Soaked in Blood: How Gaza's aid sites became death traps for starving Palestinians

Ameen Sameer Khalifa lies flat on the ground, hiding as the sound of heavy machine-gun fire, followed by unsettling silence, shatters the early morning calm in southern Gaza.

"We're dying for a piece of bread," he says as his voice trembles.

"God is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs."

Ameen, who became the main provider for his family after Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza, left his makeshift tent in southern Gaza on 1 June and made his way to a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) food distribution centre in Rafah with the sole aim of securing food.

That day he returned home empty handed.

Two days later he went again.

This time, instead of retrieving a box of flour, oil and a packet of lentils, his body was to be riddled with bullets, as scores of Palestinians around him screamed for help and cowered for safety.

A Middle East Eye investigation using forensic audio analysis, satellite imagery and eyewitness accounts reconstructs the moments leading up to his killing and exposes how Palestinians were guided into active firing zones.

'They take the tallest, the strongest, the most beautiful. They shoot them like prey'

– Fadwa, Ameen's mother

The investigation finds that Ameen, 30, was most likely killed by a FN MAG 7.62mm machine gun that was mounted on an Israeli tank in a military outpost - established just days earlier near the remains of the Muawiya Mosque in Rafah.

The coordinates, firing pattern and weapon profile point to a deliberate targeting of civilians who were heading towards aid sites.

"If I could have put him in a cage beside me, and never let him go, I would have," Ameen's mother, Fadwa, told MEE.

"They take the tallest, the strongest, the most beautiful. They shoot them like prey.

"Why execute someone for bread?"

'Famine by design'

For decades, Israel controlled what could enter the Gaza Strip, restricting food, fuel and medicine from reaching Palestinians as it sought to turn the local population against Hamas, who won the enclave's last legislative elections.

In 2006, Dov Weisglass, an adviser to then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, described the strategy this way: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet... but not to make them die of hunger."

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The blockade was planned to such an extent that the Israeli military commissioned its own internal study determining the minimum number of calories Palestinians would need to avoid malnutrition.

But after the 7 October attacks on southern Israel, everything changed.

Crossings were sealed entirely and aid convoys attacked by vengeful Israeli youth, as the UN warned Gaza was being "pushed toward famine by design".

Palestinians were forced to boil animal feed to survive, while air strikes and quadcopters slaughtered parents queueing for hours in the hopes of finding baby formula.

As the starvation spread, the only organisation mandated to provide food stood accused of grave rights violations and the targeting of civilians.

The controversial United States and Israel-backed GHF took over aid distribution in Gaza in May, after Israel eased its total blockade of the strip.

Since then, the United Nations says, more than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed trying to reach food.

Purposely shot

Gaza's health ministry, meanwhile, has reported that at least 2,531 Palestinians have been killed while trying to get aid since May 2025, with 743 killed and 4,891 injured at and around GHF sites since July.

Many have been purposely shot by Israeli soldiers or US security contractors hired by the GHF, usually following direct orders from their superiors.

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Still, in desperation to get any food they can to ensure survival, thousands of Palestinians braved the GHF sites every day, until a ceasefire was reached on 9 October.

In several cases, the GHF has denied anyone was killed at their sites and says the UN figures on the number of aid seekers killed are "false and misleading".

Since producing this MEE investigation, Mohamed Salama, the film's director of photography in Gaza, was killed in a triple-tap Israeli strike on the Nasser Medical Complex.

Israel's war on Gaza has killed and wounded more than 245,000 Palestinians to date, the majority of whom are civilians.

The war began on 7 October 2023, when Hamas launched a surprise assault on Israel, citing decades of occupation, increased Israeli violations against Al-Aqsa Mosque, the 16-year blockade on Gaza, and the mistreatment of Palestinian prisoners.

Recent reports, based on Israeli military intelligence data, indicate that more than 80 percent of those killed through to May of this year were civilians.

MEE reached out to the Israeli army and the GHF for comment but did not receive a response by time of publication.

You can watch the documentary here on 17 October 2025 at 14:00 GMT