Baby formula stashed away 'deliberately' by Hamas during Gaza hunger crisis, Palestinian activist says

Baby formula was stashed away “deliberately” by Hamas during “the worst of the days of the hunger crisis in Gaza in the past six months,” a Palestinian-American activist says. It was stored in “clandestine warehouses belonging to the Gaza Ministry of Health,” which is run by Hamas, said Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib in a post on X on Monday.

He shared a video which appears to show piles of ready-to-use infant formula. He said activists in Gaza are now 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.”

Alkhatib is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a non-partisan organization in the U.S. dedicated to finding solutions for global issues. He is also the head of Realign for Palestine, a project at the Atlantic Council advocating for a two-state solution and “a humane path forward for peace between the Palestinian and Israeli people.”

A ceasefire agreement two months ago brought an end to the war in the Middle East, which was sparked by the October 7 attacks, when Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostage.

In August, a phase 5 famine was declared in Gaza, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Phase 5 is the highest on the IPC’s Acute Food Insecurity scale. It means at least 20 per cent of households are facing an extreme lack of food, at least 30 per cent of children are suffering from acute malnutrition, and two people for every 10,000 are dying each day due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease, the IPC says.

The goal of Hamas hiding food, Alkhatib said, “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 GHF, a U.S.-run operation, was created to take control of distributing food and aid in Gaza amid accusations from Israel that Hamas was looting UN supplies. Chaos ensued at the sites set up by GHF, with Hamas accusing Israel’s military of killing civilians in need of aid. Israel’s military has denied those claims, saying that it fired warning shots. The GHF said it was winding down operations in November because its mission was complete, the BBC reported.

IPC and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) did not respond to National Post’s request for comment.

Alkhatib has been speaking out about food being hidden by Hamas since July, along with other activists.

“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,” he said.

“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.”

In the comments of his post, one person asked if there was more baby formula being hidden than what was shown in the video. “Yes, this is just a sneak peak and only what’s been captured recently,” replied Alkhatib.

He warned people against becoming “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,” he said.

In another post on Tuesday, he said that one of his Palestinian sources in Gaza saw “literal hundreds of tons of humanitarian aid” ready to be delivered last week, but drivers were reluctant to risk their lives to deliver it.

“Instead, most of the trucks going into the Strip right now, which are between 600-900 a day, are part of commercial operations that Hamas taxes at 50% and belong to businessmen and merchants across the Gaza Strip,” said Alkhatib.

He added that the UN and other non-governmental organizations “insist on either not using protection for security and the drivers of aid delivery, or not being part of the racket and gangster operations that Hamas terrorists have been running since the ceasefire.”

“This reduces the overall number of aid trucks carrying supplies and materials that are not for sale and meant to benefit children, poor civilians, and the displaced population,” he said.

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