Israel Sited New Rafah Aid Hubs at Al-Mawasi’s Door

In September 2025 Israel built two extra Gaza Humanitarian Foundation compounds in Rafah, a five-to-ten-minute walk from Al-Mawasi. The pads were meant to feed people leaving Gaza City as troops pushed into the city.

Officers called the work a safety lesson from four older hubs that had already drawn gunfire, crushes, and a UN death count. The group later said it had handed out 187 million meals, then shut the sites after the 10 October 2025 ceasefire. The tents on that shore are still there.

Two Compounds at the Edge of Al-Mawasi

The Israeli military walked reporters through the unfinished Rafah pads in September and said they would pass to the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation within days, once security conditions were met. From both sites, the first row of buildings in Al-Mawasi sat in view. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an IDF spokesman, said the northern pad was a five-to-ten-minute walk from the edge of the coastal zone Israel had named a humanitarian area, and no more than 20 minutes from the pad closer to the Egyptian border.

White armored cars labeled 4 and 5 rolled out of the compound with bearded American guards inside. The private firm around the gates was Safe Research Solutions, the US contractor Israel tasked with securing food handouts. Officers said they had changed how the yards were laid out and where Israeli troops stood, after months of chaos at the original four hubs.

The original set, opened on 27 May 2025, put three sites in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan area and one on the Netzarim corridor south of Gaza City. GHF’s model was a small number of fixed yards. Palestinians had to walk to a compound, take a box of dry food, and leave. Each box, the group said, was meant to feed 5.5 people for 3.5 days. The food still needed water and a fire in a place short of both.

The Gaza City Order That Filled the Sand

The new pads were not a side project. They were timed to a ground push on Gaza City that the army opened on 20 August 2025. On 9 September, forces ordered civilians still in the city to move to Al-Mawasi. The coastal strip had been named a humanitarian zone early in the war and was already packed with tents.

THE GHF CLOCK

1. March 2025: Israel imposes an 11-week cutoff of most aid into Gaza before GHF is stood up.
2. May 27, 2025: Two of four GHF hubs open in Rafah. Crowds overrun a yard the same afternoon.
3. June 1, 2025: The UN human rights office records 32 people killed while trying to reach GHF points in northwestern Rafah and south of Netzarim.
4. August-September 2025: The army builds two extra Rafah compounds in sight of Al-Mawasi as Gaza City is ordered south.
5. October 2, 2025: The army says rockets from Khan Younis land near a Rafah GHF site by the Morag corridor. It reports no injuries and says the site opens as planned.
6. October 10, 2025: A ceasefire takes effect. GHF yards go dark. UN partners start opening household points again.
7. November 24, 2025: GHF executive director John Acree says the emergency mission is complete after 187 million meals.

Satellite counts of makeshift camps, compiled by the Shelter Cluster for 22 August to 5 October, show how the map moved. Gaza governorate sites dropped by an estimated 133,816 people and North Gaza by 2,416. Deir al-Balah camps rose by 117,904 and Khan Younis by 41,152. Rafah, already a ruin, barely registered a gain. People were being poured into the south-central belt the new kitchens of GHF were being built to face.

Four Hubs, One Walking-Distance Pantry

Israel and the United States sold GHF as a bypass around Hamas. The UN and large aid groups refused to join it. They said a handful of militarized gates forced hungry crowds onto roads under Israeli guns. Tom Fletcher, then the UN’s emergency-relief chief, called the design a way to make aid depend on military aims and to turn hunger into a bargaining chip.

The geography did the rest. Food sat at the bottom of the Strip, a short walk from the zone where Gaza City’s people were told to go. Anyone who stayed north still had to cross the length of the enclave for a box. The two extra Rafah pads did not reopen a UN-style net. They thickened the southern funnel.

HOW FOOD MOVED, THEN AND AFTER

On 9 October, the day before the ceasefire, GHF’s own log still showed a two-site day: 15,552 boxes across two sites, 9,504 at SDS2 in Rafah’s Saudi neighborhood and 6,048 at SDS3 in Khan Younis, on 18 truckloads. Seven pallets of ready-to-use supplemental food, about 43,750 packs, went out at SDS3 for women and children. The daily sheet was large. The map was still four doors, not a street-level net.

