Gaza's breaking point

0:00Basically everyone except Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be gravely concerned about starvation in Gaza. More than 108 organizations like Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam just signed a letter saying that restrictions, delays, and fragmentation under Israel's total siege have created chaos, starvation, and death. 30-ish countries, including a bunch of Israel's own allies, have issued a statement condemning the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food. Even President Trump is balking.

0:43Here's a bit of what he said on Monday from Scotland. We have to help on a humanitarian basis before we do anything. We have to get the kids fed. Gaza's breaking point on Today Explained.

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2:21You're listening to Today Explained. My name is Anat Pelled, and I'm a reporter for The Wall Street Journal based in Tel Aviv covering the war. And it seems like this war has reached maybe yet another breaking point in just the past few days. Can you tell us what's going on? Definitely. So we're seeing a dire hunger crisis, starvation in the Strip. And, you know, this has just caused international condemnation. We're seeing a lot of countries. We saw a group of almost 30 countries speaking out against it. And we saw over 100 humanitarian and charity groups talking about it. And what this caused was a lot of pressure on Israel in the past few days.

3:05And on Saturday, it actually had to up the aid as a result of this pressure. They're saying a few things will happen. They're saying that they're going to reintroduce airdrops, which are a very expensive form of aid distribution. that actually is not the most effective. You can get a lot more aid through aid trucks on ground routes. And they're saying they're going to, you know, have these pauses in the fighting so that people can get to the aid safely. And they're saying they're facilitating more aid to come in from the UN. The starvation that we're seeing inside the Gaza Strip is a result of two things.

3:42And that is the first that Israel basically stopped any aid, fuel or medicine from coming into the Strip after, you know, January ceasefire fell apart. And that just caused a really, you know, like horrible situation in terms of food security. And then when it ended that, it launched a new controversial program along with the U.S. It's an Israeli, you know, American-backed program to basically totally reshape how aid is going to enter Gaza. And that did not work. And that program, of course, is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. We've talked about it on the show before. We're going to talk about it much more today.

4:27But before we do, can you just tell us how dire things have become? I mean, people have been hungry in Gaza throughout this war, but it feels like things have become far more deadly in the past few weeks. There's reporting that one in five children is malnourished and that dozens so far at least have died. Yeah, the situation is, I think, the worst we've seen since the start of the war. And you see that, I think, in the images, the videos that are all over the news. And you see a lot more desperation. We've had enough of starvation and oppression, enough of staying in the streets like dogs, where no one looks at us, where we can't find anything for our children to eat or drink.

5:09Nohansalha's five-month-old daughter is one of 30 children here suffering from malnutrition. I can't do anything for her, she says. It's a really hard thing for a mother to feel like this. It's indescribable. We've also seen other scenes in Gaza, you know, where, you know, UN trucks are coming in and people just storm them because they're so... They're hungry, they're desperate, so the scenes are just horrible. We entered the death trap near the tanks and we saw the soldiers and they shot at us. They shot us with flares and bullets. Look at the young men. All the bags of flour have blood on them.

5:47Listen, we are bringing this for our children. It gets overcrowded. It's like an ocean of people coming and waiting for aid. crowded, chaotic and dangerous as there is ongoing heavy shooting by machine guns. And of course, adding to the sense of chaos and anarchy in Gaza around aid or just around the entire situation is the fact that something like a thousand Palestinians have died trying to get aid. And your team at the Wall Street Journal has been doing on the ground reporting on what exactly is going on at these aid sites through this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Can you tell us what you've seen there?

6:26Yeah. So basically, Israel launched this controversial new program, Israeli-American-backed, a little more than two months ago. Our reporting shows that it was meant to eventually replace a system that has been in place since the start of the war, and that is basically aid trucks coming in from the UN mostly and aid organizations, and they were going to around 400 aid distribution sites across Gaza. And Israel has claimed over the war that Hamas has been taking over control of aid, and specifically, it argues UN aid. Hamas robs, steals this humanitarian aid, and then accuses Israel of not supplying it.

7:10Israel for a long time, we know starting as early as December 2023, there were meetings about this, decided to try to completely change the way aid goes in by basically privatizing it. So it brought in private American contractors, and a new foundation was launched called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And so it set up four aid sites to replace hundreds of sites. My colleague, Dov Lieber, who I reported a piece on this last week, we basically got access through an army embed to go see how the distribution goes. And so basically what my colleague saw, and, you know, he took videos and he's shown me that and we describe it in the article.

