Gaza peace activist: Hamas stockpiled baby formula, hid aid supplies to worsen Gaza hunger crisis

A Gaza native and peace activist, Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, posted footage on social media showing a large quantity of baby formula piled up in Gaza and claimed it was being withheld by Hamas from those who needed it.

“During the worst of the days of the hunger crisis in Gaza in the past six months, Hamas deliberately hid literal tons of infant formula and nutritional shakes for children by storing them in clandestine warehouses belonging to the Gaza Ministry of Health,” he stated.

Alkhatib continued, “The goal, as I said then, was to worsen the hunger crisis and initiate a disaster as part of the terror group’s famine narrative in a desperate effort to stop Israel’s onslaught against Gaza and force the return of the UN’s aid distribution mechanism, and away from the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).”

The narrative that Israel is deliberately starving innocent people in Gaza has been refuted by Israel and challenged in the press, but it is widely agreed that attempts to deliver aid to Gaza's civilians have been fraught with difficulties.

Some 90% of aid has been looted from trucks before reaching recipients, according to the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS). The agency’s Monitor & Tracking Dashboard revealed that of the 2,604 aid trucks that entered Gaza from May 19 to Aug. 5 of this year, only 12% (295 vehicles) reached their destination safely without falling prey to theft or mass looting, according to the New York Post.

The 10-week blockade on aid from March 2 until May 18 imposed by Israel, intending to pressure Hamas and weaken its grip on power, led to a sharp rise in cases of acute malnutrition, according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). However, though the humanitarian situation is severe, reports of starvation were distorted, along with the claim that 14,000 babies were on the brink of death, which was later found to be false. 

Now Alkhatib has asserted that the Hamas terror group has deliberately been causing shortages by preventing aid from reaching those who need it. Though currently living in the United States, Alkhatib says he received his information from activists in Gaza.

“Activists in the Strip are documenting the waste and deliberate disposal of tons of infant formula, nutritional children’s shake, and children’s powdered milk, which Hamas had hoarded away, given the saturation of the coastal enclave with humanitarian aid after the ceasefire two months ago,” he wrote.

His post has received numerous reactions, with many failing to believe the veracity of the claims, which rely solely on the footage and on reports Alkhatib says he has received from people in Gaza.

“When countless other Palestinian activists and I from Gaza said this back in July, August, and September, we were villainized, attacked, threatened, and made into pariahs by the 'pro-Palestine' industrial complex and activist mafias, even though for Gazans, the evidence was so clearly apparent before our eyes.”

Although there is no corroborating evidence that Hamas deliberately hid baby formula to worsen the famine and defame Israel, the strategy of sacrificing the lives of its innocent civilians is a well-documented strategy of the terror group.

Ismail Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader who was assassinated in Tehran in July 2024, was recorded celebrating the deaths of Gazans on Oct. 26, 2023. He declared, "As I have said repeatedly, the blood of children, women, and the elderly should not make you cry out! Rather, we need this blood to awaken the revolution, to awaken stubbornness, to awaken and move forward."

Alkhatib challenged pro-Palestinian activists to take a stand against Hamas, saying, “What those in the West continue to fail to understand is that there is no being pro-Palestine without also having a serious vigilance against Hamas’s continued manipulation of international public opinion to hide behind the Strip's civilian population's suffering, something that the terrorist organization’s own actions have led to and created.”

The peace activist added, “Never allow yourself to be a useful idiot in Hamas’s propaganda. You can have compassion for the real suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, and demand Israeli action to facilitate aid entry into the coastal enclave, while still holding Hamas accountable for its part in causing a hunger and starvation crisis in the first place.”