Palestine: MSF Urges Shutdown of GHF Aid Sites Over 'Orchestrated Killing and Dehumanisation’

Jerusalem, 7th August 2025 – An analysis of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) medical data, patients’ testimonies, and first-hand medical witnessing at two MSF clinics in Gaza, Palestine, point to both targeted and indiscriminate violence by Israeli forces and private American contractors against starved Palestinians at food distribution sites run by the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). MSF calls for the immediate dismantling of the GHF scheme; the restoration of the UN-coordinated aid delivery mechanism; and calls on governments, especially the United States, as well as private donors to suspend all financial and political support for the GHF, whose sites are essentially death traps.

A new MSF report, This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing, documents the horrors witnessed by MSF staff at two clinics that regularly received mass influxes of casualties following violence at sites run by the GHF, an Israeli-US proxy that has militarised food distribution. Between 7 June and 24 July 2025, 1,380 casualties, including 28 dead, were received at MSF’s Al-Mawasi and Al-Attar clinics in southern Gaza, located near the GHF-run distribution sites. During those seven weeks, our teams treated 71 children for gunshot wounds, 25 of whom were under the age of 15. Faced with no alternatives to find food, starved families frequently send teenage boys into this lethal environment, as they are often the only males in the household physically able to make the journey.

Patients have also included a 12-year-old boy hit by a bullet that had passed all the way through his abdomen, and five young girls, one of whom was only 8 years old and suffered a gunshot wound to her chest.

“Children shot in the chest while reaching for food. People crushed or suffocated in stampedes. Entire crowds gunned down at distribution points,” says Raquel Ayora, MSF General Director. “In MSF’s nearly 54 years of operations, rarely have we seen such levels of systematic violence against unarmed civilians.”

“The GHF distribution sites masquerading as ‘aid’ have morphed into a laboratory of cruelty,” says Ayora. “This must stop now.”

An initial analysis of the gunshot wounds among patients arriving at the Al-Mawasi clinic found that 11 percent of the gunshot injuries were to the head and neck, while 19 percent were to areas covering the chest, abdomen, and back. By contrast, people arriving from the Khan Younis Distribution Centre were far more likely to arrive with gunshot wounds to the lower limbs. The distinct patterns and anatomical precision of these injuries strongly suggests the intentional targeting of people within and around the distribution sites, rather than accidental or indiscriminate fire.

“We’re being slaughtered. I’ve been injured maybe 10 times,” says Mohammed Riad Tabasi, a patient who was treated at the MSF Al-Mawasi clinic. “I saw it with my own eyes, about 20 corpses around me. All of them shot in the head, in the stomach.”

In May, Israeli authorities sought to dismantle the UN-led humanitarian response and replace it with a militarised food distribution scheme operated by GHF. All four GHF-run distribution sites are in areas under full Israeli military control, and “secured” by private American armed contractors. The GHF has been touted by the Israeli and US governments as an “innovative solution” – a supposed answer to their unproven claims of aid diversion in Gaza and unfounded accusations of UN failure. The sites are nothing but a deadly scheme, institutionalising the Israeli authorities’ starvation policy of Gaza that started on 2 March, with the full siege they imposed on the Strip as part of their ongoing genocidal campaign.

The way this scheme operates attempts to strip people of their dignity. Over the seven weeks, MSF teams treated 196 patients with injuries following chaotic scrambles at the GHF distribution sites. Patients included a five-year-old boy with severe head injuries and a woman who died of asphyxiation, likely caused by the suffocating crush of a crowd.

People who manage to secure any food rations at the sites often face the risk of violent looting and theft of aid by other starved people. Our medical teams were required to add a new acronym to their patient registry: BBO – Beaten By Others. This refers to people injured either in the crush of the crowd or by being beaten and robbed of their supplies immediately after receiving them. It is dehumanisation by design.

“On 1 August, the same day the US special envoy to the Middle East visited GHF sites, 15-year-old Mahmoud Jamal Al-Attar was killed around the Al-Shakoush GHF site while trying to get food,” says Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, MSF emergency coordinator in Gaza. “He arrived at the MSF Al-Mawasi clinic after being shot in the chest.”

“We treat only a fraction of the total number of people killed and injured at these sites. There is no other way to describe the murder of children as anything but intentional,” says Zabalgogeazkoa. “Despite the condemnations and calls for dismantling it, the global inaction to stop GHF is baffling.”

Between 27 July – 2 August, 186 people with wounds from gunshots, shrapnel or assault and stabbing were treated in MSF’s Al-Mawasi or Al-Attar clinics after being wounded at GHF sites. Two of them died. On 3 August MSF clinics received three more wounded people, one who had been shot in the neck and two with shots to the head.

A bag in blood of one of the civilians admitted at MSF health centre in Al Mawasi, who was injured while trying to get food at the GHF distribution site. Date: 02/08/2025 | Location: Al Mawasi | Photographer: Nour AlsaqqaPalestinians at the GHF distribution site in Netzarim putting their lives at risk to receive some food. Date: 25/07/2025 | Location: Netzarim GHF distribution point | Photographer: MSF

After Israeli forces opened fire at people in one of the GHF distribution sites, At MSF health centre Al Mawasi were receiving patients with injuries including the dead while trying to get food for their families in Gaza. Date:03/08/2025 | Location: Palestine | Photographer: Nour Alsaqqa

Palestinians at the GHF distribution site in Netzarim putting their lives at risk to receive some food. Date: 25/07/2025 | Location: Palestine | Photographer: MSF

About Doctors Without Borders (MSF)

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is a global network of principled medical and other professionals who specialise in medical humanitarian work, driven by our common humanity and guided by medical ethics. We strive to bring emergency medical care to people caught in conflicts, crises, and disasters in more than 70 countries worldwide.

In South Africa, the organisation is recognised as one of the pioneers of providing Antiretroviral Treatment (ART) in the public sector and started the first HIV programmes in South Africa in 1999. Until today, the focus of MSF’s interventions in the country has primarily been on developing new testing and treatment strategies for HIV/AIDS and TB in Eshowe (Kwa-Zulu Natal) and Khayelitsha (Western Cape).

In Tshwane, we run a migration project, and we offer medical and psychosocial care to migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, who struggle to access public health services under South Africa’s increasingly restrictive.

Previously we offered free, high-quality, confidential medical care to survivors of SGBV in Rustenburg.