7:56For about an hour, I watched people walk about two kilometers from their homes in Khan Yunus or in Marwassi tent camp near the seaside and gather outside a distribution site. And so my colleague stood at the height of a makeshift military installation and he could see this pool of people growing. But it was clear that already the crowd near the site was getting rowdy, even if people were walking to it slowly and calm. And then suddenly an instant, you know, this rush began and men broke through the security line. All hell broke loose, very, very fast. Suddenly everyone began sprinting towards the aid distribution site, running as fast as they could.

8:36And everybody, as quickly as they could, grabbed the boxes of aid. We could hear what sounded like the sound of semi-automatic gunfire. And basically, within 15 minutes, all the food was gone. It was this mad dash. The moment people recognize that order has broken down, they move as quickly as they can to get any aid because what they don't know is if this site will be open tomorrow or the next day. They don't know if this is the last box of aid that they'll be getting for some time. And, you know, while there were no casualties reported from that site that day, the next day on July 16th, a Wednesday, at least 20 people were trampled to death at the same exact site.

9:18And GHF said that its security contractors had pepper sprayed people rushing that day. So, you know, it did not go very smoothly.

9:31Who's doing the shooting at these sites? You guys were there. You have video. What did you see? Yeah. So our reporting shows that it's Israeli troops that have been firing what they call warning shots at Palestinians trying to come to these aid sites. And basically the army has acknowledged that. But I was able to speak, you know, to a reservist. So an Israeli military soldier who was stationed in southern Gaza. And he told me that he saw the troops opening these warning shots, which could be in the air and towards the knees, but also at times were just directed at the crowds. If forces thought they were in danger, the people were coming too close to them.

10:14And he saw that even happen to a group that was carrying white flags, Palestinians carrying white flags. So Palestinian authorities say that hundreds of Palestinians have been killed from IDF fire. And the Israeli military acknowledges that it has fired towards crowds, but it claims that the numbers are inflated. It's so hard for people to wrap their heads around the fact that in this situation where people are so desperate, they can't even survive trying to get food. And you mentioned that the whole reason for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, you know, being introduced to this war was these allegations that Hamas was stealing food from the United Nations, from the United States.

11:02Reuters reported just Friday, I believe, that USAID stated that while Hamas may have stolen food at some point, they weren't stealing anything from the United States. And I think there's been further reporting that there's been no significant theft from the United Nations. Was the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation ever needed in this situation in the first place? Why are they there? I mean, it depends who you're asking. The Israelis would argue that it is needed, at least publicly. We should say that there has been a major issue with looting of trucks, including UN trucks. Gunmen have been doing that throughout the war.

11:39it's really hard to tell who's doing, you know, the looting. Our reporting has shown that Hamas has stolen some aid, but it's hard to know if they were stealing, you know, was it specifically more UN aid or other kind of aid? You know, publicly Israel is still arguing that it's, that this solution is needed and, you know, is saying that it works, although it's clear to a lot of people that it's not working. And even the goal of getting the aid out of Hamas's hands, you know, there is no screening at these sites. It's just a mad rush, you know, first come, first serve. And, you know, they don't know who's coming to these sites.

12:17So that's also another factor.

12:22We still need to see what's going to happen to GHF going forward. Because, you know, one of Hamas's, you know, major demands in the ongoing ceasefire negotiations is actually to, you know, get rid of GHF and have the UN, go back to the old UN-backed system. And, you know, right now, we still don't have a ceasefire. We don't know what will happen. Before this, you know, GHF and Israel have been talking about expanding and getting more, opening more GHF sites. But that wouldn't seem possible if the ceasefire is reached.

12:59Anant Pellet and her colleague Dov Lieber wrote a big story about the dire AIDS situation in Gaza titled, Why Israel's Chaotic New Food Program in Gaza Has Turned So Deadly. You can find it at wsj.com. Guess who's in charge of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation? The answer is either not what you'd expect or exactly what you'd expect. We'll have it when we return on Today Explained.

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17:49Sean Ramos for him at Today Explained, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is at the center of this starvation story and just about every story about people being shot and even killed while trying to get aid. So we wanted to figure out who's in charge. We asked Arno Rosenfeld from The Forward, the largest Jewish news outfit here in the United States. He said it wasn't someone with deep experience in humanitarian aid. It's a guy with deep experience in public relations. Yeah, so Johnny Moore is an evangelical leader with a long history in Republican politics. He graduated from Liberty University and then worked in communications for them for a number of years.

