Over the past month, Israeli forces have opened fire almost every day at aid seekers collecting food from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the US/Israeli-backed food distribution organization. More than 549 people have been killed and over 4,000 wounded so far, during nineteen separate incidents.

From the start, it was clear that the level of daily mass killing was the result of a deliberate policy of shooting live small arms ammunition, tank rounds and mortars into crowds of aid-seekers, with the aim of turning the food distribution points into killing fields as part of the ongoing genocide.

On Friday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an in-depth report substantiating the existence of orders instructing Israeli soldiers to fire into the crowds. Internally, the massacres are officially justified as a form of crowd control, with soldiers moving groups of unarmed people from one place to another by shooting at them.

One soldier interviewed by Haaretz said that the oversight of the food distribution by the Israeli forces was referred to as “Operation Salted Fish,” a reference to the Israeli version of the children’s game “Red light, green light.” By all appearances, this name is based on the Korean television series Squid Game. In the fictional series, contestants are forced to play the children’s game “red light, green light,” with those who move before the “green light” being shot with live bullets.

Each day, often late at night or early in the morning, tens of thousands of people have lined up at the GHF distribution sites to receive food, which is only available for one hour, causing a chaotic rush of starving people.

According to the report, there is no method of crowd control except for live bullets. Those who attempt to collect food, which is simply left on the ground, too early or too late are shot.

One soldier interviewed by Haaretz said, “It’s a killing field.” He added, “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force—no crowd-control measures, no tear gas—just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

Another soldier said, “We fired machine guns from tanks and threw grenades.”

Nir Hasson, an author of the report, told Al Jazeera, “It’s actually a practice of … controlling the crowd by fire, like if you wanted the crowd to run off [from] a place, you shoot at them, even though you know they are unarmed … You use fire to move people from one point to another.”

In other words, everything about the operation of the food distribution sites is calculated to kill unarmed civilians, under the pretense of providing them with aid. It is as if the plot of Squid Game, which is portrayed as a horrific bloodsport for the entertainment of wealthy people, were recast as a “humanitarian operation.”

The revelations published by Haaretz confirm the warnings made by all major humanitarian agencies, including the United Nations and Doctors Without Borders (MSF), that the “aid centers” are merely a part of Israel’s ethnic cleansing operation in Gaza.

They are aimed at concentrating the population in the south of the enclave in order to facilitate its transfer into concentration camps patrolled by Israeli troops and preparing the expulsion of the Palestinian people from Gaza. That is in line with an ethnic-cleansing plan outlined by US President Donald Trump and embraced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a statement on Friday, MSF called the operations of the GHF “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”

Earlier this week, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned, “The foundation’s operational model involves luring civilians to specific locations coordinated with the Israeli army, where they are subjected to killing, injury, and cruel and degrading treatment.”

Just one day before Haaretz published its revelations, the US State Department announced that the Trump administration had provided $30 million in funding for the GHF. State Department deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott called the group’s actions “absolutely incredible,” declaring that they “should be commended and supported.”

In an apparent confirmation of the reporting by Haaretz, the Israeli military has launched an internal war crimes investigation into shootings at the aid centers. As always, such investigations are nothing more than PR operations, aimed at creating the illusion of oversight while allowing those guilty of perpetrating war crimes to go unpunished.

In a statement Friday, Netanyahu and Israel Katz, the defense minister, accused Haaretz of propagating a “blood libel” against the Israeli military, which they called “the most moral military in the world.”

In a separate incident, the Israeli military killed eighteen people during an aid distribution operated by Palestinian police. Witnesses reported that many of the victims were ordinary people who had come to gather flour.

Gaza’s official media office alleged on Friday that aid-seekers had discovered pills containing the powerful and deadly opiate oxycodone in bags of flour distributed at the GHF aid centers. “We have so far documented four testimonies from citizens who found these pills inside the flour bags,” it stated, warning of the “possibility that some of these narcotic substances were deliberately ground or dissolved in the flour itself.”

In a statement, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the GHF’s operations in Gaza “inherently unsafe,” adding: “It is killing people… People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence.”