AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Doctors Without Borders — Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF — has called for the closure of the shadowy Israeli-, U.S.-backed aid centers in Gaza. Some 1,400 Palestinians have been killed since May trying to access food, since the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation took over aid delivery. A new MSF report titled “This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing.” gathers testimony from its medics and others about the targeting of Palestinians seeking food at GHF distribution sites, which are in direct proximity to where MSF operates two healthcare centers. This comes as the U.S. says it wants to scale up to have the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation operate 16 aid sites.

For more, we go to Avril Benoît, chief executive officer of Doctors Without Borders, Médecins Sans Frontières USA. Their new report, again, “This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing.”

Avril, welcome back to Democracy Now! Explain exactly what you’re calling for and what the medics on the ground, since you have adjacent medical clinic sites, have described happening, as pamphlets are dropped telling Palestinians where to go for aid, and when they go there, so many of them — well, more than 1,400 of them — have been shot dead since May.

AVRIL BENOÎT: The reason that Doctors Without Borders, or, as we’re known internationally, Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF, is calling for the closure of the GHF — and we don’t even dare use the word “humanitarian,” because it’s not humanitarian — they’re essentially death traps. So, every time they have a distribution, the clinics are receiving mass casualty number of patients who are shot, or they are suffering from lacerations from barbed wire around the sites or injuries from the stampedes that inevitably happen because the way the GHF functions is so disorganized. So, it seems negligent, intentionally negligent, reckless, that people get injured.

And so, even, you know, we have stories in our report of children also being shot. We treated an 8-year-old girl with gunshot wounds to the chest and a 5-year-old boy with severe head trauma, both of them injured near these GHF sites. And we know that it’s linked to the distribution events, because they all come in at once. All these patients come in at once, and they say, “That’s where we were.” Even one of my own colleagues was killed at a distribution. The airdrops are chaotic. Every time they try to bring in trucks, it’s chaotic. And certainly the GHF is singularly disorganized, reckless, dangerous, and we cannot help but come to the conclusion that these are deliberately set-up death traps for those who are starving to survive with a bit of food aid that they can grab hold of.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response to the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who’s calling on the U.N. to collaborate with GHF. He spoke on Fox News.

MIKE HUCKABEE: The president has been telling us he wants food into the hands of hungry people, but he wants it in a way that it doesn’t get into the hands of Hamas. That’s exactly what we did when we stood up GHF. It’s an American-based operation. It has the support and cooperation of the IDF, but it’s not under their control. And the result has been pretty phenomenal: over 106 million meals served at four feeding sites. The immediate plan is to scale up the number of sites up to 16 and begin to operate them as much as 24 hours a day.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, what’s interesting, Avril Benoît, is that it was the U.S. itself, a U.S. agency, USAID, in July, found that there was not evidence of Hamas taking, stealing the food. But can you talk about what was there before, the U.N.’s 400 aid distribution sites? Why were they shut down for the four of GHF?

AVRIL BENOÎT: So, Israeli authorities have been striving to discredit the United Nations’ effort since long before October 7th, of course. So, they had roughly 400 distribution sites. It was working reasonably well. You did not see starving children begging for food and bowls of slop on television, up until this latest siege. And so, now we have four sites. They’re talking about quadrupling that, sounds very impressive. But to go from four to 16 is not — is not going to cover the needs.

And it’s not a situation where there’s a lack of food. I mean, we should not be desperately begging for there to be formula, baby formula, brought into Gaza because the mothers are so malnourished that they can barely breastfeed. We should not be begging for even the therapeutic foods to be allowed in at scale, because one in four of the patients that we have surveyed of children under the age of 4, of mothers with newborns, breastfeeding women, were malnourished, clinically, severely malnourished. So, you know, we shouldn’t be, you know, considering this anything but Israeli intentionality to deprive people in Gaza of food and also clean drinking water that they need to survive. The food is just across the border. The food should be brought in en masse by the hundreds and hundreds on trucks, quite apart from the GHF. You know, these airdrops, which are spectacular efforts at public relations, very visual, they really don’t drop very much. It’s just the equivalent of a few trucks. We need hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of trucks, all the crossings being open.

And that would address this unproven, never substantiated claim that Israeli authorities and the U.S. government has been making that it’s criminal elements or Hamas that are diverting all the food aid, and if they just didn’t do that, people wouldn’t be starving on television. I’m sorry, the food is there. It could be brought in, in such quantities that you would not even have a question of needing to steal it or divert it. But again, there has not been any credible evidence that there was a systemic effort to divert the aid. People are starving because Israel wants them to. I’m sorry to say it that way, but this is the heart of all the efforts in this genocide, to deprive people in Gaza of the ability to survive.

AMY GOODMAN: Avril Benoît, I want to thank you for being with us from Montreal, chief executive officer of Doctors Without Borders, Médecins Sans Frontières. That’s MSF USA. We’ll link to your new report, “This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing: MSF’s frontline medical testimony on systematic mass casualties from GHF sites in Gaza.”

When we come back, as Trump vows to deploy up to a thousand National Guard to Washington, D.C., California begins a trial that challenges Trump’s attempt to control California’s National Guard and deploy troops to quell ICE protests in L.A. We’ll speak with the California attorney general. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Nunca Más” by La Santa Cecilia in our Democracy Now! studio.