The miraculous, exhausting, devoted work of feeding fellow Palestinians
Palestinian mutual aid workers are holding Gaza and each other together amid Israel's endless genocide, imposed starvation, and aid site “killing fields”
Please, donate to The Sameer Project’s mutual aid campaigns:
(1) Medical Campaign, (2) Central and South (tents, food, water), (3) Refaat Alareer Camp, (4) North Gaza (food, water, other supplies)
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U.S., Jordan—Last Thursday, aid workers for The Sameer Project were overjoyed when they found rice. Weighing approximately 400 kilograms, it meant one more day of food for about five hundred people. Finding food in the markets is getting more difficult—to impossible—with each passing hour since Israel imposed a total blockade in March. Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza haven’t eaten a single meal for days. Emaciated, starving infants and children are wasting away in their mothers’ arms.
In the last two months, at least 1,200 elderly Palestinians were killed by Israel’s starvation policy. And while aid seekers raced to retrieve meager food boxes at US-backed aid sites, over 5,300 were injured and over 1100 were murdered by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) and American private mercenaries.
“The last five days are the worst days since the genocide started,” said Hala Sabah, a co-founder of The Sameer Project. “I would definitely highlight that because we can't even give some medication to kids because they need to have a full stomach and a lot of these kids don't have food, so we can't give them medication without food.” The Sameer Project has about 1,500 children on a medical evacuation list.
“These are kids who are actively dying, so if they don't leave soon, they're going to die.”
All these deaths are preventable. There are supposedly over 950 UN aid trucks carrying food and lifesaving aid parked outside the border. But Israel has chosen a slow agonizing death for over 2.1 million Palestinians.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, has called on states to intervene to stop Israel’s genocide, as well as sanction Israel, impose a total arms embargo, break the Israeli siege and blockade with naval forces, suspend all trade agreements with Israel till the end of the genocide, occupation, and apartheid, and finally investigate and prosecute individuals and organizations that have committed crimes. “The absolute incapacity of Western leaders to enforce [international] law when it comes to Israel is EPIC.”
The Sameer Project began in April 2024, led by three Palestinians living abroad. Leaders Hala Sabah, Lena Djani, and Translating Falasteen (a pseudonym and social media account) are in constant contact with their ground team, which comprises approximately 85 full-time aid workers, including two doctors and five nurses spread across camps. Conditions on the ground are constantly changing—Israeli evacuation orders or airstrikes, looting or killing from Israeli-backed armed gangs, complications transferring money into Gaza, wounds and disease, or any other multitude of life-altering scenarios.
“Today [Thursday] we managed to get them rice, so that's, like, a big achievement, but it was really, really hard to obtain,” Sabah told No Frontiers over the phone from Jordan, just east of Gaza and Israel.
Costing around $18.50 per 800-gram rice meal, 120 meals were given to patients at the Refaat Alareer Camp (with 15 meals given to aid workers), and 366 rice meals were delivered to Al Aqsa Hospital to feed patients. In total, 500 rice meals cost $9,250 with 10% commission. Perhaps most importantly, each meal consisted of about 1,040 calories.
“All three of us, well, our days are full of trying to first source food, plan the water, handle the medical points, handle all the medical cases that we get,” said Sabah. Then they distribute aid across dozens of refugee camps in Gaza.
Each day, when The Sameer Project distributes a meal, it’s because their aid workers have worked tirelessly fundraising to cover the exorbitant food prices or have swept through bombed-out building wreckage to find provisions. They supply fellow Palestinian refugees with food, water, shelter, beds, medicine, clothes, and relative safety. Named after the beloved Palestinian poet and professor, the Refaat Alareer camp in central Gaza is setup especially for families with critical medical issues, like war injuries, special needs, or disabilities, and also acts as a recovery wing for patients after surgery. There’s a therapy tent for mental health care, a woman’s tent, a recreational area with a volleyball net, an education tent, and of course, the medical tent. Currently, approximately 35 families reside in the Refaar Alareer camp.
In recent days, there’s often no food left for sale in the markets, leaving aid workers with few options other than rationing. One lifeline has been connecting with the few remaining farmers in Gaza (who haven’t had their fields bombed, bulldozed, or stolen by the IOF) to purchase bulk loads of vegetables.
A couple of weeks ago, people were able to eat at community kitchens, where The Sameer Project would purchase several pots of lentils and rice daily. The medical team would call pharmacies to source Cerelac (infant cereal) and baby formula, while others would search the markets and call their network of traders and farmers to check their food stock and prices.
