“This is Trump’s famine”: How the US is complicit in Gaza’s suffering

After nearly two years of war between Israel and Hamas, Gaza is on the brink of mass starvation. Children are dying. Aid workers and doctors push through their own hunger to try to save lives. Journalists are too weak to document the unfolding horrors. There are not enough food or medical supplies entering to protect Gaza’s population from famine. Most of the food that does come in is distributed at four heavily guarded sites where hundreds of Palestinians have been killed.

“Food insecurity has gone off a cliff in Gaza,” warns Anastasia Moran, advocacy director for MedGlobal, a non-governmental organization that operates clinics there. “We just, for the first time, started to have kids dying at our clinics because we didn’t have things like potassium and IV fluids.” Moran says a tipping point has likely arrived, and that it may be too late to stop mass starvation; the conversation could soon shift to counting bodies. 

Press coverage can leave the impression that the hunger is an organic disaster, a side-effect of war that is too complicated to fully explain. But famine is easily preventable, and this one has been orchestrated with the increasing complicity of the United States. Over the last five months, President Donald Trump’s administration has overseen a disastrous shift in how aid is distributed, meaning the US is no longer just a funder and ally to Israel as it devastates civilians in Gaza. Americans are now the ones carrying out the pitiful and deadly food aid program unequipped to halt this catastrophe. The US long decried famine as a tool of war. Now it is implementing it. 

“This is Trump’s famine,” said a representative of an NGO in the region who asked that they and their employer not to be named. “There should be investigations and there should be oversight in the future about what the administration knew, when they knew it, why they ignored the reports from the UN and NGOs and refused to change course when every indication was that there was about to be people dying en masse.” 

The journey to this point is a straight line that runs from Israel cutting off aid to Gaza in early March, to the Trump administration standing up a shady aid group with distribution tactics that were doomed to fail, to it then refusing to change course when famine arrived.

Amid growing international concern for the deteriorating situation in Gaza, Trump acknowledged on Monday that starvation has set in. “That’s real starvation stuff,” Trump told reporters. “I see it. You can’t fake that.” But Trump hasn’t assumed any responsibility, instead saying on Sunday that it’s a shame the US doesn’t get more credit for the money it has spent on aid to Gaza.

Since the war began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the United States has supported Israel militarily and as a staunch ally on the international stage. The US applied virtually no scrutiny to Israel’s tactics, even, as a US official who worked in the region told Mother Jones, when humanitarian convoys were shot at and refugee camps were bombed. The support continued as Gazans went hungry, and despite US law prohibiting military support to countries restricting US humanitarian aid. Instead, billions of US tax dollars funded the war.

But the United States’ role changed shortly after President Donald Trump took office. In March, Israel instituted a blockade on humanitarian aid entering Gaza. The move is directly responsible for the crushing hunger that has brought society there to a breaking point. “Most aid is just simply not approved to enter,” explains Moran. “We have nutrition supplies, medical supplies, medicine that has been sitting for months ready to come into Gaza, that’s in the region, just outside the borders, and does not have approvals to come in. And that is true for a lot of NGOs and a lot of [United Nations] agencies.”

While the UN and NGOs are being blocked, just one aid group has a green light to operate. “The only actor I’m aware of that has seemingly full access and full scale to bring in supplies has been the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” says Moran. The GHF, a newly-formed American nonprofit, operates with local staff as well as US-based contractors and private security firms. At its helm is Johnnie Moore, an American evangelical pastor and public relations expert. Moore has close ties to Trump, Israel, and the Christian Zionist movement that has a theological commitment to supporting Israel.

As the blockade knee-capped existing and successful humanitarian efforts, GHF came in with a new model. Instead of the approximately 400 aid sites and mobile clinics that the humanitarian community was operating, GHF set up just four sites in southern Gaza, far from the north where most of the population is concentrated. They located the sites within a zone controlled by the Israeli army, and hired private security to protect them. The result has been disastrous. Children, mothers, pregnant people, the elderly, and the disabled—a population that has grown due to the war—generally cannot travel miles to the sites. Those that can are often shot by the Israeli Defense Forces, which, the UN says, have killed hundreds of Palestinians seeking aid at GHF distribution sites and wounded thousands more. American security contractors have also been implicated in the violence.