What the Clinics Counted at Al-Mawasi

Médecins Sans Frontières ran two clinics in the south, Al-Mawasi and Al-Attar, close to GHF yards. From 7 June to 24 July 2025 the posts took in 1,380 casualties at two southern clinics, including 28 dead. Teams treated 71 children for gunshot wounds, 25 of them under 15. Another 196 patients came in from crushes and beatings at the gates. Staff added a new code to the register, BBO, beaten by others, for people robbed of a box they had just won.

WHAT MSF LOGGED IN SEVEN WEEKS

• Clinic load: 1,380 wounded and sick after violence tied to GHF sites, plus 28 bodies.
• Children shot: 71 gunshot cases, including a 12-year-old hit through the abdomen and an 8-year-old girl shot in the chest.
• Wound pattern: At Al-Mawasi, 11 percent of gunshot injuries were to the head and neck and 19 percent to the chest, abdomen, or back.
• Late spike: From 27 July to 2 August, 186 more people arrived with gunshot, shrapnel, or stab wounds from the sites; two of them died.

Raquel Ayora, MSF’s general director, put the pattern in one run of sentences.

Children shot in the chest while reaching for food. People crushed or suffocated in stampedes. Entire crowds gunned down at distribution points.

Raquel Ayora, MSF General Director, 7 August 2025

The UN human rights office, in a 31 July tally, recorded 1,373 Palestinians killed while seeking food since 27 May: 859 in the vicinity of GHF sites and 514 along convoy routes. Most of the wounds it could classify were gunshots. On 1 June alone it reported 32 killed at GHF points in Rafah and south of Netzarim, after 19 killed in the first days, and called Israel’s setup a militarised humanitarian assistance mechanism.

WHERE THE COUNTS DISAGREE

• GHF: Spokesman Chapin Fay said the group had no casualties on its sites except two militant attacks, and called UN figures unreliable.
• OHCHR: Ravina Shamdasani said 859 people were killed near GHF yards by 31 July, with no information they were fighting, and asked for investigations rather than blanket denials.
• MSF: Clinic data and wound maps, the group said, pointed to fire directed at people inside and around the compounds, not stray shots on a road.

People who used the yards in those first weeks described the same grind in their own words: hours on foot, uncertainty about what was even being handed out, and many leaving with nothing. An older woman looking for diapers for a disabled daughter turned back, then learned the site was not giving diapers at all. That is the design the army said it was about to make safer by moving the fences and the troops, without adding many more doors.

Huckabee Wanted 16 Sites Running All Night

Washington wanted the model bigger, not smaller. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, said in a 6 August 2025 interview that GHF should grow from the three sites then running to 16, and that they should operate 24 hours a day. Steve Witkoff, the US Middle East envoy, toured GHF yards. On the day of one such visit, 1 August, MSF said 15-year-old Mahmoud Jamal Al-Attar was shot in the chest near the Al-Shakoush site and died after reaching the Al-Mawasi clinic.

Sixteen round-the-clock hubs would have been a different machine. What Israel actually poured in September was two more pads on the Rafah sand, sited so a family dumped in Al-Mawasi could walk to a gate. The extra concrete was a logistics answer to an evacuation order. It was not a return to street-level aid.

GHF, for its part, kept issuing meal counts and saying distributions ran without incident inside the wire. It blamed Hamas for siphoning older UN deliveries and said armed men sometimes fired near the approaches. The army said it used warning shots against people who left marked routes. None of that changed the basic arithmetic the UN had already published: hundreds dead near a system of four doors.

GHF Called the Mission Complete in November

The ceasefire that took effect on 10 October 2025 ended the experiment faster than Huckabee’s 16-site map. GHF yards closed. On 24 November the group said it had finished a historic mission.

We’ve successfully completed our historic aid mission in Gaza after delivering 187 million free meals directly to civilians in Gaza.

“At a critical juncture, we are proud to have been the only aid operation that reliably and safely provided free meals directly to Palestinian… pic.twitter.com/rpX1njYv9H

— Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (@GHFUpdates) November 24, 2025

At a critical juncture, we are proud to have been the only aid operation that reliably and safely provided free meals directly to Palestinian people in Gaza, at scale and without diversion.

