Israeli forces at the sites of the US-backed aid distribution system in Gaza operated by the perversely named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) have routinely opened fire on starving Palestinian civilians, which is a serious violation of international law and a war crime.

The UN Human Rights office reports that since the beginning of the GHF’s operations in late May, at least 859 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to obtain food from GHF sites, most by the Israeli military. Thousands more have been injured.

These crimes are not only committed by Israel. The United States is deeply implicated. The Israeli and US governments appear to be playing by the rules of “Offensive Influence” to turn reality upside down, to create heroes out of criminals and blame victims for their suffering.

Food Aid & A Killing Field

Day after day, the massacres continue. Former spokesperson for UNRWA, Chris Gunness, claims the GHF has turned Gaza into a “human abattoir”, where “Hundreds of civilians are herded like animals into fenced-off pens and are slaughtered like cattle in the process.” Médecins Sans Frontières called the scheme “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.” Israeli ‘Defence’ Force (IDF) soldiers interviewed by the liberal Israeli newspaper, Haaretz have described the sites as “a killing field”:

“We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces.” According to [the soldier], “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.” He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish – the name of the Israeli version of the children’s game “Red light, green light”

In an Associated Press (AP) expose on 3 July, US mercenaries (often termed security contractors) at GHF sites confirmed the use of “bullets, stun grenades and pepper spray” on unarmed civilians “at nearly every distribution, even if there was no threat.” In video provided to the AP by a UG Solutions source and geolocated to GHF distribution sites, some mercenaries can be heard “effectively egging each other on” in shooting Palestinians as they’re moving away:

At that moment, bursts of gunfire erupt close by, at least 15 shots. “Whoo! Whoo!” one contractor yelps.
“I think you hit one,” one says.
Then comes a shout: “Hell, yeah, boy!”

On 4 July, the BBC published accounts from a former GHF mercenary who “witnessed colleagues opening fire several times on hungry Palestinians who had posed no threat, including with machine guns”. The mercenary said GHF “team leaders” referred to starving Palestinians seeking aid as “zombie hordes”. He described one occasion where fellow GHF mercenaries “opened fire from a watchtower with a machine gun because a group of women, children and elderly people” were moving away from the site “too slowly”:

“As that happened, another contractor on location, standing on the berm overlooking the exit, opened up with 15 to 20 shots of repetitive weapons fire at the crowd.

“A Palestinian man dropped to the ground motionless. And then the other contractor who was standing there was like, ‘damn, I think you got one’. And then they laughed about it.”

The mercenary said that GHF managers had “brushed off his report as a coincidence”, and suggested the shot Palestinian man could have “tripped” or been “tired and passed out”.

In an interview on 26 July, former US Army Special Forces officer Anthony Aguilar said he resigned from the GHF after witnessing war crimes, and had never seen such “brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population”:

“Without question, I witnessed war crimes by the Israeli Defense Forces, without a doubt. Using artillery rounds, mortar rounds, firing tank rounds into unarmed civilians is a war crime.”

These ‘revelations’ by disgruntled GHF mercenaries mirror the exhaustive reports of daily massacres provided by the people Israel is attempting to exterminate. In his account of a GHF massacre on 18 June, Palestinian father Yousef al-Ajouri also spoke of how GHF mercenaries treated “aid distribution” as a sickening ‘game’:

Those [Palestinians] who got nothing started picking up spilled flour and grains from the ground, trying to salvage what had fallen during the chaos. I turned my head and saw soldiers, maybe 10 or 20 metres away. They were talking to each other, using their phones, and filming us. Some were aiming weapons at us. I remembered a scene from the South Korean TV show Squid Game, in which killing was entertainment – a game. We were being killed not only by their weapons but also by hunger and humiliation, while they watched us and laughed.

At nine pm on Saturday 7 June, Kamel Agha left his tent in the al-Qarara area east of Khan Younis and headed to a GHF aid distribution point in Rafah, arriving at the site around four am. As he approached, the Israeli army opened fire on the crowd of aid seeking civilians:

“We were more than a kilometer and a half from the aid distribution point, and while we were at this distance, the Israeli army began firing heavily at us. Soldiers, quadcopters, and tanks began killing us randomly. As I ran from death, I saw dozens of people lying bleeding on the ground. I saw hundreds of wounded people trying to escape, but no one could help them because we were running with death behind us and in front of us.”

