Israel’s ‘Food Hubs’ Are Death Traps

Consortium News
Volume 30, Number 153 —Tuesday, June 3, 2025


Jonathan Cook: Israel’s ‘Food Hubs’ Are Death Traps


No one should be surprised that Israel is integrating its so-called humanitarian effort into its genocide of Palestinians

Israeli forces in Rafah in May 2024. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 3.0)

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net




It is entirely unsurprising that Israel has yet again been caught out in a lie — a lie that the BBC once again spread far and wide on its news services.

Israel claimed that it had not fired at starving Palestinians queueing on Sunday morning to get food from one of its highly militarised “aid distribution hubs” — a system Israel imposed on Gaza in place of a long-established and successful aid network run by the United Nations.

More than 30 Palestinians are known to have been killed and dozens more injured in the weekend incident [in which 75 were killed by some estimates]. [Civilians trying to reach the aid distribution point have now been shot at and killed for three consecutive days with about 130 dead. CNN reports: “The United Nations’ human rights chief, Volker Turk, said in a statement that ‘deadly attacks on distraught civilians trying to access the paltry amounts of food aid in Gaza, are unconscionable… There must be a prompt and impartial investigation into each of these attacks, and those responsible held to account.’”]

Israel blamed Hamas fighters for shooting Palestinian civilians, saying they were trying to stop the crowds from taking food boxes. The Israeli military dished up a video, taken by one of its drones, as supposed proof.

The BBC broadcast that video on its main shows, and then did one of its standard “Israel said, the Palestinians said. Who can really know the truth?” reports of the incident.

The BBC should never have taken Israel’s disinformation seriously – not least because Israeli claims are always shown to be lies when subjected to any serious independent scrutiny. The default position should be that Israel is lying until it can demonstrate convincingly that it is not.

Doctors treating the dead and wounded immediately pointed out that their injuries were consistent with Israeli gunfire. The victims had single shots to the head or chest, in line with targeting by Israeli snipers. Others suffered shrapnel wounds from tank shells. Hamas has no tanks.

Now expert analysis of the video itself — paradoxically confirmed by BBC Verify — shows that the footage was filmed in Khan Younis, far from Rafah, where the Palestinians aid seekers were killed. It is also apparent from the shadows that the video was taken in the evening, not in the morning when the Palestinians in Rafah were shot.

Despite this, the BBC still writes: “The circumstances of this strike are unclear.”

BBC logo, Manchester, Engliand, 2009. (TechnicalFault formerly Coffee Lover, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)


No, it is entirely clear that the Israeli army disseminated lies, and that the BBC lapped up those lies and spread them to its audiences via its main news shows, before tentatively retracting the lies quietly on a live feed on its website.

The reality is that the video doesn’t show Hamas fighters shooting Palestinians to stop them getting aid. Rather it shows a criminal Palestinian gang — of the kind Israel has been cultivating and allying with — looting aid so that it can be sold back to Palestinians on the open market, where prices have been massively inflated by Israel’s blockade on food.

There are no police in Gaza maintaining law and order because Israel kills any Palestinian seen wearing a police uniform.

It was for these very reasons that international aid organisations refused to take part in Israel’s scheme. They understood it was never about distributing humanitarian aid because the U.N. was best placed to do that.

It was not even chiefly about weaponising aid to lure Palestinians into what are effectively Israeli military bases so that soldiers can use biometric data to snatch any Palestinians they want, disappearing them into Israel’s torture camps, as they have been doing.

Rather it is about giving the appearance of providing food — most of it useless because it is dried staples that need cooking, when there is almost no water or fuel available — while continuing to starve the vast majority of Palestinians. And it is about using the aid hubs as another front for killing Palestinians.

In other words, after taking the aid system out of the U.N.’s hands, Israel is successfully enfolding the so-called humanitarian effort” into its genocide.

If that sounds too cynical, mark this. Israel again shot at crowds gathering on Tuesday morning to get aid from one of its “distribution hubs,” killing at least 27 Palestinians and wounding more than 180.

Several witnesses say there was no aid available when they arrived.

There is no way to be too cynical about what Israel is doing. Israel is utterly committed to its genocide — and a genocidal state has no red lines.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.


This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.