How food aid turned deadly in Gaza

As Israel opened a military front against Iran in June 2025, another warline persisted within Gaza—one far less visible on battlefield maps but no less brutal. This time, it wasn’t militants or infrastructure in the crosshairs. It was hunger. Between June 14 and June 24, scores of Palestinians were gunned down or maimed while attempting to access basic humanitarian supplies.

What began as a scramble for food rapidly unraveled into a humanitarian tragedy. Aid convoys, soup kitchens, and flour trucks became convergence points not only for the starving—but also for bullets. This report traces the events of that week, exploring how the mechanics of food relief became militarized and what this transformation signals about modern conflict, legal protections, and the blurred edges of foreign policy.

1. Collapse in Motion: From Broken Ceasefire to Aid Chokehold

Conditions in Gaza didn’t suddenly deteriorate in June—they had been spiraling for months. A ceasefire, already tenuous, disintegrated in March. Israel answered with intensified bombardments and a total blockade. For nearly three months, the flow of food, fuel, medicine, and clean water was cut off. More than two million residents were left fending for survival.

When limited convoys resumed in late May, it was too little, too late. The delivery infrastructure had buckled. Into this fractured landscape stepped a new player: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), backed by the US and Israel.

GHF began setting up alternative aid hubs, operating outside the UN’s established, globally monitored channels. But these sites were opaque—under-resourced, poorly communicated, and often shrouded in secrecy. Palestinians were left with a perilous dilemma: seek aid through familiar UN routes increasingly under threat, or gamble on unknown GHF centers offering little assurance of safety.

2. June 14–16: A Kill Zone Around Breadlines

On June 13, Israel formally expanded its military campaign to include Iran. Barely a day later, Gaza’s civilian toll began to climb. Israeli strikes killed at least 20 people on June 14 alone. Another 11 died near aid sites run by GHF. Eyewitnesses said troops opened fire on unarmed crowds; the military claimed “warning shots” were directed at individuals it deemed suspicious.

By June 16, the situation had spiraled. Gunfire erupted as Palestinians moved toward GHF hubs in Rafah and central Gaza. Thirty-seven people were killed. Hospitals were overwhelmed—Nasser Hospital admitted more than 300 wounded in what would become its deadliest single-day influx to date. The Red Cross reported a record-setting 200 trauma cases at its field facility. Though the IDF maintained it had followed rules of engagement and sought to prevent civilian harm, multiple accounts told a different story. The distinction between “crowd control” and “targeting the hungry” was becoming impossible to defend.

3. June 17: The Line for Flour Turns Fatal

If the previous days were a warning, June 17 made Gaza’s new reality undeniable. Near Khan Younis, hundreds gathered for a UN-distributed flour shipment. They never got the chance. Without advance notice, Israeli forces fired into the waiting crowd. Fifty-nine people were killed; hundreds more were injured. Footage showed civilians clutching sacks of flour, moments before the bullets came.

“It was just a line for food,” one survivor said, “and then people were falling.” Following the attack, UN aid convoys were temporarily halted—a decision driven as much by logistics as fear. The very spaces protected under international law had become theaters of bloodshed. For those dependent on aid, the system didn’t just break. It turned on them.

4. June 18–20: Flour, Fear, and Firepower

The days that followed didn’t bring relief. They brought repetition. On June 18, another 11 Palestinians were shot dead as they approached convoys in central Gaza. A further 24 were killed by airstrikes, among them a nine-year-old boy from Bureij refugee camp. Each death chipped away at whatever remained of trust in international protections.

June 19 painted a grim logistical picture. Just 23 UN aid trucks crossed into Gaza—less than 5% of the volume humanitarian agencies say is needed daily. Of those, many never made it to distribution points. Instead, they were seized mid-route, either by desperate crowds or opportunistic gangs.

That same day, 15 more civilians died waiting for aid. Airstrikes killed an additional 60. One heart-wrenching image from Al-Shifa Hospital showed a mother grieving over the blanket-wrapped body of her child, killed during an Israeli assault. No one could pretend aid lines were safe anymore.

5. June 21–24: Political Theatre, Personal Tragedy

June 21 brought an official shift in Israel’s communications. The military announced it had recovered the bodies of three Israeli hostages, taken during the October 2023 Hamas attack. It was a moment of national mourning—and, arguably, a redirection of the news cycle. On the ground in Gaza, however, the human toll deepened.

Two days later, on June 23, more displacement orders were issued—this time across Khan Younis. The effect was staggering. Over 80% of the entire Gaza Strip was now either under IDF control or blanketed by “evacuate immediately” mandates. Israel claimed 430 humanitarian trucks had entered Gaza that week, but by then the aid network had effectively collapsed. It wasn’t just the scarcity—it was the lethal risk of trying to receive what was offered.

On June 24, the killing reached another peak. Israeli forces opened fire on civilians near Rafah, barely two kilometers from a US-backed GHF hub. Twenty-five people died; many more were wounded. Later that day, Hamas militants killed seven Israeli soldiers in a bombing—its deadliest attack in months. Gaza’s landscape had become a place where death came from any direction: sky, street, aid route.

6. When Starvation Becomes Strategy

These were not random tragedies. The consistent use of force at or near food distribution points, the splintering of aid authority, and the strategic fog surrounding GHF’s role suggest something far more deliberate.

“This isn’t collateral damage,” said one international observer. “It’s structural coercion.”

Humanitarian law, in theory, shields civilians from precisely this. Aid convoys and food lines are meant to be sacrosanct. But laws are only as strong as their enforcement—and in Gaza, enforcement has been all but absent. The US, with its logistical involvement in GHF operations and political insulation of Israel at the UN, now finds itself in a bind. Moral authority erodes quickly when bullets trace back to your partners’ supply routes.

7. Human Fallout, Political Costs

The death toll from Gaza’s breadlines has rippled far beyond the region. European capitals are seeing growing protests and calls for arms embargoes. In the US, the Biden administration faces internal division, caught between decades-old alliances and mounting public outrage.

Yet for families in Gaza, those geopolitical calculations mean little. Fuel is gone. Hospitals run on fumes. Infant starvation is on the rise. The silence from global powers registers less as diplomacy and more as abandonment. Still, every morning, people return to the food lines. Some know it might be their last. Others have no choice.

Those ten days in June did more than expose a humanitarian crisis. They revealed the dangerous logic of using hunger as a weapon. When food becomes contingent on compliance, and aid lines morph into battlegrounds, we’ve crossed a threshold few democracies dare name. Israel defends its actions under the banner of security. But the scale, frequency, and civilian concentration of these attacks make such claims increasingly implausible. As for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, its role remains shrouded in ambiguity—its consequences, less so.

For Washington, the calculus has changed. Each death near a GHF aid truck chips away at America’s standing as a credible humanitarian actor. The world has watched Gaza starve, then bleed, then bury its dead in breadlines. If this isn’t the moment to redraw the moral boundaries of war, then what is?