Multiple people familiar with the situation who spoke to Mother Jones called GHF officials amateurs who don’t understand the basics of aid distribution. The aid community was baffled when GHF opted to set up just four sites in the South. “In a humanitarian response, you’re always trying to target the most vulnerable. That’s why you do mobile clinics that go out to find pregnant women and malnourished kids,” explains one representative of an NGO that works in Gaza. “You never want someone to have to come to you. You never want kids to have to make those journeys: They’re going through active war zones. They’re going through places where there are airstrikes.”

GHF is widely considered by Gazans to be a part of the military operation, inviting violence into aid distribution. “The whole point with humanitarian assistance is that it is not militarized,” said a former US official who worked in Gaza. “And GHF is a quasi-militarization of aid.” 

To justify the blockade and new aid distribution strategy, Israel claims that Hamas was routinely stealing supplies from UN aid groups and NGOs. This narrative of so-called “diversion” helped pave the way for GHF to take over. But a USAID report—finished just before the agency was shut down last month—found no basis for Israel’s claims. Further, Israeli officials confirmed to the New York Times that Hamas was not routinely taking aid. Aid workers who spoke to Mother Jones said they had never heard NGOs or UN agencies complaining of systemic issues of theft by Hamas. 

Nevertheless, GHF justifies its work by scapegoating the wider aid community as being incapable of effectively delivering aid and of working to unwittingly aid Hamas. The group’s X account is full of attacks on the UN and other aid agencies, parroting Israeli and US accusations that they prioritize politics over Palestinian lives. It’s the same accusation humanitarian groups lay at the feet of Israel, the US, and GHF, with much more evidence.

Under mounting international pressure, and in a move that tacitly acknowledged the failure of the distribution system overseen by GHF, Israel announced over the weekend that it would pause fighting in parts of Gaza for 10 hours a day to allow more food aid into besieged areas.

But in a public relations tour over the past few days, Moore has not acknowledged that his group bears any responsibility for the mounting starvation. In a Friday appearance at the Hudson Institute, a right-leaning think tank, Moore insisted GHF’s work had been a success. “Everyone in the world should be celebrating this,” he said. The event followed a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Moore that accused the UN and other aid groups of letting supplies rot on trucks outside Gaza, without acknowledging that the aid blockade and the IDF’s onerous restrictions on humanitarian groups are hindering their efforts.

Moore’s claims appear wholly divorced from the reality observed by current and former aid workers. “This whole idea that the old systems didn’t work, reading that, I was about to vomit I was so angry,” the former US official said. “The old systems were robust. They were in place. They work globally. The biggest constraints we had were Israel blocking access to Gaza.” 

One of the discomfiting things about GHF is that, faced with the disastrous implementation of their aid plans, its leaders have doubled down rather than change course. In its mere months of existence, it appears more dedicated to its PR image—and the talking points of the Israeli and US governments—than the efficacy of its aid distribution.

GHF was incorporated as a Delaware nonprofit in February. In the months leading up to its creation, Israeli and American businessmen came up with the idea of distributing aid in IDF-secured zones. Israel pitched the plan to the UN and NGOs in February, but the humanitarian groups balked. The plan might force aid groups to become a tool of the Israeli army, or even an accessory to its larger goal of concentrating the population of Gaza in small sections of the strip—potentially even in camps. According to a Washington Post investigation, the Israelis decided it would be best if the Americans became the face of the new aid delivery system. The Trump administration evidently agreed, and Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, announced it as an American plan on May 9. 

