London – The controversial U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose operations got off to a chaotic start this week in the war-torn Palestinian territory, says it is winding down its Swiss operation after three months. The move comes as Swiss authorities said GHF was breaching rules for foundations registered in that country. GHF told CBS News that moving forward, its only operations would be based out of the United States.
The legal complication for GHF in Switzerland emerged as the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said one Palestinian was killed and 47 others were wounded when Israeli forces fired shots as people were seeking food at one of its aid distribution hubs in southern Gaza on Tuesday. The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement Tuesday that troops had only fired “warning shots” to restore order at the site. GHF later said in a statement that “no shots were fired at Palestinian crowds” and “there were no casualties.” Some injured Palestinians could be seen in video footage of the incident verified by CBS News Confirmed, which showed hundreds of people around the distribution center.
Little has been made public about GHF, including who funds it. CBS News has been told by one source that GHF has employed at least 300 American contractors, all heavily armed, who have been given “as much ammunition as they can carry.”
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said, according to a document obtained by CBS News that appears to have been written by the group, that it was registering in both Delaware and Geneva, Switzerland. The Swiss “affiliate” was established in order to “address donors who would prefer to participate outside of the U.S. structure,” the document says.
“The Swiss GHF Board and Executive team will closely mirror that of the U.S. GHF and will adhere to the same principles, mission and values,” says the document.
A separate document seeking to register the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Switzerland, dated Jan. 31, 2025, was published as part of the country’s commercial register. The foundation is shown as being registered from Feb. 12.
According to the Swiss registration document, “the foundation pursues exclusively charitable and philanthropic objectives for the benefit of people in need of support for material, psychological or health reasons, and more specifically to provide humanitarian aid to those affected by the conflict in the Gaza Strip, including the secure provision of food, water, medicine, shelter and reconstruction.”
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It lists three individuals as leaders of the Swiss foundation: David Papazian, who the document says is from Armenia but based in the U.K.; Lolk Samuel Marcel Henderson, an American in Arlington, Virginia; and David Kohler, from Switzerland.
Subsequent documents, dated May 19 and May 23 respectively, announced the removal of Swiss national Kohler from the board of the foundation, and then the end of Swiss accounting firm OGH Expertises Comptables et Fiscales SA’s role as an auditor of the foundation.
Switzerland’s Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations, known as the ESA, told CBS News on Wednesday that, according to its assessment, the Swiss branch of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is “currently not fulfilling various legal obligations,” in the country.
The ESA said the aid group’s Swiss branch does not have the required signatory member of its board resident in Switzerland, that it doesn’t have the minimum three board members required by Swiss statutes, and that it did not appear to have a Swiss bank account, a valid Swiss address, or an auditor — all of which are requirements for foundations like GHF which are registered in the country.
“Based on this information, the ESA assumes that the Swiss foundation has not yet commenced its activities and is therefore inactive,” the authority told CBS News. “The ESA has informed the foundation of its legal requirements and requested that it clarify the situation. The necessary clarifications are currently under way.”
A Swiss non-governmental watchdog organization, TRIAL International, said it had filed two legal submissions to the Swiss government on May 20 and 21, with the Federal Supervisory Authority for Foundations and the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, seeking to assess GHF’s compliance with the Swiss legal system, as well as with Switzerland’s Federal Act on Private Security Services Provided Abroad.
The legal submissions were “intended to urgently remedy potential breaches by the GHF of various rules of national and international law, in particular concerning ‘private security services’ within the framework of the foundation’s activities, such as the militarized security of distribution points and the control of individuals,” the NGO said in a statement.
Switzerland “has a moral but also a particular legal obligation to make sure that entities operating from its territory, themselves, respect the Geneva Conventions. That’s enshrined in the first article of the Geneva Conventions,” TRIAL International director Philip Grant told CBS News.
“So we just wanted to understand what they did” through the Swiss entity, he said.
Grant said it was unclear how much GHF activity had actually taken place in Geneva, which was part of the motivation for his group’s submissions. It was also looking to find out whether GHF had requested and received necessary approvals to engage private military services, the use of which is tightly regulated under Swiss law for organizations registered in the country.
In response to CBS News’ request for clarity, GHF said Wednesday that “the only GHF entity that is in use today is the foundation established in the United States by Loik Henderson in February 2025. That is the only entity through which GHF is operating and will operate moving forward. Swiss entity was created as a contingency; is not operational; and is being wound down.”
James Smith, a doctor who has worked inside Gaza, told CBS News that both the presence of armed contractors at aid distribution centers and the locations of GHF’s hubs in the south of Gaza raise red flags for humanitarian workers. He said the location of the hubs could potentially serve as a way to forcibly displace the population of Gaza to the south of the Strip.
“They are undignified. They are inhumane. We’ve seen people being corralled into cages in the baking heat,” Smith said.
Smith pointed out concerns raised by the United Nations, which has declined to work with the organization, about the methods of GHF and even “some of the people that, until the last couple of days, worked for GHF and have since resigned, saying that they cannot adhere to the humanitarian principles if they continue to work for this entity.”
“The risks posed by armed military actors, particularly those who are parties to a conflict, also providing humanitarian assistance should be and has been roundly condemned and is not something that any reputable humanitarian organization, academic of humanitarianism or humanitarian practitioner should ever support,” Smith said.
contributed to this report.
