The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation says it will permanently shut down, ending a short and controversial operation that had been created to distribute aid in Gaza outside the traditional United Nations system.
According to the evidence packet, the group had already closed its distribution sites six weeks earlier after a U.S.-brokered ceasefire took effect. On Monday it said the work would not resume, and that it had fulfilled its mission.
The foundation’s director, John Acree, said the group had shown ‘there’s a better way to deliver aid to Gazans.’ The organization also said it would hand its work over to the U.S.-led Civil-Military Coordination Center in Israel, describing that as the next stage for aid delivery after the shutdown.
The operation was controversial from the start. Palestinians, aid workers and health officials said the system forced hungry people to risk their lives by crossing near Israeli troops to reach the sites. The packet says soldiers often opened fire and that witnesses and videos documented deadly episodes, while the Israeli military said it fired warning shots only when troops were threatened.
The GHF’s own account claimed there was no violence at the aid sites themselves, but it acknowledged that people could face danger while walking to them. Contractors working at the sites, however, were backed by video accounts that said American security guards used live ammunition and stun grenades as people scrambled for food.
The group also operated in secrecy. The evidence packet says it never revealed its funding sources and disclosed little about the armed contractors it employed. That secrecy fueled criticism from aid organizations and others who saw the model as both opaque and militarized.
GHF said it had delivered more than 3 million food boxes, totaling 187 million meals. But the scale of the numbers does not erase the political and humanitarian controversy around how those deliveries were made or what happened to civilians trying to access them.
The broader context is the Gaza war itself. The packet says Israel halted food deliveries to Gaza for nearly three months before GHF began operating in late May, pushing the population toward famine. The United Nations had opposed the group’s creation, warning that the structure gave Israel control over food distribution and could force displacement.
With the shutdown, the experiment ends where it began: amid accusations, competing narratives, and a wider humanitarian catastrophe. The foundation says it delivered aid; critics say the delivery model put civilians at risk. Either way, the operation is now over.
