The Squid Game in Gaza: On Aid, Engineering Obedience, and Death

Author: مهيب الرفاعي

In a scene that surpasses imagination, thousands of Palestinians gather every morning at the humanitarian aid distribution centers in the Gaza Strip, not only in search of survival but for a miracle that allows them to escape expected gunfire. What appears to be an organized humanitarian aid effort by the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation" (GHF) with American and Israeli support reveals itself to be a stage of horror, according to field testimonies and reliable reports. The Israeli forces, according to documented evidence, have received orders to fire on Palestinians even in the absence of any threat, with the aim of scattering them from the areas before opening the distribution points or dispersing them after supplies run out. June 2025 alone recorded the martyrdom of 549 Palestinians and the injury of more than 4,000 others in the vicinity of aid distribution points. These statistics do not indicate a "security breakdown" or organizational failure; rather, they reveal a systematic structure that uses aid as a cover for advanced forms of organized killing.

"The Squid Game" as an Explanatory Model

With the release of the third part of the famous Korean series Squid Game, which shocked the world by revealing the fragility of human dignity under the weight of poverty and organized play on the instinct for survival, and the sadism of spectators towards the bloodshed, reality in Gaza has become even harsher, where this bloody fantasy has turned into daily policy practiced on the bodies of civilians. The analogy here is no longer metaphorical but becomes a literal description of control techniques, obedience tests, and institutional violence hidden behind the mask of humanitarian aid, followed by world politicians in a frenzy of gunpowder and blood.

In the aid distribution areas within Gaza, terms like "humanity," "justice," or "equality" no longer find their place in front of the long lines in front of international trucks that do not only express material hunger but represent a new engineering of power based on selection, humiliation, and risking one's life for a food box. A civilian in Gaza does not receive aid based on the principle of equality but is pushed into a harsh game: those who arrive first, pay more, and take risks may receive flour or water, while those who arrive late may exit life, not just the queue.

Widespread videos from Gaza show that Israeli soldiers receive orders to shoot at anyone exceeding the designated times for receiving aid; the closest description of what is happening is a "real-life Squid Game," where Palestinians are monitored by drones, and gunfire is directed at any suspicious movement, even if it is a child trying to pick up a loaf of bread or carrying a bag of flour through the ruins of his city.

Like the game "Red Light – Green Light" in the series, Palestinians in the aid arena move according to unclear orders, where any mistake – such as stepping out of line or rushing towards the aid – could mean a direct bullet to the head or chest. Participating soldiers have described the situation as a daily killing stage, according to a Haaretz investigation, with field terminologies such as "lethal warning fire" and "treating food incursions as tactical threats" circulating.

Gaza has become a testing ground for a new global model in managing populations under siege: conditional aid, military surveillance, technological subjugation, and the neutralization of dignity. It is a bloody version of Squid Game, with no actors, only real victims. Survival is not for the creative or talented, but for those who can survive the next shelling or get a food box on time without being killed for taking one extra step. Thus, aid becomes a tool of control, hunger becomes a weapon of war, and staying alive becomes an act of resistance in itself.

On Power and Violence

This scene redefines the relationship between "authority" as a party practicing violence, and the "individual" as a target of that violence, extending beyond military violence to symbolic violence, as articulated in Pierre Bourdieu's analysis, where dominance is practiced not only through bombing and killing but through shaping people's perceptions of themselves as numbers or expendable beings.

At the same time, the events in Gaza evoke Michel Foucault's concepts of "biopolitics," as the lives of Palestinians are managed through indicators of food consumption, levels of obedience, and submission to external schedules controlled by the occupation, as if they were in a large experimental laboratory, where Palestinians in the Gaza Strip move from one experimental scenario to another according to the decisions made by policymakers in Tel Aviv and Washington.

This pattern can be understood from a security perspective as an applied behavior of "controlled terror strategy," where violence is used to regulate crowds, not to deter enemies. Soldiers were instructed with graduated orders: first fire in the air, then at the legs, then at the upper body if "crowds exceed the defined limit." The problem here is that this "limit" is undefined, making every civilian a target.

Psychologically, the residents of Gaza are experiencing something akin to collective post-traumatic disorder; the scene of bread is associated with terror, and heading to aid points has become an experimental experience of death. Many families have started to avoid going out altogether to avoid the scene. This psychological pattern is very similar to what has been observed in cases of prisoners or refugees in war camps in Bosnia and Syria, where fear of the system becomes a central element of daily life.

Between Production, Care, and Complicity

What darkens the scene further is the role of international actors, headed by the United States, which provides food aid with one hand while arming the occupation with the other. American "aid" is sometimes presented as a political cover to evade moral responsibility and is used as a means to control the paths of movement and local influence through militias or proxies. It is a tool that reshapes the scene of conflict according to the rules of the new game, where the prize is just a food box representing today's sustenance; provided they comply with orders; and should Palestinians violate them, they face public execution by sniper fire from stationed marksmen around the aid area or from occupying tanks.

Just like in Squid Game, where hope for life is presented through mechanisms of submission rather than entitlements, the poor are driven to compete and kill for survival. This leads to fundamental questions about the ethics of humanitarian work. There is no meaning in distributing flour if the planes funded by the same entity sending the flour are the ones also monitoring civilians and shooting at them. There is no meaning in humanitarian conferences if they remain silent about the siege, justify the bombardment, or transform civilians into mere elements within a statistical equation comparing the volume of aid that entered with the number of corpses that exited, under the silence of spectators and bets or gambles from politicians and military men.

The most dangerous aspect of what is happening in Gaza is that it is no longer classified as a "humanitarian failure"; it has transformed into a geometric system of dominance, in which aid is used as a weapon, and people are deprived of it or are shelled on their way to it. With the continuation of this model, a new mechanism of war takes shape: a war without fighting, yet with casualties; a war where hunger is a trap, aid is a bullet, and death is not an exception but part of the design.