Top Trump administration officials will travel into the Gaza Strip on Friday to inspect food distribution amid international outrage over increasing deaths from starvation and criticism that U.S. efforts to distribute food are contributing to suffering and death.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee will travel into Gaza to “inspect the current distribution sites and secure a plan to deliver more food and meet with local Gazans to hear first hand about this dire situation on the ground.”
Leavitt said that Witkoff and Huckabee are expected to brief Trump tomorrow after their visit, and the president will “approve a final plan for food and aid distribution.”
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The administration has provided little to no details on Trump’s announcement, made earlier this week, that the U.S. would set up “food centers” in Gaza.
Trump made the promise after acknowledging starvation among the population in the strip, in a rebuke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claims that there’s no food crisis there.
Still, humanitarian workers, non-governmental organizations and the United Nations are highly critical of Trump’s efforts to take over food distribution in the strip. Trump backed the establishment of the U.S.-founded Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) that took over food distribution alongside Israel shutting down the majority of humanitarian access points for delivering aid.
But the U.N. says that since May, approximately 674 people have been killed while trying to access food aid through the GHF, under threat from the Israeli military and with GHF contractors reportedly using live ammunition and stun grenades against aid seekers.
“The new distribution scheme imposed by Israeli authorities through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and other actors has created, actually a dangerous power vacuum,” said Bushra Khalidi, policy lead with Oxfam, during a briefing by humanitarian workers organized Tuesday by the nongovernmental organization Save the Children.
“It’s sidelined established humanitarian actors like us and the U.N. agencies and have tightly controlled the minimal aid coming in.”
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The Israeli government responded to international pressure to allow more food aid in and for the U.N. and NGOs to begin pick up and distribution. Israel recorded more than 2,000 trucks with food and other supplies heading into Gaza in July, compared to over 1,800 in June and less than 1,000 in May.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blames Hamas for diverting food aid, Israeli military officials reportedly found no evidence of systematic and wide-scale diversion. The United Nations recorded that between May and July, approximately 1,753 trucks have failed to reach their destinations because they are overrun by “peaceful, hungry people” or armed groups.
Food crisis experts warned earlier this week that “the worst-case scenario of famine” is occurring in the Gaza Strip and Israel is growing increasingly isolated, diplomatically, as countries around the world call on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as manufacturing the crisis.
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France and Canada have announced plans to recognize an independent Palestinian state as a direct rebuke to Israel, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has threatened to do the same if Netanyahu does not take steps to end the war against Hamas and alleviate the crisis in the strip.
And while Trump has largely stood by Netanyahu’s pursuit of the war, support in Washington is fracturing. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), a firebrand for Trump’s America First movement, became the first Republican to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
On Wednesday night, a majority of the Senate Democratic caucus voted in favor of blocking weapons sales to Israel.