In a massacre on 16 July GHF guards gassed starving Palestinians seeking aid at a distribution centre in Khan Younis. The massacre was described in a Drop Site News report:

At around 6 a.m., word spread that the site had opened and the crowd ran towards the distribution hub, according to multiple eyewitnesses, located some two to three kilometers (nearly two miles) away. When they arrived, a nightmarish scene unfolded.

The site was closed, though sacks of food could be seen through a narrow and fenced in entrance. Starving and desperate, the crowd squeezed into the area. People were pushed up against the fencing, chest to back, hardly able to breathe. Some fell on the ground and were unable to get up. Then, according to eyewitnesses, GHF guards stationed nearby threw stun grenades and used pepper spray on the crowd, causing mayhem.

At least 15 Palestinians died at the site from suffocation caused by the gas and the stampede, while another 6 were shot dead on the road.

On Thursday 24 July, the GHF announced on Facebook that it would be running aid distribution exclusively for women at two distribution sites in southern Gaza, instructing women to head to these points at nine am. According to a report by Mondoweiss, when the women arrived at one site:

GHF personnel attacked them with pepper-spray and batons, while Israeli military vehicles opened fire with bullets over their heads, eyewitnesses said in testimonies obtained by Mondoweiss. One woman who was at the site says she witnessed a GHF worker beating a pregnant woman on her stomach. Other eyewitnesses reported to local journalists that two women were shot dead by the Israeli army and several others were injured.

The sister of Khadija Abu Anza, one of the two women killed, described to the BBC how Israeli troops “fired warning shots” as they arrived from “a distance of just metres” and told them to move back. As they moved back away from the site the soldiers shot Khadija in the neck, killing her instantly. The IDF said it had “fired warning shots” at “identified suspects who approached them, posing a threat to the troops” but was unaware of any casualties. The GHF also denied any “incidents or fatalities” occurred at its sites, claiming “the day was very successful, with a lot of mothers and daughters participating.”

Plainly, there is no way this system can be truthfully framed as a sincere attempt at providing humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, even an incompetent one. So what is it that the people behind the GHF are aiming to achieve?

An Ethnic Cleansing Blueprint Drawn Up in Tel Aviv and Washington

The GHF was officially registered in January this year in Geneva, with none of the three founding board members (a Geneva lawyer, a US lawyer and an Armenian financier) having any background in humanitarian work. Announcing the GHF aid distribution arrangement on 9 May, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said it was “wholly inaccurate” to describe the initiative as “Israeli”, and media reports characterising it as such were “off the mark.” The Times of Israel reported the same day that “the Israeli government and military have been heavily involved” in the private ‘aid’ plan, “even if a new international organization — the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation — will be the one managing the initiative and the Israel Defense Forces won’t be the one to distribute the aid.” By 15 June, in a Fox News interview, Netanyahu was admitting that Israel has “a plan that we devised with the help of American firms to separate the giving of the humanitarian aid to the population from Hamas control”, before describing Israel as a “democracy fighting on an island in a sea of evil” and saying Gaza “has to be destroyed because every place is booby trapped.”

A New York Times investigation published on 24 May found the initiative was indeed “an Israeli brainchild, first proposed by Israeli officials in the earliest weeks of the war.” The GHF was first conceived in December 2023 by a group of “like-minded officials, military officers and business people with close ties to the Israeli government” which called itself the Mikveh Yisrael Forum (MYF).

The group included Yotam HaCohen and Liran Tancman, both members of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) – the Israeli military unit which oversees ‘civilian operations’ in the West Bank and Gaza (including approving aid shipments) – and Israeli-American venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg. The problem the MYF aimed to solve was not the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Gaza, but the difficulty of defeating Hamas “through military force alone”. They sought innovative solutions to undermine Hamas – “including through aid.”

The MYF developed the plan with support from foreign contractors, principally former senior CIA paramilitary officer Philip Reilly, who became a central architect of the GHF as early as January 2024. As a young CIA operative in the 1980s, Reilly helped train the Contras in Nicaragua – a US backed right-wing militia responsible for civilian massacres, torture and rape. Two decades later, Reilly was one of the first US agents to land in Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks, becoming the CIA station chief in Kabul. He retired from the CIA after 29 years in 2014 and began working for various private military contractors including as senior vice president of special activities for Constellis (formerly Blackwater). In 2021, he was senior vice president of Orbis Operations, a Virginia-based private intelligence firm chaired by former acting CIA director Michael J. Morell.