“‘How do you get food into Gaza?’ is a question we get every single day and the answer to that is we don’t!” said Sabah. “We purchase vegetables from farmers and we get water from desalination plants, and anything else we buy is from the markets at high prices.”
Dozens of aid workers constantly risk their lives to deliver food and water, transport supplies across Gaza, and make deliveries to numerous camps. Recently, one aid worker travelled from central Gaza to the North, where the IOF is actively obliterating with bombs and armored bulldozers to retrieve a box filled with canned tuna.
Perhaps most miraculously, The Sameer Project has welcomed three babies into the world since they began sheltering and feeding families displaced by Israel’s relentless aerial bombings, forced evacuation orders, and genocide. But what should be a celebration has only brought anguish and torment as mothers try to feed their newborn babies.
While seeking entry to Palestine, foreign doctors are prevented from bringing baby formula to Gaza at checkpoints by Israeli soldiers. “They confiscated every single carton of baby formula,” a British surgeon recently told Good Morning Britain. While many campaign for Israel to open its borders, the Sameer Project has represented the grassroots model of aid distribution sorely needed in global humanitarianism.
“They need to trust the people, and they need to allow us to provide the aid, the way we find most suitable, and we hold of ourselves accountable by spending every second of every single day, doing these updates, posting the videos, talking to the hospitals, getting doctors to tell us who needs this, the most,” said Sabah. “So people just need to not impose Western frameworks on the way we work and how we do things. And if they want to provide solidarity, then they need to provide solidarity the way we want it, not the way they want it.”
Since 2007, Israel has had a complete stranglehold over the borders of Gaza as part of their genocidal siege strategy to exterminate the lives of Palestinians and steal their remaining lands in the West Bank and Gaza. The previous UN-led humanitarian network operated about 400 aid sites. Now there are only three militarized aid sites to feed Gaza’s 2.1 million population. Any aid that has crossed into Gaza has been paltry and doesn’t begin to reverse the genocidal famine, and was, apparently, solely to quell international outrage. And the West won’t do enough.
If Israel isn’t forced to allow aid, how many more days can families survive?
“No incidents”
Leaders at The Sameer Project are trying their hardest to provide as much food, shelter, and medical care as they can to Palestinian refugees, because the only other alternative aid organization has turned humanitarian aid distribution into a deadly, humiliating game to reach a meager supply of food.
The U.S. and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has been at the center of daily aid massacres since it began distributing aid on May 26, 2025. Before then, Israel had not let food into Gaza for over three months. Many Palestinians describe Israel’s aid scheme as a lure to the south—an ethnic cleansing of Northern Gaza—just to be shredded under surrounding machine gun fire, obliterated by aerial bombings, assaulted by tank fire, and even deadly amounts of pepper spray and stun grenades from both IOF soldiers and private American mercenaries.
“Fathers go to the GHF, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and risk their lives, basically, or risk getting shot just to get a little bit of flour,” said Sabah. So far, none from their camp have been killed or shot while seeking aid from GHF.
Each day, the GHF claims to deliver over 1 million meals and that there is no killing by aid site security forces or nearby IOF soldiers, while blaming Hamas and the UN for Israel’s engineered famine. With the southernmost aid site closed (SDS1), only two sites remain in Rafah, while a third site is open near Gaza City in the north.
But each day, a new genocidal GHF aid massacre is documented by survivors’ video footage and testimony to journalists and medical workers. It streams endlessly on Telegram, X, WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok channels.
The three so-called “Safe Distribution Sites” (SDS) operated by GHF are essentially “death traps,” several kilometers of desolate killing fields to reach the aid sites. Principled news outlets like Al Jazeera and Mondoweiss, two GHF site whistleblowers, as well as independent war crime researchers such as Databases for Palestine, Israel Exposed, and Gaza Maps, have helped piece together some of the deadly journey to retrieve GHF rations.
Most won’t receive any aid. Dozens will die trying. Palestinians have called it the real-life “Squid Game.”
First, to reach SDS3 in Rafah, aid seekers gather at a designated queue area (marked by a green dot) near Khan Younis. They then begin to walk 2.5 km along a designated route (orange path) between bulldozer-created hill mounds on either side. For their safety, they must walk this path and can’t stray from it, or else the IOF will likely open fire.