18:32At Liberty University, we have welcomed God who authored all knowledge into the educational process. God is not an exile to this campus. God is in the heart of this campus. That's a university founded by Jerry Falwell, like a sort of big evangelical mecca in the country. And then he went from that into basically PR. And so he was running a boutique PR firm that got acquired recently by a larger firm. And they do work for both like Marriott hotels and also focus on the family. So it's not exclusively sort of conservative religious causes, but it includes that. And then he's had various roles in the government.

19:09So he was an evangelical advisor to President Trump during his first campaign, you know, prayed with Trump in the White House. Prayed with Trump. Didn't know Trump was a big prayer. Well, you know, he's surrounded himself with these leaders. Someone asked me not long ago, you know, is it true that, you know, an evangelical is in the White House like every week or every day or something? And my answer was, you know, maybe like a dozen times a day, you know. And liberty was, I think, a big part of burnishing his conservative evangelical bona fides during that first race. Two Corinthians, right? Two Corinthians 317.

19:44That's the whole ballgame. Where the spirit of the Lord, right? Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. And here there is Liberty College, but Liberty University. But it is so true. So he has a long history there and then he's held various posts, you know, in the government. He was on the committee that the U.S. has to sort of promote religious freedom around the world. So he's traveled around the world to, you know, defend the religious liberty of Muslims in China and different groups in different countries in the Middle East. The world is safer because of this administration's policies.

20:21It is unprecedented when it comes to religious freedom. So he's had long ties to the Trump administration, and now he is in this new role as a humanitarian. Right. Everything makes sense up until and now he's in this new role as a humanitarian. Because as you're saying here, he's basically a PR guy. How does he go from PR flack in the Trump administration to in charge of maybe one of the most humanitarian missions on the planet? You know, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a very strange entity, but the sort of most direct answer to your question is he has a long history of supporting Israel, of traveling to Israel.

21:01Israel has impacted me far, far more than almost anything else. I almost can't think of my life inseparable from Israel in some ways. He's deep into the world of Christian Zionism. Of course, a lot of Israel's strongest supporters in the United States are evangelical Christians. And so he comes out of that world and has these ties. And I think for a variety of reasons, when they were looking for someone to take over this organization after the executive director stepped down just before they started operations, they brought him in to, I think, burnish its reputation. He's been on a big media tour.

21:32So he's leaning into his sort of PR expertise in this new role. What's he saying on his big media tour? You know, his argument is basically that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is the victim of a series or a variety of conspiracy theories. 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. And so effective that Hamas itself is not happy about it. So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a victim of a conspiracy promoted by the United Nations, which wants to sort of hoard all of the aid and the glory for delivering food for themselves.

22:16And so it seems to us that the United Nations is basically saying either UNRWA can do everything UNRWA did before, and UNRWA is the only coordinating mechanism. It's UNRWA or the people of Gaza starve. And also on the part of Hamas, which is promoting, he's sort of claiming that Hamas is on their own PR tour and has sort of snookered all of these reporters around the world into repeating lies about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Hamas has intentionally harmed Gazans in order to allege that it was the IDF or that it was GHF, in order to disincentivize people from coming to our aid distribution sites to fuel their disinformation narrative.

22:59So basically, GHF is doing great work. They're doing the most Christian thing possible, in his words, feeding people. There's nothing more Christian than feeding people. And unfortunately, the basically entire international aid community at the behest of the UN and perhaps also Hamas just has it in for them. It's very unfair, but they're not going to let that stop them from, you know, doing the Lord's work. What does he have to say about all the dead Palestinians? Uh, the dead Palestinians as a result of starvation or as a result of being shot while trying to get food from his organization? The second one.

23:34So, his argument is, again, uh, it's very tragic. They never want anyone to lose their lives. Uh, he said that they complain often to the IDF when the IDF shoots at, uh, people queuing for aid. He says the IDF has taken responsibility for those incidents. He says Hamas has also attacked GHF employees and Palestinians trying to get aid from GHF and that Hamas has not taken responsibility from that. He also said that more people are being killed trying to get UN and World Food Program aid than have been killed trying to get his organization's aid. It depends a little bit how you parse the statistics.

24:11I don't think that's true, but that's what he's been saying in these kind of public appearances. Is he convincing anyone? So I think that one of the things that's important to understand about his role and really about what I think the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is intended to do is that there is a segment of Israel supporters in the United States that live in a little bit of an alternate reality. And I think his job is to convince those people that Israel and that the United States is not responsible for Palestinian civilians starving in Gaza. So, for example, the piece that I wrote was about him addressing the American Jewish Congress.