According to the New York Times, it was in his capacity as an Orbis Operations employee that Reilly “liaised with Israeli military and intelligence officials” and worked on “a study that outlined a more detailed version of the plan to outsource food aid delivery [in Gaza] to private companies and foundations”. In November 2024, Reilly’s representatives registered two entities in the United States: Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

SRS – one of the two US private contractors providing security for GHF operations – was publicly launched in January with Reilly as CEO. It was registered as a foreign company in Israel on 14 May, less than two weeks before GHF began operations in Gaza. The sole US director of SRS’s Israeli branch – financial officer Charles J. Africano – has overlapped professionally with Reilly for years, including at Constellis.

US Air Force veteran and longtime vice president at Orbis Operations, Jennifer Counter, followed Reilly to SRS in January as a “Subject Matter Expert.” Counter also serves as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Forward Defense group, which exists to “promote an enduring military advantage for the United States, its allies, and partners.” In a report for Drop Site News (31 July) Jasper Nathaniel writes that:

In December 2024, as the Orbis-designed “humanitarian” plan transitioned into its operational phase under Safe Reach Solutions—one month before Counter made the jump—she co-authored a piece for the Council titled “Over-the-horizon counterterrorism does not work. It’s time for a new approach.” She argued that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 signaled to terrorist groups that the West had moved on, and that intelligence and counterterrorism resources had thinned dangerously. “The ongoing fighting between Israel and the consortium of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and various Sunni groups such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” she wrote, “inspires and mobilizes previously dormant or undermanned groups globally, providing a rallying call against Western interests.” She called for rebuilding source networks through partnerships with local security services, funding grassroots groups to weaken militant recruitment, and supporting Israeli efforts to degrade regional threats.

Counter’s writing frames foreign civilian environments, especially conflict zones, as strategic sites for intelligence gathering and advancing the U.S.’s national security interests. That framing appears consistent with how the GHF operates on the ground. A contractor for UG Solutions, the private security firm working at GHF sites, told the Associated Press that cameras monitor each distribution point in real time, with American analysts and Israeli soldiers watching the feeds together in a control room. Some of the video streams, he said, are labeled “analytics” and equipped with facial recognition software.

UG Solutions – the other US mercenary company contracted by the GHF – was founded in 2023 by former Green Beret Jameson Govoni. Govoni previously helped set up a surveillance program to “teach special operations soldiers how to conduct surveillance and find hard-to-find terrorist cells around the world”.

Both companies appeared on the ground in Gaza in January, months before the GHF aid initiative was announced, staffing a checkpoint at the intersection of the Netzarim corridor with US special forces veterans. SRS drafted operational plans for the Israeli controlled corridor, which divides northern and southern Gaza, amid the ‘ceasefire’ earlier this year. A recently discharged IDF officer described to Haaretz how the corridor functions as a “kill zone” extending “as far as a sniper can see”:

“We’re killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists,” he says. “The IDF spokesperson’s announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200.”

Costing Ethnic Cleansing

On 4 July, the Financial Times reported that another Reilly linked company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), had entered into a multimillion-dollar contract to help launch the GHF aid scheme and modelled the costs of “relocating” Palestinians from Gaza. BCG’s ethnic cleansing model, which “envisaged kick-starting the enclave’s economy” with a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone” included:

cost estimates for relocating hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the strip and the economic impact of such a mass displacement. One scenario estimated more than 500,000 Gazans would leave the enclave with “relocation packages” worth $9,000 per person, or around $5bn in total.

Notable BCG alumni include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who worked at the firm from 1976 to 1978 alongside former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Back in 2012, Netanyahu attributed his and Romney’s “easy communication” to what he called BCG’s “intellectually rigorous boot camp.”

An employee of the ‘not-for-profit’ Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) – founded, owned and chaired by the experienced war criminal – produced a “lengthy document” for the BCG team which included:

the idea of a “Gaza Riviera” with artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives, a deep water port to tie Gaza into the India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor, and low-tax “special economic zones”.

