The Electronic Intifada 26 July 2025
Palestinians collect aid supplies from the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, 29 May 2025.
APA imagesI knew we were close to the aid site when I saw a large mass of people gathered in front of me.
It had taken us all night to get here.
My friend Sadaa Abu Saada and I had left al-Mawasi near Khan Younis at 1:30 am and headed south on the coastal road, al-Rashid Street, toward Rafah.
Neighbors in al-Mawasi had told us to get to the aid site as early as possible, because there were not enough provisions for everyone. We thought that by leaving this early, we had a chance to get food.
We walked slowly. On our left were miserable rows of tents. On our right was the seashore, calm on the surface but with Israeli gunboats lined up along the horizon, close enough to be visible with the naked eye. We were not alone in our walk. Many others were headed the same way. An elderly man leaned on his cane and said, in commiseration, “How hard it is to be hungry.”
We had 12 kilometers ahead of us, a potentially reasonable distance for a well-fed and nourished person, but we were neither well fed nor nourished. We walked slowly from exhaustion and hunger; the only calories fueling my body were from scant amounts of lentils and pasta that I had obtained with great difficulty and effort in previous days.
My mother, brother and five sisters were back at our tent in al-Mawasi. Dizzy from hunger, they could barely move. I could no longer bear to see my family wither from starvation.
This was why I was walking along the coastal road in the dark, on Eid al-Adha, 6 June, tired and hungry, headed toward a so-called American aid center, a place that had declared itself on its social media page as a source of relief.
The aid sites run by the American- and Israeli-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation only opened on 27 May, but by early June, it was already understood in Gaza that they were also death sites: Israeli troops were shooting and killing us.
Yet, the more news spread about these massacres, the more news spread about the aid sites themselves. It is a cruel irony that we are so starved that in the news of massacres we also hear that there is food available and that there is a possibility that we might get some, if we can only survive the site itself.
“Here we die of hunger,” Saad said, “and there we may die of bullets.”
Shootings begin even before aid distribution
At around 3:30 am, we walked into the crowd of tens of thousands of people. Ahead of the crowd was what we assumed was the aid site, but the road was blocked by concrete blocks.
We stood and waited for some kind of sign to enter the aid site. It did not come.
This scene of the elderly, women and men crowding at night and sitting on the rubble of houses or in the sand is a sad sight that makes everyone feel humiliated, their dignity brutally violated.
I suggested to my friend that we should go and sit on the beach, about 20 meters away, until the sun rose.
As we walked toward the beach, we had to walk past the watchtowers where snipers were stationed.
Sadaa pointed out the surveillance cameras and the various red and white lights beaming from other mechanisms on the tower, saying that the soldiers used those to strengthen their transmissions.
Not a minute passed until the soldiers were firing at us. Bullets flew past us at alarming speed. We backed away from the beach and went to the other side of the road, where people were sitting on rubble.
We were shaken and demoralized and considered heading back to al-Mawasi.
“How will we continue?” Saada asked, knowing that I didn’t have the answer.
I just kept in mind that I was there to retrieve food and bring it back to feed my family.
We didn’t have any solutions. We continued to wait.
Every few minutes we heard more bullets. Eventually we heard a group of people yelling “Martyr! Martyr!” and carrying a person who had been shot.
Bullets continued to fly around us. Small stones flew in the air at us when the bullet hit the ground.
The way to know everything here is through fire. That is, the firing of weapons. The occupation forces shoot a shell in an area and it explodes, meaning do not go there. Quadcopters patrol the area where the shells fall and then shoot at anyone who approaches. People are only certain they cannot go into an area because they are faced with a line of fire.
We hid behind rubble and tried to protect ourselves from death.
The aid site opens
At 6 am, when dawn broke, a voice over a loudspeaker said in Arabic that we could enter the aid site, which was an additional 3 kilometers away.
Everyone ran toward the site. Thousands of people.
Concrete blocks are painted in red with phrases such as “Defense Army” and “Dangerous Combat Zone” and surrounded by barbed wire.
At a certain point, the path narrowed and only one person could pass in between the blocks at a time. It was never wide enough for two people to pass side by side. But people rushed and entered around the blocks or through the ruins of houses nearby.
Farther on, there was an area surrounded by a tall fence, much higher than the height of a person. Inside the site, English-speaking individuals allowed people to enter. There were some empty boxes that said “GHF” and that once contained food. Very little was left by the time we arrived.
One of the occupation soldiers fired a bullet into the crowd and hit a 50-year-old man in front. The man fell down and he looked dead. A group of people carried him away. One man held up his bloody hands at the soldiers and yelled at them, “You killed the man.”
I don’t think the soldiers understood what the man said to them, but they did understand the bloody hands.
Minutes later, trucks arrived and unloaded their cargo. The amount of aid was barely enough for a few thousand. We were many more than that.
We arrived at the distribution point, but there was nothing left.
We walked around and tried to find anything left. Inside this fence, it was like we were in a prison.
“It seems that we will return empty-handed,” I told Saada.
“I don’t know what we will do,” he said. “They are waiting for me to return with flour!”
We spent half an hour inside the place, still nothing. We were in a desert prison surrounded by weapons, facing the Israeli soldiers on empty stomachs.
We left around 7:30 am and walked back in silence.
Saada said that we would have to come back the next day, but that this time we would not try and take a rest on the beach, lest the soldiers shoot at us again.
I replied with a sad sarcasm: “You have formed bad memories quickly, my friend.”
We returned to al-Mawasi empty-handed, though we carried with us new truths that no one should ever have to be exposed to. This is what it is to be an unwanted person.
Two days later, by 8 June, it was reported that 130 Palestinians had been killed at these sites. Since then, this number has risen to around 900.
Refaat Ibrahim is a writer and journalist from the Gaza Strip.
