The controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which oversees the US-backed Israeli aid distribution scheme in Gaza, is to be dissolved in Geneva, Swiss public broadcaster RTS reported Wednesday.
The Swiss Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations (FSA) “ordered the formal dissolution” of the Geneva-based organization, RTS reported, adding that the organization has been the subject of controversy for months.
The foundation set up its office earlier this year as an alternative attempt by Israel to bypass the aid distribution in Gaza through United Nations channels. Since late May, more than 500 Palestinians have been killed and almost 4,000 injured trying to access food from distribution points, according to humanitarian organizations who have called for the GHF to be shut down.
‘Noncompliant’
The FSA reportedly ordered the closure after determining the GHF no longer had a Swiss representative or address and had made no effort to correct the issue. The Home Affairs Department confirmed the decision, RTS noted.
In early June, the Swiss Foreign Ministry confirmed to the Anadolu news agency that the legal status of the controversial Geneva branch of the GHF is assessed to be “inactive” and “noncompliant” with legal requirements.
Concern over the GHF led to the resignation of its Swiss director, while Swiss NGO TRIAL International has filed two complaints with federal authorities, seeking transparency regarding the foundation’s operations.
NGOs Urge Shutdown
More than 130 humanitarian organizations, including Oxfam, Save the Children and Amnesty, have called for immediate action to shut down the “deadly” aid distribution scheme in Gaza.
“Israeli forces and armed groups – some reportedly operating with backing from Israeli authorities – now routinely open fire on desperate civilians risking everything just to survive,” the organizations said in a joint statement on Tuesday.
The organizations urged “the existing UN-led coordination mechanisms” to be utilized in the enclave and for Israel’s blockade on aid and commercial supplies to be lifted.
They pointed out that the 400 aid distribution points operating during the temporary ceasefire across Gaza “have now been replaced by just four military-controlled distribution sites, forcing two million people into overcrowded, militarized zones where they face daily gunfire and mass casualties while trying to access food and are denied other life-saving supplies.”
‘Starve, or Risk Being Shot’
“Today, Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families,” they said.
The organizations highlighted that weeks following the launch of the Israeli distribution scheme “have been some of the deadliest and most violent since October 2023.”
They urged the restoration of “a unified, UN-led coordination mechanism—grounded in international humanitarian law and inclusive of UNRWA, Palestinian civil society, and the wider humanitarian community—to meet people’s needs.”
The last time I tried to get food aid in Gaza, I nearly died.
It was early morning in Rafah, and I hadn’t eaten properly in days. I woke before the sun rose, stomach aching, body weak, and met up with my friend Abu Naji. We planned to walk five kilometers to a zone near al-Alam — “the Flag,” as people call it — where humanitarian aid was rumored to be distributed. Word on the street said it would open at 10:00 am, and we were desperate enough to believe it.
We passed destroyed buildings, endless lines of makeshift tents, and the slow shuffle of others just like us — starving, exhausted, and hoping for a few cans of food. We arrived around mid-morning. There were no signs. No aid workers. No water. No shelter. Only thousands of people crowding together under the eye of Israeli surveillance drones, waiting in silence. The zone wasn’t marked, but people knew where to go — because they’d seen others try it. And seen some of them die trying.
Just before noon, Israeli soldiers fired gunshots into the sky. That was the signal: Move forward. The crowd surged as one. There were no organized lines, no distribution points — just scattered supplies thrown from trucks or dropped by parachute. People climbed over each other to grab whatever they could before it was gone. I wished I were stronger. Not a writer. Not a program coordinator. I wished I had the muscles to fight my way through, to claim a small box of pasta or a can of tuna. But my body has been malnourished for months. None of us in Gaza have eaten properly in nearly two years. I watched people push forward. I saw a man I knew step a few meters outside an invisible boundary — one no one had explained, one that didn’t exist on any map — and get shot in the chest. He collapsed onto the sand and didn’t move.
The soldiers never shouted warnings. There were no fences. Only live fire enforcing invisible borders. And hunger enforcing risk.
I turned around and walked away. I didn’t get any food. But I survived. That was my first and last time attempting to reach humanitarian aid in Rafah.
