“We’re In The Last Moments Before Things Totally Collapse”: What One Humanitarian Is Seeing In Gaza That Others Can’t Report 

There is one moment in Amed Khan’s retelling of life in Gaza right now that sears itself into memory. A child living in a tent, displaced more than 15 times, who hasn’t eaten a proper meal in more than a year, looks up at this “frontline humanitarian” – who has witnessed everything from the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide to Afghanistan’s collapse – and tells him not to cry. “It’s going to be OK,” the child says.

Amed started crying anyway. There was, he admits, something deeply unsettling about a starving child comforting an adult. “I don’t think it’s normal,” he reflects, “but that sticks with me.”

Since 2 March, when Israel implemented what Khan describes as a “complete food embargo” on Gaza, he says no child in the territory – home to 1.2 million children – has eaten more than one meal a day. If they eat at all, it’s cold; maybe some grains of rice. Bread with za’atar. Never hot. Never enough.

Amed, a philanthropist and independent frontline humanitarian, has spent decades in some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones, funding and leading his own missions across more than 60 countries – from personally evacuating over 1,500 Afghans after the US withdrawal in 2021 to delivering aid in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine. In Greece, he also founded Elpida Home to provide shelter and legal support for refugees. His work is financed through his personal wealth, built through Paradigm Global Group, the private international investment firm he now leads, after earlier roles in the Peace Corps and the Clinton administration. But his real turning point came in 1995, when he spent 18 months living in a tent in post-genocide Rwandan refugee camps with no running water or electricity. “I really thoroughly got a lot out of helping people,” he says simply. “That’s literally it.” It’s where he has found meaning – and he’s been following it ever since.

Amed has managed to navigate the bureaucratic maze of access to such areas through what he calls a mix of track record and risk tolerance. It’s the same everywhere, he says. And, unlike major international organisations bound by diplomatic red tape, Khan’s independence gives him the freedom to speak plainly – and he does. He calls what’s happening in Gaza “the systematic starvation of a population that is over 50% children”. He’s not interested in softening the language because sanitising the reality makes it easier to ignore – and the truth shouldn’t be filtered when the lives of children are on the line.

The Promise Gap

The disconnect between international rhetoric and reality becomes stark in Amed’s accounting. When Jordan’s King Abdullah met with President Trump in February and pledged to evacuate 2,000 children with cancer from Gaza, it made headlines and offered hope. The reality? Only 65 children were actually taken.

“I mean, maybe they’re going to work towards that,” Amed says, “but it’s indicative of the larger picture that there’s lip service paid to all these issues by all world leaders.”

Meanwhile, thousands of children require urgent medical evacuation from a territory where hospitals have been destroyed and medicine is virtually nonexistent. France has taken perhaps 20 or 30 children, Italy 30 or 40. “These are ridiculous numbers,” says Amed.

The mathematical cruelty is precise: Amed says roughly 10,000 children need immediate medical evacuation. Fewer than 1,000 have been moved. Every day, more children become sick from malnutrition, disease or injuries from what he describes as the most intensive bombing campaign in modern history relative to land size.

What does starvation look like day to day? Amed describes families whose only goal is simply staying alive through the night. “There’s no shelter, there’s definitely no bomb shelter. So you’re in a tent, and you’re just looking up and praying.” When bombs get closer, people scream louder, often reciting final prayers because survival is never guaranteed.

During the day, men will leave the tents to search for anything to feed their families. They return to children asking if they’ll eat today, only to answer: maybe. Maybe later. These same families have likely moved 10, 15, even 20 times – forced evacuations announced by drone-dropped leaflets warning: Leave this area or risk dying. 

And yet within this horror, Amed keeps witnessing something profoundly human – he’s reminded of Steinbeck’s line in The Grapes of Wrath: “If you’re ever in trouble or hurt or in need, go to poor people. They’re the only ones that will help you.” In Gaza, families who have nothing still share what little they have with those they think have even less. People who’ve lost everyone insist others are worse off.

Starved By Politics

This spirit of solidarity stands in stark contrast to the paralysis of the global aid system. So how does Khan succeed in delivering aid where larger organisations fail? “It’s just being relentless,” he says, though he hasn’t gotten anything through since March 2 either. The issue, he insists, isn’t logistics or organisational competence – agencies such as the World Food Programme, UNICEF or Anera know exactly how to help. The problem is political will.

UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, has 6,000 trucks loaded with food sitting outside Gaza’s borders, explains Amed. They simply aren’t being allowed in by the Israeli government. “Forcing starvation on a population that’s over 50% children is insane,” he says.

This represents what Amed identifies as unprecedented in modern conflict: one country controlling every single border, making all decisions about who gets in, who gets out, what enters. “There’s no corollary in modern history to this situation,” he argues, comparing it with Ukraine, where aid flows through multiple neighboring countries despite active warfare.

