Posted on 05/27/25
| News Source: JPost
The opening of the humanitarian aid distribution centers marks the beginning of the end of Hamas rule, an Israeli source told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday as the IDF announced the opening of two large food distribution centers, which it has said should be able to feed up to 600,000 Palestinians over the course of a week.
The two centers are located one at Tel Sultan in Rafah in deep southern Gaza, and one at the Morag Corridor, a bit north of Rafah.
A third is expected to open up near Khan Yunis in mid-southern Gaza, and a fourth in central Gaza, though it is still unclear if these other facilities are days or weeks away from opening.
Sources told the Post that the food centers would get up to their maximum food distribution capacity relatively rapidly, but there was also no exact deadline for that.
Currently, there are no immediate plans to open up such a center for northern Gaza, which means that the estimated one million Palestinians there will continue to receive food from UN groups as they have this past week and as they have for much of the war.
Sources told the Post that new guidelines and techniques would be followed to prevent Hamas from gaining control of the food in northern Gaza, but the whole reason that Israel has worked with US companies and global aid groups to establish the new four food centers in central and southern Gaza is to break Hamas's control over food, which the UN groups have done little to stop.
The new food centers will be run by the American companies UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions as part of a new Gaza humanitarian authority.
However, there has been controversy regarding the authority, with a number of its top managers resigning in recent days due to pressure from global groups who view the food centers as problematic moves by Israel to control Gazan food and to restrict this food from portions of the population connected with Hamas.
Part of the policy with northern Gaza may also be to satisfy objections from the UN and food aid groups that say it is illegal for Israel to decide some groups can receive food, while others (Hamas forces) cannot.
While the UN and human rights groups condemn Hamas, they also refuse to set any limits on who can receive food.
In contrast, the new food centers will involve some mix of Israeli and US security checks, which could allow the IDF to arrest suspected Hamas members, and certainly to arrest anyone who is armed.
Additionally, the new food centers location away from northern Gaza is designed to try to divide Gaza into sectors which become Hamas free, even if other sectors still contain Hamas terrorists.
All of this is being rolled out as five IDF divisions invaded more deeply into Gaza last week.
The IDF said that the current phase of the invasion, taking over up to 75% of Gazan territory and rolling out and normalizing the new food distribution model, could be drawn out over around two months, with hopes that this would lead to breaking Hamas’s control over the population.