The New Yorker:

As Palestinians continue to die of severe hunger, a former Israeli official explains what the latest plan is really meant to achieve.

By Isaac Chotiner

There are currently four main sites in Gaza where Palestinians can receive humanitarian aid. The sites, which were opened two months ago, are run by a nonprofit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (G.H.F.) and supported by the governments of Israel and the United States.

Previously, the United Nations and other groups distributed aid at hundreds of locations; that system, which was frequently stymied by Israel preventing aid from entering Gaza, was largely replaced by the G.H.F.’s four sites. More than seven hundred and fifty people seeking aid at the sites have been killed. The vast majority of the fatalities are attributable to soldiers with the Israel Defense Forces, though American security contractors, who help operate the sites, have also fired on Palestinians. (In a statement to The New Yorker, the G.H.F. said that, except for one incident last week, when Hamas “invoked a stampede” that killed twenty people, no one has died at or near the sites.) The G.H.F. claims that it has distributed more than eighty-five million meals, and some non-G.H.F. aid trucks are also entering Gaza. But Palestinians continue to die from malnutrition—there were eighteen such deaths in twenty-four hours this past weekend, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Before the G.H.F. sites opened, the United Nations and a variety of N.G.O.s warned Israeli officials that they were likely to be dangerous and ineffective; despite the death toll, the Israeli government and the G.H.F. have made no effort to alter their approach.

To understand how the G.H.F. was formed, and what its intentions are, I recently spoke by phone with Michael Milshtein, the head of the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University. Milshtein was previously the head of the Department for Palestinian Affairs in the I.D.F.’s military-intelligence wing, and a senior adviser to the commander of cogat, which supervises civilian policy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why the G.H.F. has been such a disaster for Palestinians, the Israeli government’s motives for its creation, and how the war aims of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, have changed.

How do you understand what we’re seeing almost daily at these G.H.F. sites? What is actually going on?

In Israeli discourse, I’m known as a critical voice, someone who was against the G.H.F. idea from even before the formal establishment of this organization. And right now I consider this whole project to be a total failure. The basic goals, or the basic expectations, for this project were to create a buffer between the Palestinian public and Hamas, and to make Hamas’s power much more limited. But it has been a total failure. And it’s not surprising, because since Day One you could see the seeds of the failure. For starters, the number of people in this organization is very small. I think it’s less than a thousand. [The G.H.F. told The New Yorker that it would not confirm how many employees it has “for security reasons.”] And it’s only four sites, or four stations, for distribution of food and water. I’m speaking with people in Gaza, and they are describing the situation to me. It is chaos. Almost every day there are shootings, from both the I.D.F. and American contractors. [The G.H.F. denied this, saying that some of the violence has occurred when Gazans “have taken dangerous short cuts or gotten lost.”]

What was the idea for the G.H.F. initially? And who, exactly, is behind it? I still don’t feel like I have an adequate answer to either of those questions. Do you?

We’re speaking about a quite bizarre group of people. The most prominent is Roman Gofman, the military secretary of Netanyahu. There were also several businessmen and analysts who were involved here in Israel. But this was a group of people who don’t really know Gaza. When I read about this project, it seemed exactly like the American idea about changing hearts and minds before the war of 2003 in Iraq. The idea was to engineer the minds of the people by changing the situation, by controlling the food and controlling the water. From my point of view, it’s a reflection of the fact that they don’t really understand the Palestinian people, and they don’t really understand how things are going in Gaza, because even if people can get food from the G.H.F. they will not become affiliated with Israel. This won’t change the loyalty that some people have to Hamas. So, unfortunately, it was a waste of time, a waste of energy, and a waste of the lives of a lot of Palestinians. I’m very disappointed that here in Israel people are not willing to declare, in a clear manner, that this project is a failure.

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