What’s entering Gaza now isn’t humanitarian aid, says Robert Inlakesh, it’s a Trojan horse.
EU aid worker in Gaza on Feb. 5. (EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid/ Flickr/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
By Robert Inlakesh
MintPress News
With over half a million people in Gaza on the brink of starvation and aid groups warning of an “imminent famine,” Israel has agreed to allow a token number of relief trucks into the besieged enclave. But what’s entering Gaza now isn’t humanitarian aid, it’s a Trojan horse.
A new, U.S.-backed private aid scheme staffed by former C.I.A. operatives, ex-Marines, and mercenaries tied to Israeli intelligence and Wall Street elites has been deployed in Gaza under the guise of relief. The project is led by a shady NGO registered in Switzerland just months ago, and human rights groups are calling it what it is: a hostile corporate takeover of the aid sector, designed to militarize relief, displace civilians and profit from Gaza’s agony.
At the heart of this scheme is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a nonprofit created in February and backed by Israeli authorities. Despite Gaza requiring a minimum of 500 aid trucks per day to meet basic survival needs, the Israeli military allowed just 1 percent of that to enter this week.
GHF, which now controls the operation, was launched by individuals with no background in humanitarian work — David Papazian, formerly with the Armenian National Interests Fund; Samuel Marcel Henderson; and David Kohler, CEO of Kohler Co. They are corporate executives, not aid workers.
According to a leaked internal proposal circulated in May, GHF plans to establish four “secure distribution sites” in Gaza capable of feeding just a fraction of the population (300,000 people), while giving the Israeli military and its contractors full operational oversight.
Fast Tracked & Immediately Condemned
This privatized model was fast-tracked with Israeli cabinet approval and immediately condemned by Amnesty International’s Swiss branch, which called it an attempt to “militarize the distribution of humanitarian aid” and warned that the planned distribution sites resembled Israel’s “safe zone” blueprint for ethnic cleansing.
Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said GHF threatened the U.N. with expulsion if it refused to cooperate. “They’re coming to take over, weaponizing aid,” Laerke told reporters in Geneva.
A U.S. government source speaking to France 24 called the project “very much an Israeli idea,” adding that it was “less secure” and “deadlier” than the Biden administration’s failed floating aid pier, a costly boondoggle ultimately used to support an Israeli military operation that slaughtered nearly 300 Palestinian civilians.
GHF’s newly appointed executive director is Jake Wood, a former U.S. Marine sniper turned disaster entrepreneur. After tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Wood founded Team Rubicon, an NGO that made its name in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake.
But Team Rubicon is no ordinary aid group. It is closely partnered with Palantir Technologies — a C.I.A.-backed data surveillance firm that equips the Israeli military with advanced targeting capabilities. Its board includes former C.I.A. Director David Petraeus and financial backers from Goldman Sachs. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have publicly endorsed its work.
The GHF proposal reveals plans to work with both Truist Bank and JPMorgan Chase, and suggests Goldman Sachs is facilitating the organization’s financial infrastructure.
As for security, GHF is outsourcing protection of its aid zones to U.S.-based private military firms, some of which have direct ties to Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer. Two firms are already confirmed.
Ron Dermer addressing the Israeli embassy’s Independence Day Celebration in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 2019. (State Department / Michael Gross/ Public Domain)
One, Safe Reach Solutions, is run by Philip F. Reilly, a former C.I.A. paramilitary chief who also worked for Constellis, the rebranded face of Blackwater. While Erik Prince, Blackwater’s notorious founder, has not been directly linked to GHF, his newer mercenary firm, Reflex Responses, was previously proposed to secure Gaza’s Rafah crossing.
The second firm, UG Solutions, hired approximately 100 former special forces soldiers earlier this year to perform vehicle inspections in Gaza. They were reportedly paid $1,000 per day with a $10,000 upfront bonus. UG Solutions is headed by Jameson Govoni, a former special ops operative and co-founder of the Sentinel Foundation.
These contractors were also reportedly involved in staffing the Netzarim corridor, a road that bisects Gaza, during a recent ceasefire. Their presence on the ground—and the opacity around their funding—marks a new phase in the U.S. and Israeli campaign to dominate Gaza not just by bombs, but through control of the most basic elements of life: food, water, and movement.
Even Israel’s closest regional ally, the United Arab Emirates, has refused to participate in the project, likely due to the plan’s political toxicity.