The truth is, what’s being called a “humanitarian operation” in Gaza is something else entirely. It’s not simply broken. It’s being used as a weapon. Hunger here isn’t accidental — it’s managed. It’s enforced. And now, it’s being militarized.
The so-called aid zone we walked to that day wasn’t managed by any recognized relief organization. There were no UN workers or Red Crescent staff. Instead, the operation was linked to an entity calling itself the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). According to lawyers and watchdog groups in Switzerland, GHF has no medical or aid personnel on the ground. Instead, it has partnered with a U.S.-linked private security firm named Safe Reach Solutions. This company isn’t made up of aid workers — it’s made up of contractors. Former U.S. military, intelligence officers, and data analysts, many earning up to $1,000 a day. Some are deployed in the very zones where civilians like me go to collect aid. Their real job isn’t just “security.” According to investigations by TRIAL International and the Alliance of Lawyers for Palestine, the GHF contractors are tasked with collecting visual and behavioral intelligence on Palestinians. They use quadcopters and surveillance drones to track people’s movements, scan their faces, and monitor their behavior — building profiles in hopes of identifying “targets.” In the process, people are dying.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed trying to reach aid, while thousands more have been injured and several others remain missing.
These are not accidents. This is not poor planning. This is a system that weaponizes food and fear at the same time. One that invites you to risk your life for a bag of flour — then kills you when you step the wrong way. This is a system where every hungry child becomes a potential data point. Where every grandmother in a food line is scanned from the sky. Where every facial expression could place you on a kill list.
What’s worse is that these operations are invisible to much of the world. Foreign journalists haven’t been allowed into Gaza for nearly 20 months. Israel has killed more than 200 Palestinian journalists, and rejected thousands of visa requests from international media. What Gaza has is just overlapping shell organizations with unclear responsibilities and zero accountability. GHF, despite presenting itself as a Swiss humanitarian group, is also registered in the United States. Several Swiss lawyers have filed legal complaints demanding investigations into the group’s nonprofit status and its ties to militarized operations. Meanwhile, other actors — like Nathan Mook, former CEO of World Central Kitchen — have appeared in parallel efforts tied to projects like the U.S. floating pier and entities like the Maritime Humanitarian Aid Foundation, which also operate without clear oversight.
In a recent interview on CNN Türk, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state described the situation in Gaza as one where “the people are hostages.” That wasn’t a slip. That was a policy. When food becomes bait, civilians become bargaining chips. And as journalist Rasha Nabil replied during that same interview, “This is injustice. The world has become a jungle.”
Israel continues to justify its military assault as a mission to retrieve hostages. But for most of us in Gaza, that justification feels like a cruel illusion. The war has gone on for over a year and eight months. Hospitals have been flattened. Neighborhoods erased. Our water systems bombed. Some Palestinians, desperate for any end to the violence, have called for the release of Israeli captives —unconditionally — hoping it might take away Israel’s last excuse for its brutal campaign. But that desperation only reveals the divide between civilians and the political factions that claim to speak for them. For Hamas, the hostages are a bargaining chip. But for Israel, the people of Gaza are the same.
I do not support Hamas. I do not support any group that plays with lives. But I also do not support a system where international aid is a tracking device. Where relief is distributed by men with guns and drones. Where death and data are delivered in the same package.
Aid must never be a weapon. It must never be bait. It must never be a tool to punish an occupied people. Humanitarian relief must return to the hands of real humanitarian organizations — neutral, transparent, and protected by international law. Private military contractors have no place in our hunger. Governments that fund or support them — including the United States and Switzerland — must investigate the systems they’ve helped build and the lives they’ve helped destroy.
We are not numbers. We are not “risks.” We are not enemy targets because we are hungry. We are people — grieving, broken, surviving — and the world is watching as we are starved, shot at, and turned into data.
And sometimes, it watches in silence.
For three months, Israel enforced a total blockade on Gaza, denying food, water, medicine and fuel to over two million Palestinians. Since the end of May, it has introduced a cruel system of aid distribution that is in fact a death trap used to exterminate starving Palestinians.
Even now, when Israel’s sadistic lust for extermination has unleashed unimaginable suffering, and you can smell the burnt flesh of Palestinian children in western capitals and hear their screams of pain as they starve to death, Germany’s elites remain silent.
