US initiative to begin Gaza aid transfers by end of May

Newly established Gaza Humanitarian Foundation appears to challenge Israel’s plan to take over Gaza, separate Gaza’s civilian population from Hamas forces in central and northern Strip.

By David Rosenberg, World Israel News

Israel will lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip later in May and allow a U.S.-backed aid group to begin delivering food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies to more than half of the coastal enclave’s population, a newly formed organization announced Wednesday.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which was recently established as part of an initiative by the Trump administration to provide an alternative mechanism for distributing aid to Gaza civilians that circumvents Hamas, said that it has been in talks with the Israeli government to build and secure distribution facilities across the Gaza Strip.

Israel previously committed only to providing a security umbrella to four aid depots in southern Gaza, around the Morag Corridor, which the IDF already controls.

Starting by the end of this month, the GHF said, it will distribute aid to some 1.2 million Gazans from those four aid depots, andl Israel will establish and secure additional facilities across the Gaza Strip, enabling the GHF to reach the Strip’s entire population of 2 million.

“The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation today announced that it will launch operations in the Gaza Strip before the end of the month,” the group said.

“This follows discussions with Israeli officials to allow the flow of transitional aid into Gaza under existing mechanisms while construction of GHF’s Secure Distribution Sites (SDS) is completed.”

While security for the distribution facilities is reportedly to be delegated to private contractors, the IDF will provide a general security umbrella over the surrounding area.

The new group’s executive director is Jake Wood, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served as a sniper in Afghanistan before co-founding the disaster relief organization Team Rubicon.

“There is no time to wait for ideal conditions,” Wood said. “We have a responsibility to act and to do it without compromising our values. Today we are one step closer to doing just that.”

The new aid distribution program, which includes a 90-day mandate for transferring over 300 million meals, is a pilot program to test the new approach to distributing aid to Gazans.

According to a report by Axios, the GHF penned a letter to Israel on Wednesday urging it to prepare aid distribution centers in the northern Gaza Strip within 30 days.

The letter also calls on Israel to limit the use of mass evacuation orders in the Gaza Strip, adding that they “should be temporary, voluntary, and solely for the protection of the civilian population.”

Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan last week to wrest control of the entire Gaza Strip from Hamas and to permanently retain control over captured areas.

In addition, the plan calls for mass evacuations of Gazans and the concentration of Gaza’s population of two million in the southern Strip as a means of separating civilians from Hamas forces.