Gazans are starving. How did it get this bad?

0:00Famine has reached Gaza. Nearly two years into this humanitarian crisis, a crisis that has gotten significantly worse in the past few months, there has been one recurring problem above all others, a failure to deliver the necessary humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. The Biden administration tried to address the problem by building a military peer. The president announced the effort in his 2024 State of the Union address. Tonight, I'm directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.

0:40That pier only operated for a few weeks, delivering a fraction of the aid needed. It cost some$230 million and led to one U.S. soldier's death. Critics said by the end of that mission, it achieved next to nothing. The U.S., along with other countries, also tried airdrops, using cargo planes to drop crates with parachutes. Palestinians have drowned trying to reach aid that landed in the sea, and several have been killed when the parachute on pallets failed to open and crush them below. The most efficient and effective way to get aid into Gaza is by truck over land, but that has also been a complicated negotiation.

1:20Nearly two years after October 7th, after countless pleas from world leaders, humanitarian groups, none of the efforts to get meaningful aid into Gaza have worked. But it wasn't just the logistics that have prevented food from reaching Gaza. It's been Israel's unwillingness to let aid in. David Satterfield, special envoy for Middle East humanitarian efforts under the Biden administration, recalled early negotiations with Israel while speaking to NPR. It was up against a brick wall. The prime minister, in one remark I remember, said, if I were to allow even four trucks in, there would be IDF tanks in Jerusalem pointed at my office.

2:06The Israeli people would react. That, of course, is hyperbole. But I'm giving you a sense of how difficult the conversation was. Not one drop, not even four trucks. We can't do this. That was the message. Consider this. Gazans are starving. How did it get this bad?

2:33From NPR, I'm Juana Summers.

2:44It's Consider This from NPR. The war in Gaza is approaching the two-year mark. As it does, Israel continues to launch new attacks on a territory that's already in ruins, and the humanitarian situation for Gaza's Palestinian residents continues to worsen. A team of NPR reporters has been focusing on one question. How did we get here? They've been talking to several former senior officials in the Biden administration, all directly involved in shaping U.S. policy on Israel's war in Gaza when the conflict began. And I'm joined now by two of our reporters on this story, NPR's Tom Bowman and Kat Lonsdorf.

3:21Hi to both of you. Hello. Hey. If you could just start by telling us why you wanted to talk to former officials from the previous administration. Well, Wana, we started out with this simple question. How do we get to this point in Gaza? Famine has been declared. And, of course, this all started in the Biden administration, the war in Gaza. Now, at this point, Palestinians are now dying from malnutrition, according to health officials there. And we wanted to learn more about what role the U.S. as Israel's strongest ally had in trying to get aid into Gaza to alleviate that crisis. Yeah, so we, along with our colleague Fatma Tanis, talked to people who were senior officials across the Biden administration and asked them to take us into the rooms where the decisions around U.S.

4:04policy toward Israel's war in Gaza were being made from the beginning. And they described strong, sometimes bitter arguments within the administration, with some officials saying not enough was being done to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow more aid into Gaza. Most of these people agreed to only speak with us without their names being used. You know, these were sensitive conversations. And these people were really grappling with the decisions that were made, wondering if they did enough or if they could have done more. What were you hearing from them specifically? Well, again, there were very tough and intense discussions.

4:38One person we spoke with was David Satterfield. Now, he was a Biden administration special envoy for Middle East humanitarian efforts appointed just days into the war. And he said that he and other senior officials were asked constantly if they were doing enough. And it's something they still ask themselves. Our answer is we're not doing enough. But we have prevented famine and starvation. And while that may be a low bar, that is not an insignificant achievement. This is something we heard, Wanda, from a lot of the people we spoke with, basically saying, by definition, we didn't do enough, but we made a difference.

5:17And it could have been worse. And of course, now it is. But, you know, there were others who said that that's just not the standard by which to measure success in a humanitarian catastrophe. Like Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland, who was putting pressure on the Biden administration from the early days of the war to do more. Here's what he told us. The Biden administration was totally feckless when it came to holding the Netanyahu government to the standard of American law and the standards that we claim to apply to every other country in the world. One former Biden era official told me, quote, none of us were ever, ever satisfied.

