For future historians, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation will be one of the most challenging stories in the annals of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since the inception of GHF in May 2025, its mission of commanding the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip’s humanitarian aid distribution has invoked a series of Western repudiations in the form of Palestinian state recognition, investigations, and fiery accusations against the humanitarian organization. The organization’s overarching mission, however ostensibly humanistic, has been strained by the geopolitical circumstances surrounding the region—Israel’s forceful grip and Hamas’ coercive governance have destabilized the region’s economic model, complicating the GHF’s implementation. Unfortunately, the GHF has only brought lamentable results and rekindled the ire of the international community, with multiple organizations calling for the fund to cease its operations in Gaza. As Gaza faces famine, the GHF’s ambitious goals have been marred by inefficiency and humanitarian failures, revealing a deep structural misalignment with regional sociopolitical complexities while highlighting the impact of political decision-making and institutions on famine development.
The Situation In Gaza
Heart-wrenching videos of Palestinian children’s ribcages clinging to their skin are mere snapshots of a continuous history of repressive Israeli policy and the Israeli-Palestinian political dynamics. The UN has emphasized that “the Gaza Famine” will “only get worse,” according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s report on August 15th, 2025. It has now been internationally designated as a famine by the IPC and UN. The IPC scale’s standardized measurement assesses the nature and severity of a region’s situation through nutrition information and food security, highlighting the multilateral concern surrounding the Palestinian plight. Alongside food insecurity, they also assess related factors that contribute to unstable gastronomic conditions. Since October 7, 2023, concepts of a humanitarian blueprint towards Gaza have been internally debated among from a web of Israeli and American businesspeople. As the Gaza Strip found itself in dire straits following October 2023, conceptions usually converged along a common consensus: deliver humanitarian aid in a “non-UN way”. As international aid acted as a lifeline for two million Gazans, Israel’s dismantlement of Gaza’s humanitarian architecture has been preceded by a history of an Israeli campaign to drive Hamas’ influence out of the Gaza Strip.
Politics and Gaza’s Food Insecurity
The slow, impending doom of the densely populated strip has reached a crescendo after decades of Gazan and Israeli historical grievances and repressive policies. Longstanding Palestinian rejectionism and Israeli militarization has embedded an inexorable mistrust that undergirds the contemporary food insecurity—critical to understanding Gaza’s looming threat of famine. Since 2007, when Hamas seized power within Gaza and initiated a startling pattern of violence toward Israel, Israeli governance has maintained a tight grip through restrictive land, air, and sea blockades by limiting farming and fishing—vital to Palestinian subsistence. Israel’s sustained chokehold on agricultural production since 2007, with the help of Egypt, through buffer zones, oversaw 50% of inhabitants losing their sources of livelihoods, compared with 33% of the general Gaza population. Additionally, the employment rate decreased 42% from 2007 to 2009, with southern governorates like Deir Al-Balah, Rafah and Khan Younis decreasing by 64%, a 22% increase.
The political battle for regional primacy has left Palestinians vying for food security, leaving international aid to fill its gaping void. Yet, Israeli suspicions endured and legislation was passed in February 2025 to bar the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, from operating in the area. At the same time, Israel commenced a swift restructuring of aid distribution with the help of an enigmatic American-Israeli joint fund registered in Delaware and in Switzerland. This reveals the enduring political dimensions within Gaza leading to a politicization of aid that hampers the economic mobility and livelihoods of Palestinians.
Drawing the Blueprint: The GHF’s Intentions
The GHF’s mystical operations, spearheaded by Phillip Reilly—then-president of Orbis Operations, a consulting company specializing in security—managed to galvanize private-sector and government Israelis and Americans who were sanguinely discussing ways to “take the responsibility off [Israel’s] shoulders” of taking care of Gazan civilians. Networks of private companies like the Boston Consulting Group and non-profits like the World Food Program were involved in the GHF’s construction, circumventing international obligations of aid delivery in the process. While the Biden Administration remained skeptical of these plans, they were all viewed as acts of “throwing spaghetti against the wall to find some magic formula,” according to a Biden official. As PM Benjamin Netanyahu signaled his deep mistrust of international aid as abetting Hamas’ activities, the GHF was a conduit towards actualizing his superstitions.
