It was Tuesday, June 10 when Khalil heard from neighbors that an aid truck had arrived a few kilometers from where he lived in Deir al Balah, Gaza. By then he had already lost about 45 pounds since the war began in 2023.

With his brothers and a friend, Khalil set off on foot. On the walk over, the 26-year-old could hear intermittent shelling, but the promise of food, he felt, was worth the risk. “Hunger has become stronger than fear,” said Khalil, who agreed to speak on the condition that his last name not be published.

When they arrived around 6:30 a.m., a huge crowd was gathering at the aid point in Netzarim. “People start heading there before sunrise because the lines get impossibly long,” Khalil said. Thousands had clearly gotten the same tip. The sheer amount of desperate, hungry people was overwhelming. Khalil said, “I hadn’t eaten properly in days. I was dizzy and weak.”

The distribution site was run by a new aid provider active in Gaza for only a few weeks. Khalil quickly noticed military presence. “We saw the Israeli soldiers in full military uniform standing next to their armored vehicles. We arrived knowing the place was dangerous. But, there was no clash, no threat to them,” Khalil said. (The Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories bureau did not respond to written requests for comment for this article.)

“I got closer to death that day than a piece of bread”

He stood in line with hundreds of others. There were children, women, and elderly men. “Some were barefoot, some had been waiting since the night before,” he recalled.

As his group inched closer to the point where they hoped they would be able to grab a parcel of items, gunshots rang out. Khalil ran for his life.

“They began shooting directly at unarmed civilians,” he said. “The bullets were chasing us as if we were targets on a shooting range, and not just hungry people. We scattered under a hail of bullets. I got closer to death that day than a piece of bread.”

Khalil survived that quest for food — alive to starve another day instead. But at least 36 Palestinians did not, and 207 more were wounded, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Since Israel broke its ceasefire with Hamas in mid-March, more than 875 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food.

Reporting from inside Gaza over the last few months, The Intercept observed a famine that is manufactured and an aid distribution system seemingly designed to cause more suffering and death. Amid the war, Israel has rendered Gaza inaccessible to the foreign press; American journalist Afeef Nessouli accessed the Strip by volunteering as an aid worker for a medical nonprofit and reporting in his off-hours.

Usually during war, the distribution of medical care and food to a besieged population would not be administered by any party waging war against it, much less by an illegally occupying military. And in most situations, aid operations would closely involve established organizations already active in the area.

But that’s not the case in Gaza. Israel has effectively banned the biggest and longest-running aid group in the region: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. And by gutting the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, a critical funding vehicle for aid groups including UNRWA, U.S. President Donald Trump has strangled international aid in Gaza.

Israel and the U.S. have instead rolled out a new scheme centered around a fledgling U.S.-based nonprofit that operates alongside the same Israeli military responsible for killing more than 230 journalists, 1,400 health care workers, and 17,000 Palestinian children in the last two years.

With a few small exceptions, all aid reaching Gaza since May has moved through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was established in Delaware in February. The organization has received tens of millions from the U.S. to distribute aid in Gaza — and, reportedly, some $100 million from an unnamed country. GHF did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story.

Since it started operations, the number of locations in Gaza where residents could receive aid has plummeted from around 400 to four sites.

“Sometimes only one hub is actually operating,” said Hanya Aljamal, the senior project coordinator at the aid group Action for Humanity, who is based in Deir al Balah. Sometimes, Aljamal said, the sites are closed for security reasons, other times for maintenance. Khalil corroborates this: “I went a few days ago and it wasn’t open.” He says now he checks the GHF’s Facebook page, which informs people of the schedule. Aljamal says she believes “they operate semi-daily for only two hours a day.”

Arriving in Gaza in late March just as Israel broke the ceasefire, The Intercept witnessed firsthand what happened to Gaza’s most vulnerable after the U.S. defunded USAID and UNRWA and turned those agencies’ work over to the Israeli military and GHF.

Famine has been a problem in Gaza since the early days of the war. But when Israel and Hamas announced a ceasefire on January 19, 2025, access to goods became easier. “Meat, vegetables and chicken — and even snacks — were reachable, albeit at a slightly expensive price,” Aljamal said. “But we had options.”

When the holy month of Ramadan began on February 28, it wasn’t hard to find a simple meal of rice or lentils for dinner, or labneh and za’atar for suhoor before fasting for the day.

But on March 2, Israel cut off food imports to Gaza when it imposed a blockade. On March 18, Israel shattered the ceasefire when it restarted its campaign of airstrikes. Even after Eid, which marked the end of the Holy Month, one meal a day remained standard practice — if not a luxury.

At the time, community kitchens like Shabab Gaza were running low on food. But they were still delivering what they could to areas the Israeli military referred to as “red zones”— swaths of land Israel has evacuated and banned aid from entering, such as Khan Yunis. By spring, 70 percent of Gaza was considered a “red zone.”

Shabab Gaza, “the youth of Gaza” in Arabic, was making meals of rice so people could break their fast at sundown. Inside a makeshift kitchen housed in a tent, the men, fasting themselves, worked in groups to cook the rice in vats. They packaged it quickly to deliver to the surrounding area, but neighbors also showed up with pots and pans, ready to grab the food for their families, or ready to eat themselves.

There were about

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