\n<\/p>\n
In November 2023, during the first phase of the genocide in Gaza, I published a text in Allegra<\/a> Lab, asking how the word \u201cceasefire\u201d could be such a politically sensitive demand that leaders and actors around the world \u2013 even the UN Security Council\u2013 needed to cover it behind the words \u201chumanitarian pause.\u201d It was as if a humanitarian<\/em> pause would be less threatening than the kind of pause a ceasefire would imply. As an anthropologist studying humanitarianism in the Middle East, I argued that it was the most striking example of how humanitarian language is used to hide politics. If humanitarianism was ever a space for politics, as Ilana Feldman argues (2018), it was for mobilizing political agendas behind perceivably neutral and unthreatening words.<\/p>\n Fast forward to October 2025. While we have for the last two years witnessed a livestreamed genocide \u2013 with the systematic destruction of lives, schools, homes, and hospitals \u2013 Western leaders continue to deny what the ICC, the ICJ and UN human rights mechanisms established more than a year ago. Recently, however, something resembling a ceasefire has been implemented as part of President Trump\u2019s so-called \u201cpeace plan.\u201d It represents the first phase of an international attempt to engineer some sort of peace. Far from representing a \u201cnew beginning,\u201d however, the plan is at best \u201ca roadmap\u201d to free the Israeli hostages and condition Palestinians\u2019 present and future under new forms of Israeli and international domination (Tartir 2025). For reading the 20-point plan drafted by Trump<\/a>, any mention of Israel\u2019s war crimes, let alone its settler colonialism, occupation of Palestinian land, and apartheid system, is nowhere to be seen. Instead, Israel\u2019s withdrawal from Gaza is conditioned by the disarmament of Hamas<\/a>.<\/p>\n This denial of Israel as a perpetrator of war crimes is neither new nor surprising. On the contrary, it is arguably what has sustained its colonial project in Palestine, as well as what has enabled its genocidal war. Beyond maintaining the status quo of Israel\u2019s occupation of Palestine, the case of Gaza demonstrates that such denial also has dangerous implications for humanitarianism.<\/p>\n There has, to say the least, been too much violence to keep track of over the last two years. Too many deaths. Too many empty talks about humanitarian solutions. Does anyone even remember the short-lived, temporary US aid pier<\/a> in Gaza and all its controversies? While Israel was blocking all international aid from entering Gaza, the Biden administration \u2013 instead of putting pressure on Israel \u2013 built a 370-metre floating pier so that aid could enter via the sea. Criticized by aid groups as a \u201ccostly distraction\u201d from the elephant in the room \u2013 Israel consciously withholding humanitarian assistance \u2013 the pier operated only for 25 days<\/a> before it was dismantled as the weather made it impossible to function. Airdropped aid parcels are another example of how states sought to solve Israel\u2019s aid blockade without addressing the root causes of the problem or putting any pressure on Israel. The result was parcels of food falling from the sky, sharing the same airspace as Israel\u2019s bombs and paper leaflets ordering people to evacuate their homes.<\/p>\n These events reveal that there is evidently much more than subtle politics that can hide in the humanitarian space. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n These events reveal that there is evidently much more than subtle politics that can hide in the humanitarian space. Beyond offering refuge for different actors to make political claims, it also provides a recipe for distraction. That is, ways for states to implement \u2018humanitarian solutions\u2019 while at the same time avoiding holding the perpetrator accountable. Consequently, the humanitarian space has, over the last two years, become a hideout for Israel\u2019s genocidal strategies. What we have seen repeatedly since October 2023 is how this avoidance has enabled Israel to mobilize humanitarian politics for its own criminal endeavours. Is it too much to say that the humanitarian space in Gaza has become a killing machine in disguise? Or how should one otherwise conceptualize death traps wrapped in a language where the adjective \u201chumanitarian\u201d decorates nouns like \u201ccorridor,\u201d \u201czone,\u201d and \u201ccity\u201d? Khan Younis was a so-called \u201chumanitarian zone.\u201d A place from which we witnessed refugee tents on fire and people being burned alive. A place that Israel bombed almost 100 times<\/a>. The routes described as \u201chumanitarian corridors\u201d in Gaza were and are anything but safe. Instead, both civilians and aid workers have been deliberately killed while on the move. In July this year, the Israeli defence minister proposed to make a \u201chumanitarian city\u201d on the ruins of Rafah. What is a \u201chumanitarian city\u201d if not another word for refugee camp? Or, to use the words of the former Israeli PM, a concentration camp<\/a>? According to UN experts<\/a>, the use of the word \u201chumanitarian\u201d is \u201can insult to the humanitarian enterprise and standards\u201d (United Nations 2025).