The TBI document said the devastating war in Gaza had “created a once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild Gaza from first principles . . . as a secure, modern prosperous society”.

Here in Australia, BCG has been awarded nearly $150 million in federal government contracts between June 2023 and June 2025, including a six year, $99 million contract from DFAT for “business intelligence consulting services”. These contracts have been awarded despite BCG’s preexisting notoriety for paying bribes via offshore entities to the Dos Santos regime in Angola, and its involvement in planning by the Dos Santos family to steal billions from Angola’s oil wealth.

Meanwhile, former US Marine Jake Wood – best known for turning disaster relief into reality TV style spectacle at Team Rubicon – was hired as the GHF’s inaugural executive director. He resigned on 26 May, one day before the GHF began officially operating in Gaza, stating it was “not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”

Wood’s replacement and current director of the GHF, evangelical Christian Reverend Johnnie Moore, was co-chairman of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign’s ‘evangelical executive advisory board’. Moore, like many US evangelicals (including Mike Huckabee), is committed to promoting Jewish immigration to Israel as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. Speaking to The Washington Post in 2018, Moore said he had advised White House officials that “those who bless Israel will be blessed”. He has dismissed reports of mass killings at GHF aid sites as “fictional massacres”, and praised Trump’s proposal for the US to “take over” Gaza.

Forced Starvation as Policy

As for the actual provision of humanitarian aid for which the GHF ostensibly exists – on 21 July the ‘foundation’ boasted it had “already distributed more than 85 million meals”. If you assumed the GHF could be believed, and that aid was effectively distributed, this would equate to around 0.71 meals per day for every Palestinian in Gaza (roughly 2.1 million people).

Prior to the intensified Israeli siege on 2 March, UN and international aid agencies had operated some 400 aid distribution points across Gaza. Under the GHF system there are four aid distribution points, all but one in southern Gaza, with typically no more than two open on any given day. Around 70 trucks of aid per day have been allowed into Gaza under the GHF, compared to roughly 500 that entered before the war and the 500-600 the UN says are needed to meet basic humanitarian needs.

The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has said the agency has enough “food stockpiled to support the territory’s entire population for more than three months”, with “the equivalent of 6,000 trucks” of aid stuck in Jordan and Egypt as Israel refuses to allow its distribution. On 25 July it was revealed that Israel had destroyed over 1000 truckloads of spoiled aid it refused to allow into Gaza, with an Israeli army source stating “Even today, there are thousands of packages waiting in the sun. If they are not transferred into Gaza, we will be forced to destroy them too.” According to Quds News Network:

[Israeli] Military officials blamed the destruction on what they called a failed aid distribution mechanism, referring to the Israeli-US Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). “The mechanism simply doesn’t work,” one officer said. “The trucks are stuck. There is no functioning coordination. The roads are damaged. Nothing is moving.”

As of 4 August, at least 180 Palestinians have died from starvation in Gaza, including 93 children and infants. Last week over 100 humanitarian organisations, including Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), and Oxfam, warned that “mass starvation” is spreading across Gaza as Israel continues to block the entry of aid. According to the Government Media Office in Gaza, over 650,000 children under the age of five face an imminent and severe risk of acute malnutrition in the coming weeks.

When not outright denying that this mass, forced starvation in Gaza exists, Israeli and US (and Australian) politicians incessantly repeat the alleged pretence for the GHF’s existence: that Hamas is stealing aid. No substantiated evidence for this allegation has ever been provided. Nor has any evidence been provided for other Israeli claims used to ‘justify’ the GHF, such as that the UN aid chief and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs are “affiliated with Hamas.”

Back in February 2024, David Satterfield, the top US diplomat involved in humanitarian assistance for Gaza, revealed that no Israeli official had presented him or the Biden administration with any “specific evidence of diversion or theft of assistance.” An internal US government analysis that “examined 156 incidents of theft or loss of U.S.-funded supplies reported by U.S. aid partner organizations” from October 2023 to May 2025 “found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.” On July 26 The New York Times reported confirmation from senior Israeli military officials that “the Israeli military never found proof that [Hamas] had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations”. The officials cited also confirmed that “the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food” to Gaza’s population.

