Gaza’s ‘death trap’ aid centres: a real-life Hunger Games

The centres use iris-scanning and facial images captured by security cameras in corridors to identify, register, and grant people access to aid or entry to specified locations. This lets the GHF create a digital database of every potential aid recipient, including their full name, photo, location, and movement tracking.

This is being seen as another form of surveillance and an imposition of security control over the residents of Gaza, one that takes advantage of their displacement from war to contravene their dignity and privacy. Many are concerned that this database could be used for non‑humanitarian purposes, including punishment, recruitment, or blackmail.

Turning point for aid

Unlike UNRWA and WFP, the GHF is not under the direct supervision of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and therefore lacks the same level of oversight. Instead, it coordinates through Israeli and American channels.

By redesigning aid distribution and imposing stringent security measures, humiliating protocols, and engineered deprivation, GHF marks a turning point in the Gaza aid model where hunger becomes part of a military framework. New security standards and pre-selection criteria determine access to food, thus undermining the essential purpose of humanitarian relief.

It is no longer a means of survival and dignity; instead, it has become another form of death and humiliation. The distribution points operated by GHF are not relief hubs but death sites built on land destroyed by bombing and cleansed of its former residents.

'Death traps' is now a term commonly used in Gaza to describe these corridors and centres meant to provide aid to the displaced and starving. If people are not killed by starvation, they are killed by bullets, stampedes, or coercion. They should be food collection points. Instead, they are places of violence, fear, and exploitation.

The need for aid here has gone beyond an emergency. Food supply chains have collapsed, agricultural and health facilities have been destroyed, and the population now faces systematic famine. Crucially, this is not a side-effect of war; it is a deliberate policy aimed at dismantling Gaza's social and human fabric, leaving Palestinians with no choice but to fight for a box of food if they want to live—a real-life Hunger Games.

Braving the centres

The GHF operates three distribution centres: the Marwah centre in Rafah, the Shakoush centre in Khan Younis, and the Netzarim centre located along Salah al-Din Street, a major thoroughfare. The latter is one of the most dangerous places in the Strip. Not only does it sit on the Israeli military's north-south axis dividing Gaza in two, with plenty of nearby Israeli military positions, but it also operates under a distribution system that begins before dawn (from 2am to 6am). The darkness gives cover for ambushes.

The Israeli army set up the 'death trap' Netzarim centre on the ruins of a former Jewish settlement of the same name, founded in 1977. It is located between the al-Bureij and al-Nuseirat camps, near the Du'a Mosque, approximately 5 kilometres from Gaza City. Those seeking aid there must navigate one of three perilous routes to reach the centre.

The first is direct along Salah al-Din Street, which connects al-Bureij and al-Nuseirat. Entirely exposed, it is subject to tight Israeli surveillance from tanks and drones. The second, known as the 'Generator Route,' is indirect, running alongside the central power station. People use winding side streets parallel to Salah al-Din. Less exposed, it is equally dangerous owing to ambushes and sudden attacks. The third, known as the 'Valley Route,' runs through Wadi Gaza and is both militarily and environmentally hazardous, with threats from open sewage and severe pollution.

Compound shock

If those who go to Netzarim in search of food survive the ordeal physically, they are scarred mentally. So close to death, with such risk to life, it is not possible to escape from trauma. This corrosive war consumes you over time with what is known as compound shock—a psychological condition resulting from repeated, chronic exposure to harm and violence, especially when there is no escape or safe refuge.

Unlike the sudden shock from a single event, compound shock builds gradually and leaves deep and long-last effects on mental functions, perception, personal identity, and social behaviour, ranging from disturbed thinking, blunted judgement, and a diminished sense of danger, to feelings of guilt or inferiority, loss of meaning, and a shift toward aggression or the normalisation of violence.

Compound shock materialises from several stages and experiences, including the witnessing of death or injury from Israeli soldiers' gunshots and tank fire, from trampling and stampeding, from violence in the centres' hulāba (security corridors), from 'bandit' attacks, and from black market predators.

Eyewitnesses told Al Majalla about facing direct fire from Israeli machine guns, tanks, and drones, with no warnings or safe lanes. Bullets suddenly flying into large groups create panic and terror, with the risk of being trampled or crushed by those trying to flee. A small stumble can be the difference between life and death. With no one able or willing to turn back, the terror sends aid seekers running wildly in one direction.

