AHMAD IBSAIS, [email protected]
Ibsais is a first generation Palestinian American and law student. He just wrote the piece “Gaza’s Aid System Isn’t Broken. It’s Working Exactly as Designed” for Al Jazeera which states: “Marketed by Israel and the United States as a model of dignity and neutrality, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s new distribution hub disintegrated into chaos within hours of opening. But this was no accident. It was the logical endpoint of a system not designed to nourish the hungry, but to control and contain them.”
Ibsais writes at Substack. Also see his pieces for The Guardian. He also wrote an in-depth paper, “Navigating Humanitarian Aid and Human Dignity During Ongoing Violence in Gaza.”
His most recent piece continues: “The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had promised something revolutionary with this initiative: Aid free from the corruption of Hamas, the bureaucracy of the UN, the messiness of Palestinian civil society. What it delivered instead was the purest distillation of colonial humanitarianism — aid as an instrument of control, dehumanisation, and humiliation, dispensed by armed contractors under the watchful eye of the occupying military. …
“Jake Wood, the foundation’s executive director, resigned days before the collapse of the Tal as-Sultan operation. …
“Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, accused Israel of conducting a ‘starvation campaign’ against Palestinians in Gaza as early as September 2024. …
“The Nakba did not merely displace 750,000 Palestinians — it engineered a transformation from self-sufficiency to dependency. By 1950, former farmers were lining up for UNRWA rations, their olive groves now feeding someone else’s children. This was not an unfortunate side effect of war but a deliberate strategy: To break Palestinian capacity for independence and replace it with a permanent need for charity. Charity, unlike rights, can be withdrawn. Charity, unlike justice, comes with conditions.”