Five Lessons Learned Along the Way to 187 Million Meals
GHF Executive Director John Acree writes in Real Clear World about how the lessons of GHF’s successful model, which provided 187 million meals in Gaza, have created the needed framework for the next crisis.
Read his reflections below:
“The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation concluded its emergency food delivery operations last month after delivering more than 187 million free meals directly to civilians in Gaza during five months of operations.
Our mission was always temporary. We built an immediate food delivery model that met the needs of a hungry and desperate Gazan population. We worked to meet the needs of the moment, and worked every day towards expanding our scale to reach as many families as possible. We delivered when the United Nations’ supported legacy systems stalled. We are hopeful that others will continue the critical long-term work of establishing food security in Gaza.
What follows are some of the challenges and lessons learned and shaped by the men, women, and children who came through our sites each day and by the humanitarian professionals, local Gazans, American veterans, and medical teams who served them. Humanitarian crises like this will happen again, and the international community will be required to adapt and realize that the nuances of war will always create seemingly insurmountable challenges to be resolved, not rebuffed.
This is not the place for an all inclusive list of what went right and wrong during our operations. I do hope it provides some information to the thoughtful as we move forward in Gaza and to other crisis responses underway around the world.
The most challenging aspect of our operation, and interestingly enough, the one that drew the most ire from our detractors, was that in order to deliver free food to as many Gazans as possible in a war zone and under the operational supervision of the Israeli government, we had to devise a different delivery method. We had to adapt.
The largest takeaway from our success is that adaptability must be prioritized against outdated practices and bureaucratic discretion. Much of the global humanitarian delivery systems are designed around the context of slow onset or long-standing emergencies, which was the case in Gaza prior to the war overseen by an enervated humanitarian response infrastructure directed by the United Nations and larger international non-governmental organizations.
Gaza’s conditions in May of 2025 demanded emergency decisions and delivery paradigm shifts unencumbered by political dogma and funding channels lacking financial accountability. The United Nations and their implementing partners chose not to adapt, and then to actually fight adaptation.
We also soon learned how adaptation could become dependable practices. We adjusted crowd flow, site layouts, and distribution timing based on real conditions on the ground instead of by remote directives. We created dedicated lanes for women and children and built schedules that lowered desperation and improved safety. While 92 percent of the United Nations’ aid flows were diverted through looting or interference by Hamas, our team built a model designed specifically to avoid that outcome, and it worked. We did not lose shipments. During our operational lifetime, every truck loaded for distribution sites reached its destination with zero losses. Not one of our trucks was looted.
Due to operational and access restrictions, we operated four distribution sites instead of the sixteen we originally envisioned. Any additional site required approval from the Government of Israel. While our vision was never fully realized, we constantly innovated our approach to try to minimize limitations and restrictions, including a proposed community distribution pilot program to increase community access to food and a pre-distribution registration system to increase distributions for females and the disadvantaged.
These were practical adjustments, not theoretical ones, and they delivered results. Future responses must prioritize flexibility over rigid procedure or institutional delays.
The second lesson is that safety and dignity begin with intentional distributions designed to consider women and youth. Too often, these populations are treated as a category of vulnerability rather than as an integrated part of humanitarian planning. We adapted our deliveries to secure and include specific means to serve this population.
Women told us where and when they felt unsafe, how they were treated by a desperate population, how crowds were behaving, and what food delivery times were feasible for them and their families.They asked for fresh produce and we were able to distribute potatoes and onions. Given the food insecurity of the population, particularly children, we partnered with Samaritan’s Purse and together distributed 1.1 million packets of Ready to Use Supplementary Food. Samaritan’s Purse also provided medical teams to provide care for pregnant women and infants at our sites because they told us they were unable to reach distant health clinics.
Humanitarian systems worldwide should treat women, youth and child populations as an organizing principle, not an afterthought.
Thirdly, each day in Gaza taught us that genuine collaboration requires shared risk, not gatekeeping by legacy systems. We repeatedly pleaded for UN agencies to merge their massive aid pipelines with our secure, diversion-free distribution network. Had they done so, the humanitarian impact could have been dramatically larger. Instead, longstanding habits of control and hierarchy prevailed, and civilians suffered the consequences.
We instead found successful partnerships with the people closest to the crisis: our local Gazan workers and we are incredibly grateful they valued impact over institution.
Our local Gazan staff were the backbone of everything we accomplished. They showed extraordinary courage, working every day in dangerous conditions to feed the people who needed it most. We lost twelve of them during this mission, murdered by Hamas militia, a tragedy that underscores both their sacrifice and the risks they accepted to help their fellow citizens. Thanks to their insights and commitment, our sites turned into places where people could gather safely and enjoy even for a fleeting moment, the sense of community again.
The fourth major lesson concerns the information environment that shaped global perceptions of this conflict. Far too many mainstream outlets and organizations relied on unverified casualty figures and incident reports from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. Under pressure to publish quickly, they repeated claims without adequate sourcing because they were either not on the ground or receiving intentionally selective and hostile information.
More than once, mainstream stories about GHF were released without our knowledge or requests for comment including casualty or violent incident numbers falsely linked to our sites, incidents we could disprove with firsthand testimonies, data, and video footage. This hostile media bias created the need to divert resources to counter messaging rather than to more urgent needs, such as feeding Gazans.
We understand that war zones are complex and dangerous reporting environments, but accuracy matters, especially under the conditions of extreme propaganda on both sides of a conflict. Amplifying hearsay and relying on single source information caused several reputable news organizations to retract, correct or apologize publicly for reporting information that was not only inaccurate, but in some cases completely false and harmful to Gazans. Humanitarian actors should be held accountable, but not forced to combat misinformation campaigns while feeding desperate families and journalists should know better than to rely on single sources or highly politicized narratives and violence promoting agendas.
Finally, this mission reminded us why humanitarian work exists in the first place. The families who came through our sites each day showed a resilience that no statistic can capture.
While much of the world saw GHF only through the lens of critical headlines, we saw a different reality on the ground: children and youth laughing as they traded friendship bracelets with our staff, mothers thanking America for showing up for them, and families finding small pockets of calm inside our sites. What stays with me is the people themselves; their dignity, resilience, and hope for a peaceful homeland is why humanitarianism matters, and why we must make it work better.
Our mission is complete for now, but the next crisis will demand new thinking, genuine collaboration, and the courage to challenge systems that have been failing for too long. Governments, NGOs, donors, journalists, and field teams all share that responsibility. The humanitarian sector will not be ready for what comes next unless it is willing to rethink long-standing assumptions.
If we do not adapt, we will not change, and that would be the true tragedy for those in need.”
Click Here to View GHF’s Impact Report on Gaza Aid Operations
Learn more about GHF’s operations in Gaza at ghf.org
###