John Acree, GHF Executive Director, 24 November 2025

Acree said the mission had shown a better way to deliver aid, and that the group was winding down because it had succeeded. UN partners, in the same weeks, were doing the opposite of GHF’s four-gate map. Food Security Sector groups resumed household parcels on 13 October after a pause that had lasted since mid-April. By 29 October they had reached 187,000 households, about 935,000 people, through 44 household distribution points after the ceasefire, including 11 in Gaza City. Cooked-meal kitchens climbed to 1.3 million meals a day by 10 November. Bakeries sold 2-kilogram bread bundles at 3 shekels, about $0.92, through dozens of shops.

The UN net was thinner than before the war and still short of fuel, trucks, and open crossings. It was also the thing GHF had been built to replace. Once a deal existed, the replacement was the first to go.

A Year Later the Tents Are Still on the Shore

The Danish Refugee Council and the Agricultural Development Association, in a 1 October 2026 note, put 1.8 million people in protracted displacement, 86 percent of Gaza’s population, across 1,739 sites. They counted more than 1,400 killed since the 10 October ceasefire. Fresh satellite pictures of Al-Mawasi still show tents on the sand, often a few metres from the water.

THE SOUTHERN SHELF, THEN AND NOW

• The bet in September 2025: Two extra GHF pads, a short walk from Al-Mawasi, to feed a city being emptied.
• The close: Four hubs down, 187 million meals claimed, UN points and kitchens put back in their place.
• The remainder: 1.8 million people still in displacement sites a year after the ceasefire, with Al-Mawasi still a tent shore.

The army’s lesson from the first GHF yards was about lanes and troop posts, not about whether a starving population should be sent to a handful of gates. The extra Rafah compounds made that lesson concrete at the exact moment Gaza City was told to walk south. They put calories at the end of the march. They did not make the march optional, and they did not survive the deal that stopped the march.

Acree’s last number and the UN’s 859 sit on the same short stretch of sand. The compounds built to greet the evacuees are closed. The people those compounds were sited for are, in large part, still in the zone the army pointed them toward.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Was the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation?

GHF was a US-registered group, set up in February 2025 after a Swiss vehicle of the same name shut following board resignations and a complaint in Switzerland, that ran armed, fixed food yards in Gaza with Israeli military backing from 27 May 2025 until the October ceasefire. John Acree was executive director. Safe Research Solutions, an American contractor, held the perimeter. The UN and major aid agencies stayed out, saying the design broke basic rules of impartial aid.

How Many Meals Did GHF Say It Delivered?

On 24 November 2025 the group said it had completed its mission after 187 million free meals, a figure it also called a record. A box was described as food for 5.5 people for 3.5 days, almost all dry goods that had to be cooked elsewhere. GHF did not publish a full donor list; reporting around the project put at least some US government money behind it, and Israeli officials described coordination through the Southern Command and COGAT.

How Many People Did the UN Say Were Killed Near GHF Sites?

The UN human rights office’s 31 July 2025 count was 859 killed in the vicinity of GHF sites between 27 May and that date, out of 1,373 people killed while seeking food, with 514 more along convoy routes. Those figures are not a full-war total and stop in late July, weeks before the extra Rafah pads were shown to reporters. GHF denied deaths on its yards; MSF’s two southern clinics, a narrower sample, logged 28 dead and 1,380 casualties over seven weeks.

When Did GHF Stop Operating in Gaza?

Yards closed as the 10 October 2025 ceasefire took hold, with Palestinian witnesses describing abandoned sites in Rafah and at Netzarim. The group’s public end-date is 24 November 2025, when Acree announced the emergency mission complete. UN household parcels resumed on 13 October, three days after the ceasefire, through a growing list of points rather than GHF’s four compounds.

Where Were the GHF Distribution Sites?

Three of the original four were in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan area and one sat on the Netzarim corridor. GHF daily sheets later named SDS2 in Rafah’s Saudi neighborhood and SDS3 in Khan Younis. The two extra September pads were in Rafah in sight of Al-Mawasi, one a five-to-ten-minute walk from the coastal zone and one toward the Egyptian border. All sat in areas under Israeli military control.