Throughout the war in Gaza, U.N. agencies and experienced aid groups have overseen the distribution of food aid in the territory. Now, Israel is set to transfer that responsibility to a handful of newly formed private organizations with obscure histories and unknown financial backers.
Supporters of the project describe it as an independent and neutral initiative run mainly by American contractors. The main group providing security is run by Philip F. Reilly, a former senior C.I.A. officer, and a fund-raising group is headed by Jake Wood, a former U.S. Marine, who said in an interview that the system would be phased in soon.
Announcing the arrangement in early May, Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said it was “wholly inaccurate” to call it “an Israeli plan.”
But the project is an Israeli brainchild, first proposed by Israeli officials in the earliest weeks of the war, according to Israeli officials, people involved in the initiative and others familiar with its conception, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak more freely of the initiative.
The New York Times found that the broad contours of the plan were first discussed in late 2023, at private meetings of like-minded officials, military officers and business people with close ties to the Israeli government.
The group called itself the Mikveh Yisrael Forum, after a college where members convened in December 2023. Its leading figures gradually settled on the idea of hiring private contractors to distribute food in Gaza, circumventing the United Nations. Throughout 2024, they then fostered support among Israel’s political leaders and some military commanders, and began to develop it with foreign contractors, principally Mr. Reilly.
The plan was designed to undermine Hamas’s control of Gaza, prevent food from falling into militants’ hands or the black market, and bypass the United Nations, which Israeli officials do not trust and have accused of anti-Israeli bias. Israeli officials argued, too, that their plan would move distribution out of chaotic and lawless areas into zones under Israeli military control.
U.N. officials pushed back, contends that the plan would restrict food aid to limited parts of Gaza, and warning that it could endanger civilians by forcing them to walk for miles, across Israeli military lines, to reach food. The U.N. also warns that the system could facilitate an Israeli plan to displace civilians out of northern Gaza, since the initial distribution sites would only be in the south.
Under the new plan, Mr. Reilly’s group, Safe Reach Solutions, and other security firms would initially secure four distribution sites in parts of southern Gaza under Israeli military control, Mr. Wood said. His nonprofit, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, will finance the arrangement, which would gradually replace a U.N.-run system in which civilians collect food from hundreds of places across Gaza.
Mr. Wood, the foundation’s executive director, said in an interview that the system is “imperfect,” but added, “The reality is, any food that is getting into Gaza today is more food than got into Gaza yesterday.”
He said his foundation had been endowed with “the necessary autonomy to operate independently,” and that it had no funding from Israel. As an example, he said he had pushed for new sites to be built in the north, and added, “I would participate in no plan in any capacity if it was an extension of an I.D.F. plan or an Israeli government plan to forcibly dislocate people anywhere within Gaza.”
The project’s genesis was in the chaotic aftermath of Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, when hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians rejoined the military as reservists, many of them reaching positions of influence.
That process created a huge cohort of Israelis with one foot in the military and another in civilian life, blurring the boundary between the two worlds. It fostered unlikely connections and conversations between career officers and influential part-timers, as well as their business associates.
An informal network formed among like-minded officials, officers, reservists and business people who believed the Israeli military and government lacked a strategy for the future of Gaza — and set out to develop one themselves.
That group, some of the people interviewed for this article said, included Yotam HaCohen, a strategic consultant who joined COGAT, the military department that oversees aid delivery to Gaza; Liran Tancman, a well-connected tech investor who also joined COGAT; and Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli-American venture capitalist who remained outside the military.
Mr. HaCohen soon became an assistant to Brig. Gen. Roman Goffman, a senior COGAT commander who is now the prime minister’s military adviser.
In December 2023, Mr. HaCohen, Mr. Tancman and Mr. Eisenberg helped lead a brainstorming session with both officials and influential civilians at the college near Tel Aviv, according to people with knowledge of it. Its members would later meet in other venues, including Mr. Eisenberg’s Jerusalem home.
Mr. Eisenberg confirmed he had joined meetings about these ideas with both Israeli officials and private individuals but said in a statement that so many people, including U.S. officials, had been involved that “it is hard to know exactly how this all emerged.” A representative for Mr. HaCohen’s and Mr. Tancman’s group declined to comment.
