The Famine in Gaza Was Made in the USA

You’re right to locate the genesis of the GHF in that broader environment around Trump. That is where, over the course of decades, a hardline pro-Israeli narrative has tried to undercut the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which has been the backbone of humanitarian aid for Palestinians during this war. It has been essential for them across the diaspora and in Gaza for years.

But there has been such a wellspring of hatred and often deceptive descriptions of UNRWA and the UN more broadly. You see the claim that the UN as a whole is poisoned against Israel, and humanitarian organizations working with the UN are then implicated. That narrative in the right-wing ecosystem here in the United States is now at an all-time high. It was already there prior to October 7.

As US officials failed to effectively counter it by saying, “look, we’ve probed UNRWA, independent investigations have looked at UNRWA, we’ve worked with them — this is not a branch of Hamas,” that failure led to the undermining of the professional humanitarian aid system, which knows how to get aid to people effectively and without aid seekers being killed en masse.

The system was clearly on the chopping block by the time the Trump administration took office. There was a slashing of global humanitarian funding right at the start of Trump’s term. But when it came to Israel-Palestine, there was a sense that here was the opportunity to finally root out this apparatus that they hated.

It was too tempting for people in the Trump ecosystem, by which I mean many Christian Zionists and some hardline pro-Israel voices in congress. They found it so appealing to say, “we can just replace this root and branch and build something different.” It’s clear that “different” has not translated to “better.”

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation emerged from discussions among Israeli officials, academics, some US veterans and security contractors who remain involved (particularly a company called Safe Reach Solutions), and the US consulting conglomerate, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which has now abandoned and disavowed the project.

As this scheme evolved, there was a surreal and chilling sense, when you’re talking about human lives, that they thought they could find some tech-based, non-governmental, non-NGO solution that would work. Based on my reporting, I haven’t found evidence of deliberate fostering of the scheme by the Trump administration, but the people who wanted to see it instituted found the administration to be happy customers.

Once it was unveiled in May, the US government, having initially said, “we aren’t necessarily involved in this,” very quickly became the first major donor to the GHF. The executive chairman Johnnie Moore has been close to the Trump movement going back to 2016, before many other Republicans and evangelicals were willing to embrace Trump. They’ve brought him in and he continues to be a spokesperson, but he’s not an aid expert. His chief role is to be an American voice and face for this deeply controversial program.

The US role has been enabling continued mass death among Palestinians, including by malnutrition and dehydration at the extreme and accelerating rates we are now seeing. But there is still so much focus on PR and spin. Almost two years into this conflict, you still have the idea that if Israel can just tell a better story, it will look a little better and a little different.

Part of that has involved asking, “how do we remove these independent aid operators?” You see UN officials and now EU officials having visas denied and being told they can’t visit Gaza. Of course, foreign journalists have not been let in unsupervised for the whole duration of this war. Then on the flip side, you have the GHF saying, “we’re giving people food, we’re delivering tens of thousands of items and ingredients daily — how dare you say we’re not helping?”

The GHF, of course, roundly rejects the idea that its forces and the troops defending it are deliberately targeting Palestinians and often denies killings took place, even though hospital workers and family members can identify where their relatives were killed. There have been not just shootings, but also air strikes at these locations.

There’s such a strong desire to avoid engaging with the reality of the Palestinian experience, which at this point is famine and what one doctor described to me as “auto-digesting.” Children’s bodies are eating themselves in Gaza because of choices over aid.

Brett McGurk is the architect for much of what the United States has done in relation to the Gaza war. Recently he put out a piece through CNN talking about what Israel should be doing differently and framing it in terms of how Israel can be seen as a benevolent party. The focus remains perception rather than saving human lives.