<\/p>\n Israel has undeniably hijacked the humanitarian space. But this appropriation does not end at language, which brings me to one particular genocidal strategy mobilized by Israel: the US-backed Israeli NGO, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Created based on accusations \u2013 without evidence \u2013 that Hamas was stealing aid from the UN<\/a>, in May 2025, GHF took over the aid distribution in Gaza previously performed by UN agencies. As a result, reaching aid distribution points and waiting for aid became a dangerous, even deadly, endeavour. A journalist in Gaza under the pseudonym Jannat Youssef described conditions under which receiving aid was a life-or-death battle. She wrote in Haaretz<\/a> that aid centres \u201chave become death arenas where hunger and bloodshed define survival.\u201d Either people returned with some food to feed their family, or they did not return at all. She called it a real-life Squid Game. The only difference is that in Gaza, there was no prize \u2013 only more death and destruction. <\/p>\n Condemned by UN experts and International Human Rights organizations<\/a>, both for undermining the established aid apparatus and violating humanitarian principles, the actions of GHF expose the structural limits of humanitarianism more than ever and put everything it stands for into question. Driven by a \u201cpolitics of compassion\u201d (Fassin 2012), humanitarianism has, throughout history, sought to safeguard a space where ethics can co-exist with violence and war. The understanding that such a space always deserves to be preserved, even in the most violent and unjust contexts, is what enables humanitarian actors to operate with the agreement of ruling state powers (Barnett 2011; Duffield and Donini 2014; Barnett 2001). Critical scholarship has revealed how preserving such a space unintentionally reinforces, rather than disrupts, various forms of state violence (Duffield 2007; Ramsay 2020; Pandolfi 2003). In the context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, this is visible in the way aid is always negotiated through<\/em> the administrative mechanisms of Israel\u2019s colonial apparatus \u2013 making aid organizations complicit in maintaining the status quo (Billaud 2024).<\/p>\n What we have been witnessing in Gaza, however, is arguably something worse than a failure to initiate systematic change via the state system. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n What we have been witnessing in Gaza, however, is arguably something worse than a failure to initiate systematic change via the state system. Rather, we see an occupation force consciously refusing<\/em> the established humanitarian apparatus and shamelessly creating a pseudo-alternative to camouflage its own criminal actions. No need to negotiate, justify, or strike of compromise with anyone anymore. The result, as we see, is horrifying.<\/p>\n The real-life Squid Game in Gaza raises the question of how we are to approach the structural limits and dangers of the humanitarian space, taking into account that it can evidently be hijacked and used as camouflage by the killing party. What will the future of humanitarianism look like after Israel\u2019s blatant hijacking of the humanitarian space to cover up its genocidal war on Gaza? Can something like \u201ca humanitarian space\u201d even be maintained in a context of apartheid and occupation?<\/p>\n Two years into this genocide, the same actors who in 2023 demanded a \u201chumanitarian pause\u201d instead of a ceasefire now celebrate the prospects of a distorted peace (Tartir, 2025) while ignoring questions of justice and accountability. Clearly, it is not only humanitarian language that gives way to political denial. In the same spirit, beyond diverting attention from Israel\u2019s war crimes, the language of peace frames the situation in Gaza as if it were a matter of war \u2013 not settler colonialism, not apartheid, not occupation, and certainly<\/em> not genocide. For this reason, Trump\u2019speace plan will do nothing more than extend Israel\u2019s immunity from accountability and deny Palestinians\u2019 meaningful ownership of and participation in the path forward (Tartir, 2025). Under these circumstances, how can humanitarianism \u2013 and the space it seeks to preserve \u2013 possibly recover?<\/p>\n Barnett, Michael. 2001. \u201cHumanitarianism with a Sovereign Face: UNHCR in the Global Undertow<\/a>.\u201d International Migration Review<\/em> 35 (1): 244\u201377.<\/p>\n Barnett, Michael. 2011. Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism<\/em>. Cornell University Press.<\/p>\n Billaud, Julie. 2024. \u201cPrisoners of Humanitarianism: Complicity and Resistance in the Occupied Palestinian Territory<\/a>.\u201d Today\u2019s Totalitarianism<\/em>, November.<\/p>\n Duffield, Mark. 2007. \u201cDevelopment, Territories, and People: Consolidating the External Sovereign Frontier<\/a>.\u201d Alternatives<\/em> 32 (2): 225\u201346.<\/p>\n Duffield, Mark, and Antonio Donini. 2014. Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security<\/a><\/em>. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional.<\/p>\n Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present<\/em>. University of California Press.<\/p>\n Feldman, Ilana. 2018. Life Lived in Relief: Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics<\/em>. University of California Press.<\/p>\n Pandolfi, Mariella. 2003. \u201cContract of Mutual (In)Difference: Governance and the Humanitarian Apparatus in Contemporary Albania and Kosovo<\/a>.\u201d Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies<\/em> 10 (1): 369\u201381.<\/p>\n Ramsay, Georgina. 2020. \u201cHumanitarian Exploits: Ordinary Displacement and the Political Economy of the Global Refugee Regime<\/a>.\u201d Critique of Anthropology<\/em> 40 (1): 3\u201327.<\/p>\n Tartir, Dr Alaa. 2025. \u201cRecognizing Palestine, Unrecognizing Palestinians<\/a>.\u201d Arab Reform Initiative<\/em>, September 24.<\/p>\n\n
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