loading . . . On the same day Gaza health officials reported that at least 20 Palestinians died of malnutrition in the Strip’s hospitals over the past two days, the American official in charge of delivering food amid Israel’s restriction of aid declared his program a success.
“We’ve been filling a massive gap in a way that’s direct to the people, that prioritizes the security of the situation in this very complex environment,” said Johnnie Moore, the chair of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, on Tuesday during an event hosted by the American Jewish Congress and joined**** by the World Zionist Organization. “And despite what you may read in the press and the criticism that you hear from the United Nations and other institutions, what we’re doing has actually been unbelievably effective.”
As Palestinians continue to starve to death in Gaza, Moore, an evangelical minister and former religious adviser to the Trump administration, has spent the past several weeks defending his organization’s work. He’s appeared on mainstream TV news outlets and in interviews with pro-Israel podcasts. He and his foundation have messaged in lockstep with the Israeli government, as both cast blame on Hamas officials and the international community for a famine of Israel’s creation.
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Israel has blockaded humanitarian aid from entering Gaza since March, when the Israeli government acknowledged it was weaponizing hunger to pressure Hamas into total disarmament — a plan that even U.S. officials have said is untenable. When the GHF took over aid distribution in the Strip in late May, Israeli troops began routinely opening fire on starving Palestinians waiting for food. As of this week, Israeli troops have shot and killed more than 1,000 people trying to get food: 766 near GHF aid sites, and 288 near aid convoys run by the United Nations and other organizations, according to the U.N.
Moore repeatedly blamed the U.N. for choosing “politics … over the needs of these people,” during Tuesday’s event. He claimed the U.N had failed to deliver “thousands upon thousands of pallets” of aid already inside Gaza. The Israeli government has made the same argument in recent weeks, releasing video and photos of supposedly dormant stockpiles to advance a narrative that the U.N.-led system is broken.
A GHF spokesperson echoed Moore’s comments in a statement to The Intercept.
“The false and exaggerated statistics from the UN seem to come directly from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry. The deadliest attacks on aid distribution in Gaza since late May have been linked to UN convoys. That is a fact,” the spokesperson wrote. “The truth is violence is around all aid efforts and instead of hurling insults from the sidelines, the UN needs to get in the game and start delivering aid.”
On Wednesday, GHF publicly requested permission to take over delivery of U.N. aid in Gaza. The Israeli government and GHF have long alleged the U.N. system allowed for Hamas to steal and enrich itself with aid intended for Palestinian civilians. Moore claimed Tuesday that Hamas would use aid to “recruit fighters” and would sell the aid in “the black market to make money.”
“It’s shocking to imagine that’s being said with a straight face,” said Mara Kronenfeld, executive director of UNRWA USA, referring to Moore’s statements. “This is a narrative that does not at all match the reality and is a very cynical and dark narrative, given how bad the reality is.”
Outside of reports that rely solely on anonymous Israeli intelligence sources, such as a recent Washington Post article that alleged Hamas seized 15 percent of goods for its own use, there has been no evidence of widespread theft of aid by Hamas. An aid audit recognized Hamas had been using some aid for revenue, but showed that only 1 percent of aid had been lost to theft. While the Israeli government publicly cried foul about such theft as far back as early 2024, Israeli officials failed to provide evidence of such allegations during confidential briefings with U.S. officials.
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### Israeli Soldiers Killed at Least 410 People at Food Aid Sites in Gaza This Month
Despite news reports like the Haaretz investigation in June that Israeli soldiers have been ordered to shoot at unarmed Palestinians waiting for aid, or the July Associated Press story revealing that American contractors guarding the GHF aid sites had fired live ammunition, stun grenades, and tear gas at aid-seeking Palestinians, GHF markets itself as a safer alternative to U.N.-run aid sites.
“We exist so people live,” Moore said during the Tuesday event, while dismissing such reports. “We don’t want a single person to be hurt and certainly not killed trying to seek food. And we do everything in our power to make sure that that doesn’t happen. But the way the world is responding to this challenge, this terrible challenge, in the middle of a war is making the situation worse rather than helping solve the issue.”
He called reports to the contrary a “flood of misinformation.” Addressing the chaotic images of desperate Palestinians frantically rushing to sift through boxes of food at its aid sites, Moore said the GHF model is “far more orderly than” that of the U.N.-led World Food Programme, and said it only appears disorderly to “the untrained eye.”
