August 2nd 2025

Yousef Fares reporting from Gaza

Hundreds of thousands of starving Palestinians in northern Gaza make a seven-kilometer journey on foot to reach the Zikim military base in Beit Lahia, where trucks loaded with bags of flour are stopped just meters away from Israeli soldiers. To secure a 25-kilogram sack, people must approach the very area where Zionist forces and private contractors carry out daily killings.

Al-Akhbar met with Mohammad al-Sleibi, a former public school teacher in his thirties, who described surviving stampedes and knife fights to grab a single sack. “The soldiers allow only one or two trucks in for over 200,000 people,” he said. “Violence is inevitable. If you hesitate, you go home empty-handed.”

But the danger goes beyond scuffles. Israeli soldiers can open fire at any moment under the pretext of feeling threatened, no permission from higher-ups needed. That’s exactly what happened yesterday. According to survivor Ahmed Miqdad, Israeli soldiers opened fire as crowds rushed toward the trucks. “The soldiers fired round after round at us. We were trapped for hours. Hundreds were killed or injured,” he described. “They shot us like ducks, competing among themselves and probably even betting on who could shoot better. We made it out by some miracle, but without any flour.”

Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported that Zionist soldiers killed 53 civilians yesterday and wounded nearly 200 others in that incident alone.

This distribution system, dubbed “self-distribution” by the Zionist occupation and international organizations, has become one pillar of a new three-pronged strategy: air drops, aid traps, and chaos. The aim is to create an illusion of humanitarian assistance in order to strip Hamas of the “famine card” amid growing global outrage over Israel’s engineered starvation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on countries to participate in airdrops over the Gaza Strip. Five planes from Egypt, Jordan, and Israel delivered less aid than a single truck, and some drops landed in “red zones” too dangerous to reach, or directly injured displaced civilians in crowded tent cities. Others, dropped over Gaza’s western areas, injured several displaced people living in the densely packed tent cities that now blanket the region.

Israel’s aid policy goes far beyond preventing Hamas from gaining control of supplies. It is being used to recalibrate Gaza’s social structure under the harshest conditions, in ways that erode the moral and behavioral rules of society.

“The Israeli army is exploiting two years of war and the absence of effective governance to foster organized crime and looting networks,” said human rights activist Abdullah Sharshara. “The army enables aid theft as a way of supporting local militias, like the gang led by Yasser Abu, which looted hundreds of trucks under Israeli protection. It’s a system built on lawlessness.”

Aid trucks are now Gaza’s main source of goods. The trade in aid has created a massive black market that employs hundreds of thousands of people. This has spawned a vast black market and informal economy that feeds off looted supplies. “Every market needs a product, and aid is all that’s left,” Sharshara said. “The army forces truck drivers to stop in crowded areas and prohibits them from delivering to UNRWA warehouses. This sustains the climate of chaos where people are pushed to loot or steal just to eat.”

This is how the Zionist occupation systematically dismantled Gaza’s civil infrastructure: by eliminating community leaders from public service through targeted assassinations or forced displacement. At the same time, it obstructs the work of security forces and destroys civil society and private sector infrastructure, eroding all forms of societal authority.

“Gaza already had a high percentage of unemployed youth, over 49% before the war.” Sharshara noted. “War economy has allowed them to integrate into a new order based not on labor or production, but on opportunistic accumulation and looting. This class has moved from the periphery to the center of post-war life. Their moral values have been completely redefined.”