Israel’s interest in shifting the burden of humanitarian aid led to a bold experiment to address the humanitarian situation. For the Israeli government, the GHF is a tool to coordinate the Israeli Defense Forces and strengthen its oversight over operations to eliminate Hamas’ influence in Gaza often with disruption and violence. For the Biden administration, clarifying aid distribution responsibilities was a necessary way to advance regional peace and stability while minimizing casualties. This misalignment of interests between America and Israel would create friction between the two states. The failure of the Gaza floating pier, a maritime aid corridor that focused on bringing humanitarian relief to Gaza, reflected the continuous diplomatic frailty between the Israelis and Americans.
Amid the diplomatic back and forth, the GHF came to represent a substantive intermediary for ameliorating the status quo. Alongside the financial backing of the Trump administration and the private equity firm McNally Capital, Reilly quickly reconciled private interests with the IDF’s concerns, building a monumental for-profit scaffolding that supported a non-profit initiative without the backing of the UN and with limited international support. Since then, the GHF has operated as a conglomerate of Israeli and American interests, creating a robust administrative partnership. Although the Trump administration reaffirmed the GHF’s substantive goals of delivering humanitarian aid, Netanyahu’s vision of the Gaza Strip has presented major ideological roadblocks that have hampered the GHF’s effectiveness.
Israel’s aggressive attitude towards the strip and the U.S.’ noncommittal stance undermine aid efforts. Trump’s abandonment of ceasefire negotiations due to Hamas’ supposed obstinacy could allow Israel to expand its military operations along the strip. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s unilateral control of the spigot of assistance has sidelined UN aid efforts, weakening international humanitarian assistance and making it harder for the GHF to function effectively. If Israel decides to strengthen its grip by expanding its operations, which remains likely at this juncture, this could trigger an increase in distribution site killings within the vicinity of GHF’s centers in Gaza. Furthermore, the organization’s questionable involvement in an Israeli vision of displacement has jeopardized its political neutrality, resulting in the resignation of former Executive Director Jake Wood. As Netanyahu calls for a full-scale occupation of the Gaza Strip, the GHF will find it increasingly challenging to navigate Israel’s vested interests in GHF operations while simultaneously upholding its values to the international community and taking “full responsibility for [the] future of Gaza.” As the GHF serves as a vehicle for President Trump’s vision of regional peace, Netanyahu’s unfettered ambitions have compromised the GHF’s intended mission of operating in a nonpartisan manner.
Famine Theory and Gaza: We Need a New Approach
The story of the GHF breaks the mold of conventional famine analysis, requiring an examination of various complicating factors. Until the late 20th century, academic literature held that the causal mechanisms of famine can be reduced to the theory of food availability decline, or FAD. Yet, the reductionist famine model fails to explore societal economic capacities that cause famine despite the presence of food. Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate and Harvard professor, advanced a new body of famine literature by dovetailing economic and political causes, linking a novel causation of famine development to an individual’s exchange of entitlements for access to resources. He refers to this theory as the failure of exchange entitlements (FEE). He expands on his theory by examining the 1943 Bengal famine, during which the British government suspended the trade of rice and grain among Indian provinces. Although Sen’s theory takes into account political activity, it aims to connect political actions with collective entitlements to labor. This theory, applied to the Gaza famine would diagnose the cause as a lack of Gazans’ entitlement to economic movement. Sen’s narrow descriptive model, however, does not engage with the history of Israeli interventionist policies, such as its calculated control over the amount of aid flowing into the region. On the other hand, Sen’s model examines starvation on economic/legal grounds; it would not evaluate Hamas’s use of aid deprivation as an instrument of terrorism.