After trekking 2.5 km, aid seekers reach what the GHF calls their “waiting area” (orange dot). Here, a red flag is raised, indicating the aid site is closed. This is where people are concentrated, waiting for the site to open. To have any chance at retrieving food, one must be here when it opens. Everyone is forced to fight to be first in line.
Second, when the flag changes from red to green, aid seekers rush to the aid site, located 1.5 km away. And they have to run, because not only are there few boxes of rations, but they only have a few minutes before the site closes and surrounding IOF soldiers and American private mercenaries descend upon them with gunfire.
Once they reach the aid site, they are corralled through a narrow fence that looks like a cattle chute, topped with surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition software. The ration boxes are usually scattered about the sand and are directly below armed guards. There are no tables or organization to them; they are laid out to be fought over. They have 10 minutes.
While they are fighting over the boxes, mercenaries from UG Solutions, Safe Reach Solutions (SRS), and Sentinel Foundation are firing stun grenades, pepper spray, and machine gun fire at them. And there are reports of IOF aerial bombing, tank fire, and mortar fire upon aid seekers.
After 10 minutes (or less) of racing to the site, fighting over food, dodging munitions from mercenaries and IOF soldiers, a yellow flag appears at the site. This is the five-minute warning.
And finally, when the five minutes are over, everyone needs to leave the way they came, back down the 1.4 km corridor past the “waiting area” and through the first 2.5 km path entrenched by sand dunes. Then they will have reached relative safety from the militarized aid zone.
However, to make everyone leave the aid site, mercenaries and IOF soldiers fire “warning shots” into the crowd, indiscriminately killing men, women, and children until the desperate aid seekers run to safety with whatever food rations they could carry. Most will leave with nothing to feed their families. Some have to carry back the injured or the dead who were shot.
Recently, there was an “engineered stampede” at the Khan Younis SDS3 “waiting area,” when instead of throwing up the green flag and opening the gate, an IOF soldier used either a stun grenade or pepper spray on the crowd, causing panic. Chaos ensued, and aid seekers began rushing forward. In the panic and confusion, many were trampled and killed in the stampede. And new horrific details keep unfolding.
“I witnessed the Israeli defense forces firing a main gun tank round from the Macabre Tank into a crowd of people, destroying a car of civilians who were simply driving away from the site,” said ex-Green Beret Anthony Aguilar, who worked security for GHF, to the BBC in late July. He reported seeing IOF soldiers firing guns and mortar rounds into an “unarmed, starving civilian population.” One child kissed his hand, thanking him for the food, and was immediately shot and killed by an IOF soldier.
At aid site two, a July 14 video (below) showed a group that ran too soon and was immediately fired upon, causing hundreds to take cover in the sand. And while attempting to retrieve aid, Palestinian youth report being abducted by IOF soldiers, thrown in prison, and tortured for a month before being released. There are approximately 42 Palestinians abducted at GHF aid sites. The list of atrocities goes on.
The day after I spoke with Hala Sabah, the GHF hosted a “Women’s Day” ration distribution for women and children only. They still beat, terrorized, and shot at the women and children who came, killing two women.
“Today’s GHF operation update,” wrote the GHF’s X account. “Nearly 92 million meals distributed to date. Nearly 1.5 million meals delivered today. No incidents”
Aid organizations like the World Health Organization, various branches of the UN, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) are being stopped by Israel from their regular entry into the genocidal war zone.
“We have always said that we cannot do this alone, and this is why we have called on the [at]UN to let us help them deliver food to the desperate families in Gaza,” wrote GHF’s spokesperson on X. “At the end of the day, it is about empathy. It is about helping people in need. We are trying to help the Gazan people get food.”
Despite the death and destruction, grief and pain, the Palestinian mutual aid workers at The Sameer Project and elsewhere continue the exhausting work of feeding and caring for their people. For them, this isn’t a business. It’s survival.
“I think what I want people to understand is that they need to decolonize their solidarity, because people think they know better than us on how to handle things like this,” said Sabah.
It's very problematic when people in the West tell us that we need to be the perfect victims, where we are constantly thanking and begging and have a certain image, whereas when we have agency and power that makes them feel uncomfortable. And on top of that, they want us to be pacifist and not talk about violence or any kind of armed resistance when our children are being blown into pieces. So I think we're all, as Palestinians, sick of the bullshit conversation around democracy and human rights and the UN and the West, where they tell us what to do and how to handle things during a genocide, when in reality, they are the ones funding the genocide that we're in, especially the United States.