GHF closure exposes limits of post-war political strategy in Gaza - analysis

Its eventual closure, encapsulating the rise and fall of a noble idea, was due to a failed strategy and implementation is a metaphor for many other failures in two years of efforts to replace Hamas politically.

Rather, the terror group would need to be beaten militarily and replaced politically.

Without helping average Gazans to feel like they could be fed and live without Hamas running their lives, Hamas could always fester and eventually stage a military comeback.

Hamas was beaten militarily in northern Gaza by January 2024, and efforts could have started then to try to replace it politically in that arena.

Finally, Hamas was beaten militarily in Rafah in the summer of 2024 and could have then been replaced politically in that portion of deep southern Gaza.

Some of the decisions were political: Netanyahu did not want to be forced into ending the war, which could lead to his coalition being toppled, and he worried that too much post-war planning could bring about the war’s end.

Yet some of the decision was considered strategy: Netanyahu correctly believed that Trump would give him a freer hand on a number of thorny issues: the conditions for ending the war, the involvement of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Gaza and its impact on potential Palestinian statehood, and how much real energy would be put into disarming Hamas post-ceasefire.

Within months of Trump taking office, his administration, Netanyahu, and the Israeli government developed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation idea.

The GHF, as a concept, was potentially one of the most valuable strategic developments of the war, which could have undermined Hamas politically, as it could have cut off the Gaza terror groups’ control over food aid in the Gaza Strip.

Most, or all, of the international food aid groups were just rushing food into Gaza, paying no attention to whether Hamas then controlled its distribution or not, and often turning a blind eye to Hamas openly stealing the aid for its own fighters, as opposed to the general Gaza population.

GHF could potentially have broken that cycle. It said that it handed out 187 million meals from late May to early October, not an insubstantial feat. Gazans who received food aid from GHF did start to feel less controlled by Hamas and more ready to challenge the organization.

But the largest problem with GHF was it was “too little, too late.”

In addition, its implementation was fraught with massive strategic errors, including several (the global media exaggerated the number) incidents where Palestinian civilians were killed on their way to GHF facilities for food.

How bad was “too little, too late?”

The GHF only ever opened four sites, much of the time operating just two, catering only to portions of the population in southern Gaza and central Gaza.

The aid never reached half of the population in northern Gaza at all, and even in southern and central Gaza, it had very limited reach beyond providing significant supplies to Palestinian civilians who lived close to its facilities.

The GHF never identified how many persons it actually fed regularly, but it did provide numbers of meals. For example, in late August, it had averaged around 2.3 million meals per week.

If the people in Gaza fed by the GHF were eating three meals every day, it would be feeding just over 100,000 Gazans, or around one-twentieth of Gaza’s two million-plus population.

If they were rationing themselves to two meals per day, the number would have been higher. But then again, GHF did not keep a record of most of those who came to its centers, so there was no way of knowing how many individuals were “double-dipping,” though there was significant anecdotal evidence that this phenomenon was not small.

The more double-dipping, the smaller GHF’s reach for the broader Gaza population.

That was the “too little” part.

The “too late” part was that GHF was never going to succeed without working with the other international aid groups involved and by May 2025, when GHF finally opened its doors, those groups had no trust left in Israel or in the Trump administration.

At many points during the war, Israel tried to convince international aid groups to work harder to avoid giving food over to Hamas, sometimes by establishing new bureaucratic hoops for them to jump through.

While the goal of breaking Hamas’s control over food was the right one, Israeli tactics regarding those groups poisoned the waters. That was even before March of this year, when Israel cut off all food aid for around two months – granting critics a gift to be able to falsely accuse Israel of “starvation.”

Critics had accused Israel of starving the population of Gaza throughout the war, without evidence of any mass starvation actually occurring, and cutting off food supply for over two months gave them a much stronger platform for the argument.

It also meant that GHF entered the arena in a completely hostile state of affairs, both globally and regarding any attempts to cooperate with other international aid agencies.

Instead of allowing GHF to join in their efforts, as an example of how food aid could be delivered without Hamas gaining control, much of the world rushed to associate GHF with a “cover-up” of the mass “starvation” campaign.

Moreover, it did not help that there were several instances in which IDF troops killed possibly up to a total of some dozens of Gazan civilians (the IDF says that the claim of several hundreds is an exaggeration or mixed with killed Hamas fighters) on their way to the GHF.

The GHF could argue until it was blue in the face that it had nothing to do with these fatal mistakes by the IDF – and place the blame on Hamas for sometimes injecting themselves into the civilian crowds to instigate riots. But the fact is that the civilians would not have been killed if they had not been on their way to GHF sites.

IDF sources complained that the soldiers only made mistakes when they were surprised by unidentified large groups coming nearby.

But such were predictable events, and yet no one thought to provide the IDF soldiers in the GHF area with non-lethal means to carry out crowd dispersal.

It can be argued that GHF had a better chance of succeeding without competition from the other agencies, at a time when the Palestinians had run out of months of extra food inventory and would really need the GHF.

Also, it can be argued that the other food aid agencies would never have worked with GHF because they would always have rejected its attempt to break Hamas’s control over food as being an arm of Israeli policy.

But we will never know if GHF, or some variant of it, might have been more successful if introduced in early, mid, or late 2024 because Netanyahu and the government vetoed all attempts.

Add all of that in with all of the Palestinian civilians killed on the way to GHF sites or with some initial GHF sites being set up in the wrong place or that initial arrangements made it hard for women or children to get any food vs stronger grown men, and GHF’s rollout also harmed its brand.

Imagine if the planned international stabilization force (ISF) – which is currently only really being negotiated by Netanyahu – had entered northern Gaza in January 2024, then Khan Yunis, and then Rafah. Imagine GHF, or a variant, had entered shortly thereafter. Is it possible that the war might have ended sooner, and that by now Hamas would be politically weakened enough to be approaching being replaced as the premier power in Gaza?

The fact that GHF was not attempted until May of this year and no plans were made for the ISF until basically now explains a lot about why Hamas has continued to make comebacks and is still threatening to make another comeback – despite being beaten militarily so many times.