In recent years, corporate consulting firms have been involved in decisions related to humanitarian action. While such engagement has been represented as designed to achieve efficiency, it has also led to fundamental concerns about whether these firms can advance humanitarian objectives effectively, even more so when they have no expertise in emergency relief.
Such worries were confirmed in June, when it was revealed that Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world’s leading consulting firms, played a key role in designing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a U.S.- and Israeli-backed organization created to distribute food and aid to Palestinians in Gaza. At first, U.S. officials hailed the foundation as providing necessary relief for Palestinians, especially after a three-month Israeli blockade. They portrayed GHF as a centralized, streamlined solution to the aid crisis. However, it soon became clear that the foundation’s goals and methods were deeply flawed and dangerously inhumane.
United Nations agencies condemned the GHF’s aid system, with the UN secretary general, Antonio Gutteres, calling it “inherently unsafe.” From the beginning, BCG’s role went beyond consulting on the project. The firm also proposed “relocation packages,” worth approximately $9,000 per person, to encourage the voluntary emigration of over 500,000 Palestinians from Gaza. What had initially been branded as an aid plan, seemed to be facilitating, essentially, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This proposal for supposedly voluntary relocation also sought to undermine the humanitarian efforts of the UN, particularly of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, by replacing care with an agenda of population transfer. BCG had even pitched different models for Gaza to the UN before pivoting to GHF.
GHF’s incentive to co-opt and monopolize the humanitarian aid space in Gaza was extensively calculated. According to the Washington Post, a network of private companies and non-profits were involved in the GHF project, alongside the Trump administration, which invested $30 million in the operations. Specifically, Orbis Operations, a private security contractor and subsidiary of the private equity firm McNally Capital, helped set up GHF. At the same time, McNally Capital is the beneficiary of a Wyoming-based trust that owns Safe Reach Solutions, which oversees GHF’s operations in Gaza. BCG was brought in to this convoluted arrangement by Orbis, until it withdrew amid the growing controversy surrounding the GHF scheme.
GHF has carried out its operations by establishing only four distribution sites for aid to more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza. However, these sites quickly became flashpoints for violence. Since May, Palestinians have been killed while trying to access food, many near GHF sites. Videos have shown Israeli soldiers pepper-spraying desperate, starving civilians, including women and children, simply for trying to survive. Over 1,000 people have been killed while attempting to get food from the GHF distribution points, making these not places of assistance, but traps to kill civilians.
Despite BCG’s withdrawal from the project and the resignation of two senior executives, the firm’s extensive involvement in GHF’s establishment and in shaping the foundation’s model for relocating Palestinians raised serious questions: Why was a consulting firm brought in to participate in addressing a major crisis for which it was unprepared? Consulting firms such as BCG prioritize profit and efficiency, which is hardly ideal when navigating the moral and political complexities of a situation like that in Gaza. Such an approach tends to downplay the history and humanity of the communities one claims to be helping. However, perhaps the real question is not whether consulting firms such as BCG are capable of handling humanitarian crises, but whether they should be allowed to shape aid-related frameworks in the first place.
BCG’s partnership with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), a non-profit organization founded by the former British prime minister, shed light on a more troubling logic behind their model. Together, they developed a vision for Gaza as a commercial hub after the war. Internal documents estimated that relocating the Palestinians could cost $5 billion, but claimed that removing people from the area would save $23,000 per departing Palestinian. This meant that money could be made by having more Palestinians leave Gaza. While TBI was involved in the process, it denied preparing or endorsing a slide deck in which the postwar plan for Gaza was presented, which was prepared by BCG and involved Israeli businessmen.
More chilling is the disregard these companies and non-profits have had for the impact of their work on the Palestinians themselves. The terrible situation on the ground illustrates why. Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. special forces officer who worked for GHF in Gaza, accused Israeli troops and international contractors of using “indiscriminate and unnecessary force” against unarmed, starving civilians. Aguilar described the GHF mission as “amateur” and “criminal,” charges the foundation tried to rebut by labeling him a “disgruntled former contractor.”
Ultimately, BCG’s involvement went beyond a failure of judgement and pointed to a deeper problem in outsourcing humanitarian responsibilities to firms designed to prioritize profit and efficiency over empathy. While BCG stepped away from the GHF project, its withdrawal did not absolve it of responsibility. When humanitarian planning is left to private companies, the results can be disastrous. GHF’s experience proves this. However, they might also do great damage to the companies themselves. Israel is responsible for a horrific loss of life in Gaza, over 60,000 deaths according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, and has engaged in the massive destruction of the territory and all aspects of its infrastructure. For many observers, there has been a specific objective behind all this: to make Gaza unlivable and force the population to leave. Ethnic cleansing can be considered a war crime and a crime against humanity, so that when BCG proposed “voluntary” departures from Gaza, many would have regarded this as helping to fulfill Israel’s plan, making the firm potentially complicit in Israeli crimes and opening it up to legal ramifications. BCG’s realization of the risks may have been a reason for why the firm withdrew from the project.
The GHF’s highly criticized role in providing aid to Gaza, like the participation of private equity firms, consulting firms, and non-profits in this failed experiment, should force a rethinking in all these domain to determine where organizations should a draw a moral red line. War zones are complicated places of contestation, where the demands of profit, efficiency, and control usually have profound repercussions on the lives of populations. Only those institutions qualified to deal in such settings should involve themselves in trying to find solutions to their problems.