This scheme doesn’t exist in a vacuum. For years, the U.S. and Israel have worked to undermine UNRWA, the UN’s primary aid agency in Palestine. The Biden administration froze its funding, while Israel moved to outlaw the agency entirely. In the vacuum, GHF and its army of private contractors have emerged—not to serve Palestinians, but to manage their displacement more efficiently.
With American taxpayer dollars flowing into the hands of former intelligence agents, globalist financiers, and mercenaries, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation represents the convergence of Silicon Valley surveillance, Wall Street speculation, and Zionist military objectives.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show “Palestine Files.” Director of “Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe.” Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47
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Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Outstanding article and outstanding comments as well.
The depravity of this collapsing empire knows no depths. They show in stark relief what becomes of the human psyche when love of wealth and power overtakes its ability to distinguish right from from wrong.
“The depravity of this collapsing empire knows no depths” How very true.
Tiny correction. Should read “it’s another Trojan Horse.”
An earlier Trojan Horse related to the same use of withholding of vital survival aid for political gains was Biden’s Humanitarian Pier. It delivered remarkably little aid. Then this expensive military pier got damaged in a light storm and got towed to an Israeli port for repairs. After it was towed back, Israel launched an attack on a refugee camp to release (and kill) some hostages held by Hamas. It was said that a portion of the attack came from the Biden Humanitarian pier with commandos hidden inside aid delivery trucks until they came out firing. Denied of course by the US, which in the tradition of George Washington never tells a lie. The humanitarian group immediately suspended aid deliveries, claiming that their people had been put into danger since fewer would trust that the trucks were there to deliver aid and not live bullets. Afterwards, Biden withdrew his Humanitarian Pier.
thank you so much for making me aware of yet
another facet of western/settler colonial perfidy.
there truly are no limits to whites’ [global northern]
indifference to human suffering – except their own.
if we weren’t convinced of that before, this utterly
inhumane trojan horse tactic proves it beyond any
reasonable doubt.
i subscribe to no part of such a “rules-based order.”
It’s hardly unreal this new Gaza aid stratagem of the Western Deep State Intelligence axis but its nefarious purpose righteously disguised in the mantel of NGO humanitarianism is no less egregious in its genocidal intent to aid Israel in a final solution of the Gaza Palestinian problem. It is no less remarkable how seamlessly this will be inserted in the Western narrative enjoining the Western Publics to believe and accept that the West is actively instrumentalising the flow of desperately needed aid into Gaza
Thank you for this informative piece on the unfathomable evil of the US/Israel military death cult.
A classic bait and kill technique. Starving Palestinians will be lured to “safe food aid sites” far from their preferred locations but convenient for the IDF to get the cattle trucks in and forcefully dump the helpless Gazans over the border into the Negev desert controlled by Egypt. It is likely that Egypt will object forcefully but hey, what if a few trucks and their contents get blown up!
The plan is to level Gaza, so the real estate has zero value and can be purchased for nothing, addording to Trump; to move all Gazans out of the country; and to build Trump’s new Riviera of the Middle East. Any pretense of “humanitarian aid” is a fraud.
Will you visit Club Genocide? I won’t.
Back in the 70’s and 80’s, the apartheid regime of South African built a resort named “Sun City”. Many artists turned down the big bucks offered to do a gig there. I’d never have booked a room there, not that such was ever my price range. And that was just because of the regime it was linked to, and not because if you dug too deep into the sand you were likely to find the bones of the previous occupants.
Who will visit Trump’s Club Genocide?
They’ll be some takers of course, given the low quality of human nature. Probably a few residents of War Criminal Row in Miami Beach will take a mortgage on their condo there in order to put down a down payment on rooms with a view of genocide.
Depressingly clear trifecta: “convergence of Silicon Valley surveillance,
Wall Street speculation, and Zionist military objectives.”
Immorality of US-Israeli genocide and degradation of the human spirit
deepens the darkness.
How low can these people go? Is there no end to their cruelty and evil?
What do the poor, long-suffering Palestinians have to do to survive, as the rest of the world does little to nothing to help them?
They will continue until they are stopped by force, or a larger event. If Israel attacks Iran, that could lead to Iran dealing a death blow to Israel. Also, it appears US/Israeli lackey states and actors that run them and their press (like Kier Starmer) are starting to get nervous about the increasing lunacy and openness of the US/Israeli Genocide. The Israelis are both criminally insane and reckless, a bad combination. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that we have not seen the worst yet.