After Gaza famine report, U.S. is mostly silent while Israel is defiant
A report by a panel of food security experts that found there was famine in parts of Gaza prompted outrage from many European countries, but not from the United States — Israel’s main backer — and the Trump administration.
Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, echoed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel’s arguments against the report in posts on social media, saying that Hamas was to blame for any hunger in Gaza.
“Tons of food has gone into Gaza but Hamas savages stole it, ate lots of it to become corpulent,” Mr. Huckabee wrote on X.
Without pressure from the United States, Mr. Netanyahu is unlikely to shift his conduct in the nearly two-year war in Gaza, analysts say. President Trump has yet to comment on the report, which was released Friday, although he suggested last month that there was starvation in Gaza. [Continue reading…]
In the overcrowded, rubble strewn streets of Gaza City, there was little surprise at the announcement that UN-backed experts believed the scenes of desperation could now be formally described as a famine.
“This is something we have been saying for months now, and we have witnessed this and we have been living this and suffering this. We feel very powerless and very sick and very tired,” said Amjad Shawa, the director of the Palestinian NGO Network, who has been in Gaza City throughout the 22-month war.
On Friday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a globally recognised organisation that classifies the severity of food insecurity and malnutrition, found that three key thresholds for a declaration of famine had been met in the once bustling commercial and administrative hub.
Only four famines have been declared by the IPC since it was established in 2004, most recently in Sudan last year. “This famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed,” the report said. It warned of an exponential increase in deaths if “a ceasefire is not implemented … and essential food supplies and basic … services are not restored immediately”.
It is the most vulnerable among the Palestinians now living in Gaza City, thought to be between 500,00 and 800,000 people, that are most at risk, especially elderly people, the young, sick or socially isolated, aid officials have said. [Continue reading…]
Amid mostly silence in Congress, some US lawmakers on opposite sides of the political spectrum spoke out Saturday over a UN-backed report warning of famine in parts of Gaza.
“Let’s be clear: President Trump has the power to end the starvation of the Palestinian people,” Vermont’s politically independent senator Bernie Sanders posted on X. “Instead he is doing nothing while watching this famine unfold. Enough is enough. No more American taxpayer dollars to Nethanyahu’s [sic] war machine.”
Sanders, who also pushed resolutions to ban selling US weapons to Israel, has long been consistent about his concern regarding the humanitarian crisis in Gaza amid the war.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, the outspoken, far-right Georgia Republican, also called for greater compassion for Palestinians in a social media post Saturday, a day after UN secretary general António Gutteres described the famine in the territory as a “failure of humanity”.
The US representative, in a departure from the majority of her peers in Congress, described the Gaza humanitarian crisis as a genocide last month. In a long post on X, she then said that while Israel’s war against Hamas was justified, the suffering of civilians was not.
“Does Hamas deserve it? Yes,” Greene wrote, in part. “Do innocent people and children deserve it? No.”
“The innocent people in Gaza did not kill and kidnap the innocent people in Israel on Oct 7th,” she continued. “Just as we spoke out and had compassion for the victims and families of Oct7, how can Americans not speak out and have compassion for the masses of innocent people and children in Gaza?”
Greene linked the entirety of US financial and military aid to Israel to the conflict, arguing that it “means every U.S. tax payer is contributing to Israel’s military actions”.
“I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay for genocide in a foreign country against a foreign people for a foreign war that I had nothing to do with,” Greene concluded. “And I will not be silent about it.” [Continue reading…]