Sen’s framework excludes normative considerations, as reflected in his concluding sentence in his work Poverty and Famines: “The law stands between food availability and food entitlement. Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance.” Simply put, Sen’s approach derives entitlements from legal rights rather than morality or human rights. Because Sen’s descriptive framework establishes analytical parameters without normative connotations, an explicit entitlement to food is reduced to a legal concept instead of a moral imperative. Sen’s model falls short in recognizing the vital role of normative elements, as the Geneva Conventions prohibit the starvation of noncombatants. Since Sen’s model would tend to characterize Palestinian starvation as a matter of food availability and economic movement, it assumes that the issue occurs in a vacuum outside the scope of politics, including terrorist tactics, the influence of international institutions, and conventional warfare. The GHF’s operations seem to be applying Sen’s framework of aid distribution, hoping an influx of regulated assistance can be effective in quelling Gaza’s pressing hunger in the interests of the Israeli government to deter Hamas. Thus, by adhering to Sen’s framework, labor entitlements are merely a product of individual choices and market forces, and ignore the longstanding influence of non-market forces controlling food assistance and institutional instability within Gaza. A robust, long-term approach necessitates an examination of the impact of political factors and institutions.
Contemporary famine literature has revised Sen’s entitlement model, shedding light on the cataclysmic power of political decision-making and institutional forces. Examinations during this time found that its causal mechanisms are rooted in state-centric policy decisions, and shaped by political considerations. Filip Slaveski’s work on Soviet Union’s collectivization of Ukrainian farms and Ingrid de Zwarte’s work on the Allied blockade during WW1 that killed over 450,000+ Germans negates the explanatory power of economic and legal entitlements proposed by Sen.
Haris Gazdar introduced a more contemporary perspective on famines, employing a tripartite model that categorizes famines into pre-modern, modern, and post-modern periods. This approach allows famines to be scaled, with pre-modern encapsulating food shortages,modern famine taking into account the political economy of food accessibility, and post-modern famine, caused by institutional factors and often involving international actors. By acknowledging this, Gaza’s famine has been characterized by considerable overlap among these ostensibly chronological paradigms, obscuring the categorical delineation of Gazdar’s model. The GHF’s sidelining of important international actors such as the UN, no matter its intentions, has worsened food insecurity, allowing the GHF’s incompatible non-profit model driven by profit-seeking incentives to underestimate the sheer scale and delicate nature needed to address the famine.
From a comparative famine analysis lens, the famine unfolding in Gaza shares significant parallels with those in Somalia and Sudan, yet it also resists easy comparison. Like Somalia and Sudan, Gaza’s crisis is not rooted in the absolute absence of food but rather in political and military restrictions that obstruct access, echoing Amartya Sen’s notion of entitlement failures. In all three cases, civilians face starvation primarily as a byproduct of conflict and the weaponization of resources. However, Gaza is distinctive in that it represents what Gazdar terms a post-modern famine: mortality is shaped not only by food scarcity but also by the collapse of public health, water, and welfare infrastructure under blockade and bombardment. Somalia and Sudan, by contrast, exhibit a mix of “modern” and “pre-modern” famine dynamics, where conflict-induced market breakdowns, displacement, and drought-driven shortages intersect.
Gaza exemplifies the unique vulnerabilities of a globally isolated population for whom famine emerges not only through food deprivation but also through systemic welfare collapse. While Israel’s sweeping vision of eliminating Hamas bleeds into mission creep, its partnership with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation allows humanitarian parameters to become more elusive. It dampens its ability to assuage the crisis. Zooming out, this provides us with a much more valuable lesson. While parsing through history expands our horizons on how famines come to be, Gaza’s novel dimensions of famine analysis erode our preconceptions, challenging academics and famine models for decades to come.
by Alejandro Nina Duran