> “What they are missing is these are human beings.”
“The idea that this is the way you do aid, and only a ‘trained eye’ could see that, would be true if we were talking about corralling animals into such settings,” Kronenfeld said, adding that the U.N. operated 400 aid sites throughout the Strip to broaden the reach of aid and to prevent such chaotic scenes. “What they are missing is these are human beings, and the kinds of scenes we are seeing are not fit for human beings, let alone people who’ve been suffering for 21 months.”
GHF has claimed it has delivered nearly 89 million meals in Gaza since it began operations. Moore said a new community distribution model has been “incredibly successful in getting food more deeply into the Gaza Strip.”
## Related
### Our Reporter Got Into Gaza. He Witnessed a Famine of Israel’s Making.
But in the months since GHF took over aid distribution in Gaza, hospitals in the Strip have reported sharp increases in malnutrition cases. Doctors Without Borders said among its patients with severe or moderate malnutrition include 700 pregnant and breastfeeding women and nearly 500 children. Aid workers and journalists have also begun to report experiencing severe hunger, including one photographer with Agence France-Presse who quit after he said he was too weak to work.
In a letter released Wednesday, more than 100 humanitarian aid organizations urged Israel to end the siege on Gaza and come to a ceasefire, noting that acute malnutrition is especially prevalent among children and older people.
“Illnesses like acute watery diarrhoea are spreading, markets are empty, waste is piling up, and adults are collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration,” the letter said. It notes that about 28 trucks of aid per day are allowed into Gaza — a drop from the 600 daily that flowed into the Strip earlier this year amid the temporary ceasefire, which Israel later broke by continuing its bombing campaign.
There are “tons of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items and fuel” sitting inside Gaza or at border crossings, the letter argues, but the Israeli government’s restrictions have prevented them from accessing and delivering the aid.
Read our complete coverage
## Israel’s War on Gaza
As of Monday, Israel had deemed 87 percent of the Strip a military zone or put it under evacuation orders, severely straining movement for both aid-seeking Palestinians and aid workers. That territorial creep fits into the far-right Israeli government’s broader plans for Gaza: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans in May to evacuate Palestinians to the south into a military-controlled “sterile zone.” Last week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said he had instructed the military to forcibly displace Gaza’s entire population of about 2 million people into a “humanitarian city,” which would be built atop the ruins of Rafah in southern Gaza, according to The Times of Israel. And Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has long called for the establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza, continued to push the idea while attending a Knesset conference with other Israeli lawmakers called “The Gaza Riviera – from vision to reality,” a riff off of U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed plan to take control of the Strip to construct “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
As the writers of the letter argue, “The UN-led humanitarian system has not failed, it has been prevented from functioning.”
However, Israel’s blockade has prevented the delivery of other aid, such as medicine, medical supplies, hygiene products, water, fuel, and other essentials. Moore said his organization is prepared to deliver such supplies when called upon, but he continued to blame the U.N. and nongovernmental organizations for their unwillingness to collaborate.
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Anastasia Moran, advocacy director at MedGlobal, a Chicago-based medical aid organization that has teams in Gaza and signed onto the letter, said that it has stockpiles of nutrition treatments, medicine, and other medical supplies sitting at the Gaza border that has been blocked by the Israeli government.
Like the remaining hospitals across Gaza, MedGlobal’s clinic in Gaza City has seen an increase in severe malnutrition cases, Moran said. Lacking essential supplies, their medical teams have struggled to treat patients, and many have died.
> “Every single one of those deaths is preventable.”
Moran said at least five infants and toddlers had recently died of malnutrition at MedGlobal’s clinic: 3-month-old Mohammed, 4-month-old Nahed, 1.5-year-old Zein, 2-year-old Jouri, and 4.5-year-old Sewar.
“They died for the sole reason that we did not have the essential medications and IV fluids and nutrition treatments that we needed to save their lives,” Moran said. “Every single one of those deaths is preventable, every single one of those deaths is not the norm of what we’ve been seeing in Gaza.”
**Update: July 24, 2024, 11:27 a.m. ET**
_This story has been updated with a statement from a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation spokesperson._
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