5:58It was the most heartbreaking work ever, and we never got aid in in any amounts that was sufficient. Interesting. OK, I want to back up if we can a bit. Let's talk about the early days of the conflict when Israel was reeling from the Hamas-led October 7th attacks back in 2023, which started this war. Israel imposed a complete siege or blockade on Gaza in the days after. There was no food, no water, no fuel. What was happening behind the scenes in those weeks and months? Yeah, I mean, remember, October 7th was the deadliest attack in Israel's history. And Biden made his support for Israel very clear afterwards, saying it had the right to defend itself.

6:33And at the same time, Israel imposed that siege on Gaza. That's an enclave that is completely walled off, totally dependent on Israel to allow goods in and out. So this was a really difficult situation from a humanitarian aid perspective from day one. And also, we heard from former senior officials who traveled to Israel around the time, and they told us that the humanitarian assistance component of the war was not well thought out. Some told us there was essentially no humanitarian plan, and the military mission was always paramount. And looking back, some officials told us the U.S. didn't push Israel hard enough on that.

7:10And many of the people we talked to spoke about how the U.S. was reluctant to pressure Israel. Biden was very focused on the rightness of Israel's war. And there was a real sense at the time that Israel was being attacked from multiple fronts. It sounds like you really got an understanding of what it was like behind the scenes in the Biden administration for some really dramatic and difficult months. Can you just describe that a bit for us? Yeah, everyone we talked to stressed just how hard everyone was working on this issue. I mean, this was round the clock up to the highest level, even often the president himself making phone calls to the Israelis constantly.

7:45Essentially, everyone became desk officers focusing on real specific details, spending hours getting the Israelis to open a specific crossing or turn back on one specific water pipe. And officials told us that this meant that the U.S. was often bogged down in these details and phone calls, sometimes losing the bigger picture of the humanitarian catastrophe. This all led to a lot of frustration with Israel within the administration. Heated arguments between senior U.S. officials and their Israeli counterparts trying to get movement of aid. I remember a time when the humanitarian situation in Gaza was addressed very publicly here in the U.S., and that was during Biden's State of the Union speech back in March of 2024.

8:26And in the speech, he announced that the U.S. would be building a military pier to deliver aid off the coast of Gaza. Tell us about the conversations around that. Yeah, right. You know, at this point, aid groups in Gaza were sounding the alarm bells about an impending catastrophe there. And Israel was still not letting in nearly enough aid through the land crossings. So the U.S. first started airdrops and then proposed that pier, which had all sorts of problems and only ended up operating for about 20 days total. One former official told us, quote, we were in Hail Mary mode. You know, many of the officials we talked to defended those decisions.

8:58Others argued that they ignored the strongest tool the U.S. had in its toolbox, which is withholding U.S. military assistance from Israel. Right. I mean, the kind of elephant in the room behind all of this and all U.S. policy toward Israel is the large amount of military aid that the U.S. provides to Israel. Right. No, that's right. And looking back, some officials are still wondering, should we have halted all military assistance? Would that have pressured Israel to open more aid routes? Now, the Biden administration did withhold, remember, 2 ,000-pound bombs for a time. So could a larger arms halt have changed anything?

9:30But the Israelis were pretty blunt in the meetings with U.S. officials when humanitarian concerns were raised, basically saying, if you withhold arms, we'll just go it alone. I want to end by bringing this back to now when famine has been declared in Gaza. The situation has just gotten so much worse in recent months. How has the Trump administration handled the humanitarian crisis there? Well, now the U.S. under the Trump administration largely seems to be allowing Israel to do what it wants. Aid groups on the ground told us that the U.S. is no longer exerting the same kind of consistent round-the-clock pressure on Israel to allow more aid into Gaza as it did under the Biden administration.

10:11We reached out to the White House for this story. A spokesperson replied saying in part that Trump, quote, wants to ensure the people of Gaza are fed. But, you know, regardless of the administration, one former senior U.S. official told us that they thought the tragedy of Gaza with a humanitarian crisis that has played out for almost two years now has fundamentally compromised American global standing. They said, quote, it's a stain which everyone in the world sees, even if we don't. That was NPR's Kat Lonsdorff and Tom Bowman talking about reporting they did along with NPR's Pat Matanis. Thanks to both of you.

10:47Thank you. You're welcome. And there is so much more to their reporting that we could not get into here. If you want to read their story in full, go to NPR.org. This episode was produced by Mia Venkat and Daniel Offman. It was edited by Andrew Sussman, Courtney Dorning, and William Troop. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

11:11It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.