The question of why Israel would allow 1.2 million children to face starvation reveals, in Amed’s analysis, a deliberate strategy rather than an unfortunate byproduct of war. “It’s part and parcel with the overall goal of making Gaza uninhabitable, laying the groundwork for clearing out the population through forced or semi-voluntary methods,” he says. The tactic represents what he sees as Israel’s pivot to achievable objectives after military failures. “Destroying Hamas and displacing the population to the Negev [a desert southwest of Gaza] has proven more challenging. But denying food and medicine is easy to execute.”

Amed reserves particular frustration for media coverage that, in his view, systematically dehumanises Palestinians and repeats talking points that can’t be fact checked, given Israel has deliberately excluded Western journalists from Gaza. “There’s no journalists from the New York Times, The Washington Post, who’ve been into Gaza that could report [or verify] this stuff. So it’s all coming from Israeli officials. Then they’ve dehumanised Palestinian journalists to the point where people don’t believe they are credible – even though they’ve killed most of them at this point.” Israel’s war on Gaza has killed 232 journalists – an average of 13 per month since October 2023 – making it the deadliest conflict for media workers ever recorded.

Some reporters, he acknowledges, are trying to tell the truth but the dehumanisation, he argues, isn’t always loud. It shows up in subtle editorial choices – like the difference between “Air Strike Leaves 40 Children Dead” versus “Israel’s Air Strike Kills 40 Children.” That former passive construction, repeated across outlets, erases responsibility. And when those choices are made over and over again, they stop looking like neutral reporting – and start looking like complicity. This lack of accountability, Amed says, extends far beyond the media. He questions why, after 19 months of what he characterises as the most well-financed and well-equipped military on earth, deploying every sophisticated weapon imaginable against a largely innocent population, there is little enforcement of accountability towards Israel upheld by the politicians enabling it.

The Protest Effect

Yet Amed detects signs that sustained public pressure is finally moving political leaders outside of Israel, who previously offered it unwavering backing. “They’re finally making statements they wouldn’t before,” he observes. French President Emmanuel Macron, once steadfast in his support, has called for a ceasefire. “It took them 19 months, but it seems like they’re waking up now.”

The shift is measurable. In the final weeks of May, 17 of the EU’s 27 member states backed a review of their trade agreement with Israel over human rights violations in Gaza – a departure from the bloc’s previous position. The UK suspended trade negotiations with Israel, with Foreign Secretary David Lammy calling the Gaza operation “morally unjustifiable”. Canada joined Britain and France in threatening “concrete actions”, including targeted sanctions, if Israel doesn’t halt its offensive.

These aren’t countries traditionally critical of Israel. The Netherlands, “considered a firm ally of Israel”, led the EU initiative, Amed notes, citing Israel’s humanitarian blockade as a violation of international law. He credits this shift not to top-down diplomacy, but to bottom-up pressure – by grassroots activism: “I think politicians are reacting to these social movements; these people movements. I know specific countries where they’ve had massive protests, and now their heads of state have magically woken up.”

The math of protest, it seems, is starting to add up. In London alone, 600,000 people marched in May to commemorate the Nakba and demand government action. Similar demonstrations have filled the streets of European capitals, creating what Amed calls “a wall of political pressure that leaders can’t ignore anymore”.

A Ticking Clock

However, even with protests and negotiations taking turns, without immediate intervention – specifically a ceasefire followed by flooding Gaza with aid – Amed predicts the numbers of children dying from starvation will simply increase. He describes infants who are “literally skin and bones now”, with missing muscle mass, discolored skin, and absent light in their eyes from lack of protein and nutrition. “We’re in the last moments before things totally collapse,” he warns. The minimum requirement is 600 trucks of aid daily. In recent days (at the time of our conversation), only a few trucks have entered sporadically.

But the fundamental problem isn’t logistics: it’s the impossibility of delivering aid during active warfare. “You can’t deliver aid when there’s military operations going all over the place,” says Amed. “If you have 2.2 million people who are starving, and you try to send 12 trucks of food into an area that you’re bombing, it’s not going to work. There’s a high chance it will be blown up, and crowd control is impossible in a situation like that.”

The current reality resembles something from a dystopian film. “There’s no secure route. There’s no way to guarantee the safety of a truck,” Amed reflects. “It’s kind of like, I don’t know if you ever watched any Mad Max movies, but there’s this idea of this war rig, and there’s a driver, and he’s going through and people are bombing him, and he’s just trying to get through... It’s like a post-apocalyptic world. It’s really like that in Gaza right now.”

The solution, Amed insists, requires political will from one source. “Someone – say, specifically the President of the United States – needs to tell the Israeli government there will be a ceasefire for this amount of days. In this period, we are going to evacuate every single sick and injured person who needs medical attention, feed everyone and get them back onto their calorie count and make sure nobody dies of starvation.”

“It’s all pretty simple,” Amed insists, “if anyone would really spend time and think about this.” If a child, starved and displaced, can still summon the strength to comfort an adult, then surely those with the power to act can summon the will to intervene. The question is no longer what is happening, it’s what are they prepared to do about it?

Read an extract from We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth by Amed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey, a powerful new collection of writing by young people living in Gaza here.