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President Donald Trump’s vague plan to respond to the famine in Gaza with Israeli-approved “food centers” is being panned by humanitarian groups who say it will do little or nothing to reverse widespread starvation caused by Israel’s decision to block aid.
Trump has given only broad-brush details about the scheme after announcing it Monday, when he acknowledged that children in Gaza are starving.
As with many of Trump’s proposals, however, it is unclear how seriously the president intends to pursue it. Aid organizations fear the rollout of another new system of food aid, considering the hundreds of killings near food distribution sites operated by the American-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
They also emphasize that at this point, women and children in Gaza are in need of not just food but also specialized medical care to reverse severe malnutrition.
“The proposal is ludicrous,” said Dr. John Kahler, a pediatrician who co-founded a nonprofit group MedGlobal that supports re-feeding centers for children in Gaza. “Nothing new needs to get done. It’s a simple but not easy solution: Stop the bombing, open up the gates, and let the people who know how to do it, do it.”
A Vague Plan
Trump has sketched out only the vaguest details about how the “food centers” might work after introducing the idea during a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Trump told reporters Tuesday on Air Force One that Israel would “preside” over the food centers “to make sure the distribution is proper.” Israeli officials have repeatedly offered the unsupported claim that Hamas is diverting food aid, which has been widely rejected by humanitarian groups, as their justification for clamping down on the flow of aid Gaza and pushing to the sidelines established aid organizations in the region.
The food centers would roll out “very soon,” Trump said.
The White House has given no information on key questions, however, such as who would run the food centers, who would fund them, where they would be sited, and whether they would be militarized in a similar manner as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s distribution operations, which have been the sites of numerous deadly strikes on aid-seekers.
In the months leading up to the past week’s outcry from European countries and the United Nations over mass starvation, the Trump administration largely relied on the GHF to distribute food aid, and some observers thought it sounded like Trump might be talking about an expansion of the nonprofit’s operations.
A State Department spokesperson told reporters Tuesday that she was unsure whether the food centers would involve the GHF, however.
“We don’t know the framework of how something would proceed regarding the details. I am waiting for the president to return and don’t want to get ahead of him regarding announcements and what the framework would be,” Tammy Bruce said.
The White House and Israel’s embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to requests for comment.
“Is Israel Going to Pay for Them?”
The White House seems to have communicated few if any details about the food centers to several members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioned about the proposal Tuesday.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said he had received no information from the White House.
“The notion that the U.S. is going to set up food distribution centers — why not let the pros do it? The World Food Programme. Mercy Corps. World Vision. I mean, all these NGOs that this is what they do for a living, why not let them do it?” Kaine said. “The U.S.’s efforts thus far have been the pier, which was a joke, and this GHF thing, which has been a disaster. So we don’t have any credibility on this.”
Another member of the committee, foreign aid skeptic Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questioned how the food centers would be funded.
“What, is Israel going to pay for them?” Paul said when asked about the idea. “I think as with most humanitarian crises, the people most directly involved are the people that should be involved with funding them.”
Congress last year banned the U.S. from funding the longtime hub of aid distribution in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Israel halted aid deliveries altogether between March and May, creating the conditions for dozens of malnutrition deaths this month.
Nonprofits Face “Systematic Obstruction”
The main conduit for U.S. aid to starving Gazans since the aid pause was lifted has been the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a nonprofit supported by the U.S. and Israeli governments that was incorporated in Delaware in February. The State Department approved $30 million in funding for the GHF in June.
The GHF’s food distribution centers are clustered largely in southern Gaza, forcing thousands of people to make dangerous treks and weather a barrage of gunfire in desperate attempts to secure food for their families.
GHF has drawn scathing criticism from nongovernmental organizations over its decision to ring distribution sites with heavily armed private soldiers. GHF’s chair Johnnie Moore has dismissed the reports of chaos at its distribution sites as “misinformation.”
Aid groups would have the same concerns about GHF if Trump’s latest plan consists simply of expanding its operations, said James Hoobler, a humanitarian policy adviser at Oxfam America.
Oxfam says its own attempts to distribute humanitarian aid in Gaza have been severely constrained by “systematic obstruction by the government of Israel.”
Amid international outrage, Israel said over the weekend that it would ease access into Gaza for humanitarian groups, which say they have faced many obstacles to distributing aid.
Hoobler said it was critical for Trump to follow through on his promise of providing more aid, since Israel has repeatedly promised greater access that fails to materialize.
“We really are looking over just a cliff edge. There is a real risk that the deaths we have seen so far are going to accelerate because of the combination of malnutrition and dehydration and water-borne disease, and lack of shelter and hygiene issues we are seeing,” he said. “It has to be across all sectors. It can’t just be food parcels that aren’t reaching the most vulnerable, and aren’t even consumable for people who don’t have clean water and don’t have fuel.”
The post Trump’s Gaza “Food Centers” Miss the Real Problem: Israel’s Aid Blockade appeared first on The Intercept.
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