At the meetings, people familiar with them said, the group discussed how difficult it would be to defeat Hamas through military force alone, and sought ways of undermining Hamas’s control of Gaza’s civilians, including through aid.
Group members promoted the idea of distributing aid from pockets of territory occupied by the Israeli military and out of Hamas’s reach. The Israelis wanted to circumvent the United Nations, but did not want Israel to take on the responsibility of caring for Gaza’s roughly two million residents. As time went on, they settled on the idea of private contractors managing food distribution, the people familiar with the meetings said.
Writing in a journal published by the Israeli military last July, Mr. HaCohen proposed a version of the plan now set to be implemented.
“To meet the war’s goals over the long term, Israel needs to develop tools that will pull the rug out from under the Hamas movement and not just (temporarily) dismantle the Hamas government,” Mr. HaCohen wrote. “Pulling the rug out will come once Israel begins to work directly with the civilian population, manages the distribution of aid itself, and begins to take responsibility for building the ‘day-after.’”
Lamenting how Israel was “at the mercy” of traditional aid agencies, Mr. HaCohen said that “non-state contractor companies must be employed” to enact the plan, including private, non-Israeli contractors “in the areas of security, aid and services.” He added that he had developed these ideas while serving as General Goffman’s assistant, and thanked Mr. Tancman and the Mikveh Yisrael Forum for their help.
By this time, Israeli officials, including Mr. HaCohen and Mr. Tancman, had begun meeting with Mr. Reilly and promoting him to Israel’s military and political leadership, some of the people familiar with the meetings said. Other private contractors pitched their services, but the former C.I.A. officer gradually emerged as Israel’s preferred partner.
In a brief interview, Mr. Reilly said he began to discuss Gaza aid with Israeli civilians in early 2024, and confirmed meeting Mr. Eisenberg and Mr. Tancman later in the year.
As a young C.I.A. operative in the 1980s, Mr. Reilly had helped to train the Contras, right-wing militias fighting Nicaragua’s Marxist government, according to a 2022 podcast interview. Two decades later, he was one of the first U.S. agents to land in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the interview. He became the C.I.A. station chief in Kabul, then left to work as a private security expert for groups including Orbis, a Virginia-based consulting firm.
It was in this capacity that Mr. Reilly liaised with Israeli military and intelligence officials to develop new models for food distribution in Gaza, according to a document produced by Orbis. In late 2024, while working for Orbis, Mr. Reilly worked on a study that outlined a more detailed version of the plan to outsource food aid delivery to private companies and foundations, according to the document.
Last November, Mr. Reilly’s representatives registered two such entities in the United States, S.R.S. and G.H.F., according to two people familiar with the move.
S.R.S. began to operate in Gaza in January 2025, with Mr. Reilly as chief executive. During a cease-fire that ran from January until March, the firm’s contractors staffed a central Gaza checkpoint that screened Palestinian cars for weapons. In a statement, S.R.S. said it had no Israeli shareholders or interests. Still, the effort was seen in Israel as a small-scale trial for a future security model that could be rolled out more widely.
Mr. Wood said S.R.S. is now the main security company chosen to secure the food distribution sites in southern Gaza, essentially implementing the ideas articulated by Mr. HaCohen and Mr. Reilly.
Mr. Wood said the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a nonprofit organization that will hire S.R.S. and raise the money to pay for its operations.
The foundation now operates at “arm’s length” from S.R.S., said Mr. Wood. But one lawyer, James H. Cundiff, registered both organizations in the United States, and until this month the two groups shared the same spokeswoman. Mr. Cundiff did not reply to requests for comment.
At least two other groups named the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation have been registered, one in the United States and another in Switzerland. A spokesman for Mr. Wood’s foundation said that one established in February in Delaware was his.
It is unclear who is financing the foundation’s enormous aid operation, which aims to pay for food for roughly 1 million people, roughly half of Gaza’s population. It would also involve roughly one thousand armed security guards, according to the Orbis document.
Mr. Wood said that the foundation had received a small amount of seed funding from non-Israeli businessmen, but declined to name them or the people had appointed him.
Later, the foundation said in a statement that a Western European country had donated over $100 million for its future operations, but declined to name the country
.
Johnatan Reiss and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting. Jack Begg contributed research.
Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv.
Natan Odenheimer is a Times reporter in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.
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