Those who survive enter an open square where aid is thrown. There, people swarm, fight, scream, and scuffle. Many are armed, so there are stabbings, beatings, and disfigurements. To survive, Al Majalla was told that you need "more ferocity" than those around you.

Armed bandits

Those who pass that obstacle emerge to face armed groups known as 'bandits' who lie in wait on the return route to rob people of their aid under the threat of death or violence. Those who survive the bandits arrive at a zone known as al‑Biūq, where crisis profiteers await, offering to buy the aid for a pittance or in humiliating, coercive, and exploitative barter. As a result, people travel in groups as a form of protection.

Boxes of aid may last only two days, yet they pay for it with their bodies, their dignity, or even loved ones. This illustrates how Gaza's social fabric is unravelling, with neighbours and cousins—through their own desperation—becoming predators, thieves, or even killers. In short, people are now beginning to see one another as threats rather than as support. This is one of the most dangerous long-term effects of compound shock.

In their design, location, and implementation, these GHF distribution centres have accelerated the onset and consequences of compound shock, but despite them being synonymous with death, thousands still need to go daily, risking their lives in a merciless arena in order not to succumb to starvation.

Food aid boxes contain basic necessities—flour, rice, oil, sugar—and can be resold by the crisis profiteers (who prey on the vulnerable) at inflated prices that are often out of financial reach for displaced families. In this way, aid is no longer a humanitarian lifeline, but a commodity subject to a ruthless black market, hunger recast as a profit-making opportunity.

Those who brave the GHF centres are often young. Their physical endurance makes them more likely to survive it. Those who make the journey know that their return is uncertain, but it is the only viable way to feed their families or younger siblings. Psychologically, they feel anything from coerced heroism, the guilt of failing to save others, and a smouldering rage that erupts in moments of chaos.

Sexual exploitation

Women are commonly thrust into this hazardous zone, under the false presumption that they are less likely to be harmed, but they, too, are physically harassed, threatened, blackmailed, or robbed by female-led gangs. Women who collect aid can be targeted for sexual exploitation and gender-based violence, particularly on remote routes or at unofficial checkpoints.

There are some reports of passage being allowed in exchange for physical acts. This preys on the women's desperation, their absence of safe alternatives, and the reluctance of humanitarian organisations and local communities to publicly acknowledge these abuses, fearing reputational damage.

Yet the most heart-wrenching group of aid seekers is children, prematurely aged by their experiences. Childhood, in all its manifestations, has been extinguished. They shoulder the burden of families that have lost so much, undertaking a brutal journey with their slight frames simply to stave off hunger.

At the centres, they can easily get involved in shoving, shouting, cursing, stealing, and fighting with sticks or knives, just to survive. No child should come to understand how bodies are crushed, or how to avoid predation on the way to seek nourishment, or how it is necessary to be an aggressor if one is not to be a victim.

None of this is normal. In Gaza's theatre of destruction, aid is no longer a means of salvation but a tool of soft warfare, doled out conditionally, monitored, and seized. Mercy gives way to manipulation, as aid is used for recruitment, blackmail, and subjugation in a cycle of violence and humiliation.

Aid as a weapon

The Israeli-backed GHF has allowed the weaponisation of aid, transforming it into a mechanism for behavioural manipulation and collective punishment via starvation, calculated rationing, and discriminatory distribution that is violently reshaping Gaza's social hierarchies and redrawing lines of power amid a landscape of hunger.

Numerous testimonies suggest that some people receive aid through pre-arranged systems involving specific routes, tracking protocols, and entry times. Individuals are seen entering the distribution centres before the crowds, and exiting without facing inspection or violence, fuelling the suspicion that aid here functions as a reward for collaboration or spying. These claims are difficult to verify, but they recur consistently in eyewitness accounts.

The debate about aid in Gaza is, at its core, a debate about power: who holds dominion over life, who decides who perishes and who gets scraps. At Netzarim, in particular, this is a daily catastrophe unfolding in and around a place that should be least expected: an aid distribution centre.

Under international law, humanitarian aid is a universally recognised, unconditional right during times of war. But there is no law in Gaza, no safe zones, only survival, brutality, learned cunning, and submission.

"Amidst severe hunger and famine-like conditions, many families tell us they are now too weak to compete for food rations," said the joint letter signed by around 170 charities and non-governmental organisations. Submission occurs when you no longer have the energy to continue braving the death traps.