Introduction:

On social media, Palestinians risk everything to livestream their own destruction. Phones held up in Gaza broadcast homes turned to rubble, children rescued from dust, and the sounds of warplanes overhead. However, Meta Platforms throttle, silence, or erase these livestreams. Moreover, officials tell the world that humanitarian aid is coming, that the global community is responding, while the Israeli government holds up convoys, blocks trucks at the border, and lets supplies rot or be diverted. As a result, Palestinians livestream genocide while the promised lifeline never arrives.

Meanwhile, in Sudan, armed RSF militias drive women to mass suicide, forcing them to choose death over the certainty of sexual violence. These militias abduct children and sell them into slavery, treating their lives as commodities. Instead of isolated tragedies, these patterns reveal systemic violence in a world where “humanitarian aid” is absent, withheld, or weaponised.

At first glance, many people imagine humanitarian aid as compassion in action—neutral, benevolent, and offered as a lifeline in the face of disaster. The term evokes convoys of food, medical supplies, clean water, blankets, and the comforting belief that the world does not abandon the vulnerable. In reality, aid is rarely neutral. It is conditional, surveillance, and political.

Furthermore, state-backed NGOs and international institutions often step into crises not to dis- mantle the systems causing dispossession but to manage them instead. The very governments that fund these organisations are often the same ones arming occupations and waging wars. Aid becomes another theatre of control, one that sorts people into categories of “deserving and “undeserving,” keeping survival contingent on donor approval and international optics.

Ultimately, this system produces double violence. First, occupying forces displace, starve, assault, and enslave communities. Then, when survivors turn to the world for help, aid systems track, catalogue, and discipline them. Survivors must prove their suffering in donor-friendly terms; their dignity shrinks into line items on an accountability report. Therefore, humanitarian relief often enforces “chronic temporariness”—a perpetual state of limbo that keeps people alive but never free. In contrast, out of this machinery of harm, something different emerges: mutual aid. When institutions abandon them, people turn to one another. Palestinians reaching out via social media, risking their dignity in capitalist platforms, prompt many in the US and Europe to start crowdfunding on their behalf through platforms such as GoFundMe or Chuffed. Likewise, in Sudan, volunteers deliver food where aid agencies retreat. In Congo, communities build survival networks against centuries of extraction. These are not acts of charity but of solidarity. Mutual aid is survival work that refuses the hierarchies of donor and recipient. It restores the redistributive ethic that state-run charities and global NGOs have hollowed out.

Against this evidence, this essay traces how humanitarian aid has become a tool of empire; how Palestinians, Sudanese, and Congolese expose its failures; how the states co-opted Islam’s zakat and sadaqah into bureaucratic spectacle; and why mutual aid matters as the humane alternative. To understand this fully, we must set aside the comforting myth of aid as compassion and recognise instead the systems of power it sustains.