics in Gaza that regularly received mass influxes of casualties following violence at sites run by the GHF, an Israeli-US proxy that has militarized food distribution.
An analysis of MSF medical data, patient testimonies, and firsthand medical witnessing at the two clinics point to both targeted and indiscriminate violence by Israeli forces and private American contractors against starved Palestinians at food distribution sites run by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). These are sites of orchestrated killing and dehumanization.
The person who owns this backpack was injured while trying to get food at a GHF distribution site, and was taken to MSF’s health center in Al Mawasi for treatment. | Palestine 2025 © Nour Alsaqqa/MSF
Between June 7 and July 24, 1,380 casualties, including 28 dead, were received at MSF’s Al-Mawasi and Al-Attar clinics in southern Gaza, near GHF-run distribution sites. During those seven weeks, MSF teams treated 71 children for gunshot wounds, 25 of whom were under the age of 15. Faced with no alternatives to find food, starved families frequently send teenage boys into this lethal environment as they are often the only males in the household physically able to make the journey. Patients have included a 12-year-old boy hit by a bullet that had passed all the way through his abdomen, and five young girls, one of whom was only 8 years old and suffered a gunshot wound to her chest.
Palestinians at an Israeli-controlled distribution site in Netzarim risk their lives at risk to receive food. MSF calls for an immediate cessation of the GHF distribution mechanism and urges states and private donors to refrain from funding what is essentially a death trap. | Palestine 2025 © MSF
Injury patterns suggest intentional fire
“In MSF’s nearly 54 years of operation, rarely have we seen such levels of systematic violence against unarmed civilians,” said Raquel Ayora, MSF general director. “The GHF distribution sites masquerading as ‘aid’ have morphed into a laboratory of cruelty—children shot in the chest while reaching for food, people crushed or suffocated in stampedes, and entire crowds gunned down at distribution points. This must stop now.”
There is no way to describe the murder of children as anything but intentional. Despite the condemnations and calls for dismantling it, the global inaction to stop GHF is baffling.Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza
An initial analysis of the gunshot wounds among patients arriving at the Al-Mawasi clinic found that 11 percent of the gunshot injuries were to the head and neck, while 19 percent were to areas covering the chest, abdomen, and back. By contrast, people arriving from the Khan Younis Distribution Center were far more likely to arrive with gunshot wounds to the lower limbs. The distinct patterns and anatomical precision of these injuries strongly suggests the intentional targeting of people within and around the distribution sites rather than accidental or indiscriminate fire.
“We’re being slaughtered,” said Mohammed Riad Tabasi, a patient who was treated at MSF’s Al-Mawasi clinic. “I’ve been injured maybe 10 times. I saw it with my own eyes, about 20 corpses around me. All of them shot in the head, in the stomach.”