Chapin Fay is the spokesperson for an organisation called – in one of the many grossly Orwellian inversions of language and meaning we have come to associate with the Israeli war on Gaza – the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
An American operation based in Delaware and backed by Israel, GHF – which has no experience in humanitarian aid distribution – has been entirely responsible for it in Gaza since May. The United Nations and major aid groups have refused to co-operate with GHF because they say it prioritises Israeli military objectives over the safe delivery of aid. As such, until a ceasefire holds and the safe flow of aid resumes, GHF has been the only thing standing between 90,000 already seriously malnourished women and children and imminent death by starvation.
According to his online biography, Fay is “one of the best media strategists and Republican operatives in the state” and a “crisis management expert with a track record of helping Fortune 500 companies”. He is also now the public face of the group operating what has been called by the head of United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa), “sadistic death traps”, food hubs staffed by US mercenaries and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
These hubs, which are located in areas Palestinians have been ordered to leave, typically open for an average of 11 minutes at a time, according to a powerful Guardian investigation. As desperate Palestinians, who have trekked long distances and waited many hours, rush towards unattended packages of flour, they risk being shot by the IDF. Since May, more than 1,000 people have reportedly died in the scramble for food from the centres, according to Unrwa.
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During the masterclass in Orwellian Newspeak he delivered at a briefing this week, Fay shrugged this off. “Civilians are being killed all over the Strip,” he said. But then he went on: “By Hamas, the IDF and other armed groups. But I’d like to point out that actually, the most violent incidents, the highest casualties have been linked to the UN or other humanitarian convoys. That’s a fact.”
As words like “fact” and “humanitarian” have lost all meaning – have been so violently divorced from their normal use as to now infer precisely the opposite – we may need to start inventing new ones. Like inhumanitarian. Binyamin Netanyahu wants to ethnically cleanse the population of Gaza, removing survivors to an inhumanitarian city. US president Donald Trump wants to create an inhumanitarian transit area. Or we can take the approach of Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, and use the names we already have for these kind of places: concentration camps.
Whatever words we use, none can occlude the reality of what is happening in Gaza. No words can adequately capture it either. Language has been so debased that maybe we should abandon it altogether and allow the images to speak instead.
One such photograph was published on the front of this newspaper on Wednesday. Taken by Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-Arni, it shows a woman dressed in mauve robes with a stained white headscarf knotted under her chin. Only the lower half of her face is visible. The serene set of her mouth belies the unspeakable horror of what she has seen, and what she wants us to see.
A little boy of 18 months, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, clings to her. Her hand is tenderly cradling the back of his head. Instead of a nappy, he is wearing a black bin liner. The outline of his vertebral column, his shoulder blades and his rib cage protrude under his dry, papery skin. Babies normally have dimples at their elbows, but he has the wizened limbs and loose skin of an old man, of someone close to death. Muhammad, you understand instantly from the picture, is very close to death.
The images coming in on the wire services from Gaza used to show children playing in the rubble of what was formerly their home. They were very distressing. But the pictures we are now getting are unfathomable: emaciated small bodies who no longer have the strength to stay upright. Children with horribly protruding ribs, hollow eyes, scabbed lips and noses, distended bellies and far off, vacant stares. Toddlers whose features are scarcely recognisable as belonging to children.
In the 48 hours before Muhammad’s picture was published in this newspaper, 12 children and 21 adults had died of starvation in the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza health ministry. Fay recommends we don’t believe the ministry, because it is run by Hamas. Who, then, do we believe? Who does the EU choose to believe? Whose words will be enough for the United Nations Security Council to intervene?
What about the evidence of researchers from University of London, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Princeton, Stanford, Peace Research Institute Oslo and Université Catholique de Louvain and the first independent study of the number of people killed as a result of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza? The study was based on household surveys and found that at least 75,200 Palestinians were killed between October 2023 and January 2025. Another 8,540 died due to starvation, disease and the collapse of healthcare systems. The researchers say the Gaza health ministry’s figures are, in fact, far too conservative.
Do we believe the AFP when it warns that the 10 freelance journalists it has left in Gaza face death by starvation? Do we believe the 109 aid organisations that wrote a letter this week begging Israel to end the blockade? Do we believe the evidence of our own eyes?
Or do we believe the Newspeak of Chapin Fay, of Binyamin Netanyahu’s government and of Donald Trump, when they insist that freedom is slavery, that concentration camps are humanitarian cities, and that the babies starving to death in front of us are Hamas propaganda?