The country where the smell of burning people and their starving to death once stood for one of the greatest crimes against humanity now remains steadfastly on the side of those whose heinous crimes spread that same smell and suffering again.
“Do you condemn the Zionists for their massacres of innocent Palestinian children?” one is tempted to ask these elites.
Their answer, however, would be little more than a variation on their favourite hollow refrain: “Israel has the right to burn children alive in the tents it forced them into, and the right to starve them to death.”
In 20 months of genocide, nothing has changed for Germany’s ruling class. They supported Israel when the genocidal regime let newborn babies freeze to death or suffocate in incubators. They willingly accept that the Israeli army deliberately and purposefully kills Palestinian children, and they look the other way when they are left to starve and die of thirst.
This is today’s Germany: a country without a moral compass or conscience, infected with an elite whose silence in the face of Israeli crimes has long crossed into the obscene.
But while it may appear that Germany’s elites are simply waiting for the genocide to end in the hope that everything will return to normal, their Faustian pact with the Zionist regime has already made them all accomplices. Having sold their souls to a genocidal government, they are now silent in the face of its orgy of extermination.
However, this silence on the part of the elites inadvertently reveals what the country has tried so carefully to conceal for decades.
Unconfronted past
Germans grow up believing that their country is the most committed defender of human rights and international law.
From an early age, they are told that Germany is a good country – a model democracy that emerged after World War Two, with educated citizens who understand their regrettable past and do everything they can to prevent its recurrence.
And they believe it, fervently.
But this self-image is one of the nation’s greatest self-deceptions. Denazification was superficial at best. Re-education was conducted by the wrong teachers. And as for confronting the country’s settler-colonial legacy, that has never been on the agenda.
Prosecuting a few high-ranking Nazis at Nuremberg does not amount to the wholesale denazification of society or its institutions. As we know, far more continuity followed fascism than Germany is willing to admit.
Even the much-vaunted US-led “re‑education” programme was deeply flawed. As political scientist David Michael Smith has shown, American “democracy” was built on the genocide of millions of Indigenous people – an atrocity that inspired the Nazis and now serves as a model for the Zionists.
It is worse still when it comes to the concealment of Germany’s own settler-colonial crimes, including genocide. The white supremacist worldview that dehumanised others and inspired Nazism has never been meaningfully addressed.
These truths remain excluded from Germany’s collective memory, from its official discourse, and even from its commemorative rituals. They are unspeakable.
And yet what is repressed eventually erupts – or remains as the constant background music to everything a people pretend to be and do.
In the 1930s, the Nazis unleashed the repressed sadism it had brought back from the German colonies. Today, the decades-long repression of historical truth and contempt for non-white life resurfaces in the genocide being carried out by Germany’s murderous friends.
As Israel’s campaign of annihilation continues, Germany’s elites are forced to peer into the abyss of their own corruption – and still they defend, fund and promote the crime.
What is revealed is the ugly truth: the enduring force of Germany’s white-supremacist settler-colonial mindset, now embodied in the elites’ celebration of Palestinian death. If denazification, re-education and democratisation had truly succeeded, the language and actions of the Zionist regime today would set off alarm bells.
Announcing a Greater Israel; bombing and invading neighbouring countries; waging total war to annihilate another people; declaring a “final solution” in Gaza; calling human beings “human animals”; letting an entire population starve and die of thirst – all of this should remind Germans and their elites of their own history, of what their country once did to others. If only they were willing to face it.
If Germany’s elites possessed the slightest sense of responsibility – a conscience worthy of the name – then the mass death in Gaza, and the destruction in the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and now Iran, would confront them with the unbearable weight of history. The suffering would haunt them as a nightmare and deprive them of sleep.
Instead, they sleep soundly and abide by Germany’s glorification of Zionism. They remain the “loyal subjects” described by Heinrich Mann more than a century ago.
Little has changed. Germany’s elites remain submissive, fearful, and obedient.
Political theatre
With Friedrich Merz’s election as chancellor, the obscenity of German support for Israel’s genocide has reached new heights.