There has, however, been thoroughly documented proof of gangs armed and protected by Israel stealing aid. Again back in February 2024, Satterfield described how:

Israeli forces earlier this month killed Palestinian police — among them Hamas operatives — protecting a UN aid convoy in the enclave’s southern city of Rafah. As a result, Sutterfeld said they have since refused to protect convoys, hampering aid deliveries inside Gaza because of threats from criminal gangs.

On 18 November 2024, The Washington Post reported that organised gangs “described by observers as rivals of Hamas” were “operating freely” and systematically stealing aid “in areas controlled by the Israeli military.”

An internal United Nations memo obtained by The Washington Post concluded last month that the gangs “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” or “protection” from the Israel Defense Forces. One gang leader, the memo said, established a “military like compound” in an area “restricted, controlled and patrolled by the IDF.”

Aid organizations say Israeli authorities have denied most of their requests for better measures to safeguard convoys, including appeals for safer routes, more open crossings and permission to allow Gaza’s civilian police to protect the trucks. Israeli forces within view of the attacks have also failed on multiple occasions to intervene as looting was underway, aid workers, U.N. officials, transport workers and truck drivers say.”

The internal UN memo identified Yasser Abu Shabab as “the main and most influential stakeholder behind systematic and massive looting” of aid convoys. Abu Shabab escaped from prison (where he was serving a 25-year drug trafficking sentence) during the Israeli assault on Gaza in October 2023. The personnel of his so-called “Popular Forces Militia” are widely known to be affiliated with ISIS.

Head of the Association of Truck Owners in the Gaza Strip, Nahed Shuhaibar, described to The Washington Post how Abu Shabab’s gang “sets up berms to waylay convoys along the Israeli-controlled route from Kerem Shalom, where they wait with Kalashnikovs and other weapons.” On 20 November 2024, the Financial Times reported further confirmation from sources on the ground that “heavily armed gangs” including Abu Shabab’s were stockpiling looted goods in open-air headquarters “seemingly overlooked by Israeli surveillance drones” and reselling the supplies “via middlemen to destitute Palestinians at prohibitive prices”.

Writing for The New Arab, Muhammad Shehada says that by mid-2024 local authorities in Gaza had concluded that:

Abu Shabab was merely a front for an Israeli astroturfing campaign to maintain its policy of starvation in Gaza after the international community pressured Netanyahu to ease his total siege and allow a trickle of aid into the enclave.

What made this clear, according to them, is how Israeli drones bombed emergency committee volunteers or police officers every time they came close to thwarting a looting attempt by that gang in particular.

That Israel is backing aid stealing gangs in Gaza, including Abu Shabab’s, was openly admitted by Netanyahu in early June. It was also confirmed by Abu Shabab himself in an interview early last month with Makan, the Israeli public broadcaster’s Arabic-language radio station. As reported by The Times of Israel:

In the interview, Abu Shabab confirms for the first time that his forces are cooperating at some level with the IDF.

“We didn’t have any security like we do in zones under Israeli control. We entered these areas and carried out operations beyond expectations. As long as the goal is support and assistance (from the IDF), and nothing more, when we go on a mission, we inform them — nothing beyond that — and we carry out the military operation,” he says.

On 24 July, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Abu Shabab, titled “Gazans Are Finished With Hamas”, where he called “on the U.S. and Arab countries formally to recognize and support an independent Palestinian administration” under his gang’s leadership. Abu Shabab writes (though Israeli news reports have claimed he’s illiterate) that the areas his gang controls “have successfully kept Hamas and other militant groups out” and as a result “people have access to shelter, food, water, and basic medical supplies—all without fear of Hamas stealing aid or being caught in the crossfire with the Israeli military.” He urges “proper support” for his gang, including “financial support”, “humanitarian aid”, and “safe corridors” (i.e IDF and US mercenary backing) to make his “vision a reality.”

The next day, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by GHF executive director Reverend Johnnie Moore, titled “The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Can Feed Starving Gazans.” Moore claims that the UN has “falsely cast us as endangering needy people in Gaza” in an effort to “deflect blame.” He alleges that it is the UN, not Israel or the GHF, preventing a backlog of aid from entering Gaza, providing a COGAT post as the source for this claim. Moore’s message combines righteous urgency with a progressive, humanistic appeal:

The people of Gaza don’t need more posturing or institutional deliberation. They need food. They need medical supplies. They need leadership from the institutions whose purpose is to help them.