When Merz hosted the president of the Zionist settler colony, Isaac Herzog, as his first official foreign guest, they posed before a giant photograph inside the Chancellery. The image showed what Israel now calls Livni Beach – a place they had agreed to visit together soon.
Of course, what the German public is not told is that Livni Beach sits atop the ruins of the Palestinian village of Hiribya, destroyed and ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias during the Nakba of 1948.
Merz will soon stand on that beach admiring the sun, without giving a moment’s thought to those who were murdered or expelled from there.
And even now, as the Zionist regime wages an illegal war of aggression against Iran, this chancellor does not speak of a clear violation of international law. Instead, he praises the western colony and declares that Israel is “doing the dirty work for all of us” – by which he means the West, of course.
How obscene can the actions of a German chancellor be?
Also in May, on his first overseas trip – which, naturally, took the new German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, to Israel – he, like many of his predecessors, was not above adopting Israel’s mendacious propaganda.
After completing the obligatory visit to Yad Vashem, Wadephul expressed understanding for Israel’s decision to block humanitarian aid to starving Palestinians in Gaza, citing claims that Hamas might exploit the supplies.
Again, the German public is not told that, like Livni Beach, Yad Vashem was also built on the ruins of the Nakba. As Palestinian anthropologist Honaida Ghanim has documented:
Yad Vashem was built upon the lands of Khirbet al-Hamama, which were public lands that belonged to the village of Ein Karem – one of the largest villages in the Jerusalem district in terms of space and population, home to 2,510 Muslims and 670 Christians. Unlike most other Palestinian villages, its houses and other structures were preserved from demolition – but only after the Arab residents were expelled from their homes, prevented from returning, and their houses were inhabited by Jews in their place.
Still, the message remains the same: because of Germany’s past, its hands are tied. The Palestinians must starve and die of thirst – and the German government, of course, will regret this deeply.
Elite complicity
In May 2025, the Protestant Church in Germany, part of the country’s moral elite, banned a travelling exhibition on the Nakba – not even on the current genocide – from its biennial nationwide convention.
Of course, they had no problem offering the stage to the ousted genocide supporter and denier, Olaf Scholz. Yet to this day, not a single word from the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) on the Zionist genocide.
On 24 May 2025, as children starved – and many had already starved to death – Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s leading liberal newspaper and self-styled “opinion leader”, argued that Germany could not criticise Israel as harshly as Canada, France or the UK, lest it be accused of abandoning a “traumatised people”.
In good German tradition, columnist Daniel Brossler made himself the stooge of the crime of the 21st century, repeating the old Zionist propaganda that casts Israel as the victim. This elite journalist is prepared to turn history on its head.
He joins the long line of elites who specialise in “blaming the victims” of Zionist settler-colonial oppression, and declares Israel traumatised, inviting German readers to pity a regime whose Jewish population overwhelmingly supports, and openly demands, the extermination of all Palestinians.
How mendaciously German can one be?
Brossler not only inverts victim and perpetrator, but conceals – and thus justifies – the decades-long traumatisation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and within 1948 borders.
It is the Palestinians who have endured daily humiliation, siege and brutal war in an open-air prison, culminating in today’s relentless genocide.
And then there are Germany’s academic elites – the obedient heads of its “universities of excellence”, including Ludwig Maximilian University and the Technical University in Munich, and the Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin – who silence anyone who speaks out for the victims of genocide.
Some have even gone so far as to cancel appearances by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories – a figure who, unlike the German elite, lives up to the responsibilities of her position and speaks out against the silence and lies of the powerful.
What an abysmal disgrace the behaviour of these university presidents is for German science.
New guilt
Pretending not to smell the burning flesh of Palestinian children or hear their cries, Germany’s submissive and fearful elites are doing precisely what Norman Finkelstein has condemned: using the Holocaust not to honour its victims, but to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people.
As he put it: “The biggest insult to the memory of the Holocaust is not denying it but using it to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
By despicably misusing the Holocaust in this way, Germany’s elites have failed utterly.
They have lost all credibility and should never again raise their voices in the name of human rights or humanity. From their mouths, such values will only ring hollow.
These white elites will never raise their voices for non-white Palestinians.
They do not even shudder in the face of infanticide on a biblical scale. Their silence is deafening. Repulsive. Obscene.
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