No one organization can carry this burden alone. If there was ever a time for unity over bureaucracy, courage over caution, pragmatism over politics, and mission over ego, it is now. To the U.N. and others across the humanitarian community, we say: Our door is open.

In a speech delivered in Washington on 31 July, Moore again sought to flip reality – accusing the UN of “laundering Hamas disinformation”:

When establishment media and international organisations spread these false narratives about GHF, they’re not attacking us. They’re attacking the hungry children that we feed, and instead of lying, they should just help us, because there’s another basic rule of life: if Hamas opposes you, it probably means you’re doing the right thing.

The Rules of Offensive Influence

Alongside her role at Safe Reach Solutions and senior fellowship at the Atlantic Council, Jennifer Counter is also a course associate at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies’ Strategic Communications department – which boasts that it develops “the next generation of leaders in the global communication field.” Jasper Nathaniel writes that:

On her faculty page, where students considering her class would find her bio, there is an article she authored in 2021: “Rules of Offensive Influence.” “Influence is a long-term effort and inherently political in nature, not a one-off event that is grounded in military objectives,” Counter writes in the piece originally published on Strike Source. “Even tactical military propaganda should support a longer-term strategy and goal to be most impactful.”

She then offers 16 rules for creating, implementing, and adapting offensive influence campaigns: a playbook that closely tracks the effort to delegitimize the UN’s existing aid network, install the GHF in its place, and control the humanitarian narrative in Gaza. She advises practitioners to “use divides in society to build support, seed dis- and misinformation to mislead and manipulate, and co-opt community groups to do what you want.” Campaigns should focus on a few emotionally charged concepts “based on historical ills that plague the group,” and then A/B tested for impact and used to “discredit the adversary and their place within the community.” Messaging should be layered across platforms, voiced by different actors—including local figures, politicians, and members of civil society—and rotated to keep the adversary “always on the defensive. The goal is not to counter your adversary. Your goal is to dominate your adversary,” denying them the “time, bandwidth, or opportunity” to advance their own narrative.

Counter also stresses the need to “plan to fill the power vacuum… The backfill needs to be established and ready to go well before the adversary is” removed. The negativity, she writes, must “be balanced with the hope that is your vision for the future. People want things to be better, and your … system is the answer.” Nowhere in the piece is there any reference to ethical limits or moral considerations.

In one of her LinkedIn posts, Counter argues that in conflicts like Gaza, “it doesn’t matter what the details are” because people “fit the narrative to what they want to believe.”

Johnnie Moore claims that the GHF wants the UN to distribute aid but the UN is refusing. This plainly clashes with the reality that Israeli restrictions on the movement of UN staff make distribution impossible, as well as Israel’s repeated rejection of Hamas’s insistence in ceasefire negotiations that any agreement must allow the UN to resume aid distribution.

Yasser Abu Shabab claims that his “Popular Forces” offer a “viable alternative” to Hamas, and “in a short time” could “transform most of Gaza from a war zone into functioning communities.” This plainly clashes with the reality that, as Muhammad Shehada writes:

Around 300 untrained thieves, drug dealers, criminals, and convicted murderers cannot overpower Hamas’s estimated 30,000 militants

Their actual role has more to do with advancing Israel’s genocide, starvation, and ethnic cleansing in Gaza while creating plausible deniability.

Abu Shabab’s claim that the “vast majority” of Palestinians in Gaza “reject Hamas” clashes with the reality that while polling indicates support for Hamas may have declined since last year, it remains at around 37% in the Gaza Strip, with 64% opposed to the “disarmament of Hamas in the Gaza Strip in order to stop the war”. Abu Shabab’s claims also clash with the reality that his own family has publicly disowned him for collaborating with Israel and looting humanitarian aid.

All these political actors are betting on the same outcome as Counter: that people will accept their narratives without proof because it’s “what they want to believe.” Specifically, they are relying on populations in the rich, imperialist countries that support Israel, including Australia, only identifying with Palestinians as passive victims of a ‘humanitarian crisis’, not as active agents fighting for justice and liberation – including through armed struggle.