A shroud of secrecy surrounds GHF. It brings the distinctly American flavors of dark money and capitalist profit-seeking to a humanitarian crisis, with at least one private equity firm involved in the project. Its initial funding remains a mystery. GHF’s first executive director, a former marine named Jake Wood, told the New York Times that its startup money came from non-Israeli businessmen. In June, the Trump administration awarded it a $30 million USAID grant. According to Reuters, a former DOGE official signed off on the grant just five days after GHF filed its application despite staff objections that it failed to meet “minimum technical or budgetary standards.” The push to fund GHF, Reuters’ reporting makes clear, came from higher in the administration. 

GHF arrived in Gaza in late May, and its decision to open four aid sites in a zone controlled by Israeli forces immediately raised the possibility that aid had become a weapon to corral and control the population. In July, Reuters reported on a mysterious slide deck bearing GHF’s name that includes plans to set up camps called “Humanitarian Transit Zones,” but GHF denied any involvement. Rebutting such fears, Wood told the New York Times in May that “I would participate in no plan in any capacity if it was an extension of an I.D.F. plan or an Israeli government plan to forcibly dislocate people anywhere within Gaza.” But the day after the Times published the quote, Wood resigned from GHF because, he said, “It is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.” 

A few weeks later, GHF brought on Moore as its new board chairman. As opposed to a veteran of the humanitarian world, Moore came with another set of skills as a pastor with a public relations firm and close ties to the conservative evangelical movement. During the first Trump administration, Moore was a White House regular, acting as a gatekeeper to the evangelical community. When in DC, he would hold court at Trump’s hotel, alongside others currying favor with the president. He was among the advocates who pushed Trump to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and has professed a deep connection to Israel. During those discussions, Moore told the Washington Post what he would tell White House officials: For evangelicals, “those who bless Israel will be blessed.” 

Moore’s stalwart support for Israel is likely tied to his religious beliefs. Moore, whose career began at Liberty University as a protege of Jerry Falwell Sr., has close ties to Christian Zionists. Christian Zionists have a theological commitment to Jewish migration to Israel, seeing it as necessary to usher in the return of Jesus. Their end-times scenario implies that many Jews in Israel will die, leaving only a remnant that will eventually convert—fulfilling a Christian vision of apocalypse and the second coming. 

Some members of the Trump administration hold strong Christian Zionist views. When Trump tapped Huckabee for the administration, Moore posted to on X that “selecting a lifelong non-Jewish Zionist as the U.S. ambassador to Israel sends a powerful message.” Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, has outright denied the existence of Palestinians, saying there is “no such thing as a Palestinian” and calling the term nothing more than “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.”

Huckabee recently floated relocating any future Palestinian entity outside Israel in an interview with the BBC. “Does it have to be in the same piece of real estate that Israel occupies?” he said. “That’s a question that ought to be posed to everybody who’s pushing for a two-state solution.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has a history of supporting Israel from a Christian Zionist perspective. “There’s no reason why the miracle of the reestablishment of the temple on the Temple Mount is not possible,” he said in a 2018 speech in Jerusalem. “I don’t know how it would happen. You don’t know how it would happen. But I know that it could happen.”

“Christian Zionists are very powerful in this current administration,” says Annelle Sheline, a former State Department foreign affairs officer who resigned to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Sheline, now a fellow at the Quincy Institute, says that the Trump administration’s overt, wholesale support for Israeli aggression is a departure from the largely acquiescent Biden approach. Despite the humanitarian rhetoric of Trump administration figures, she added, “this horrible suffering happening in Gaza aligns with what I understand to be the belief system” of many people dictating US policy toward Israel.

“This is what the US has decided is okay,” said a foreign policy expert at another NGO that works in the region, who also asked not to be named. “There is an understanding that we’re not going to use the normal UN system, we’re not going to push for humanitarian access. Instead, we are going to be okay with and support this system through this American nonprofit.”

Since Trump took office, the aid situation—always tenuous in Gaza, thanks to Israel’s restrictions—has deteriorated. The United States is now backing and defending a group with shady origins, dangerous tactics, and inadequate capabilities as it oversees mass starvation in Gaza. Meanwhile, that group and its leader mount attacks on aid organizations that have saved lives in Gaza, acting like a propaganda arm of the US and Israeli governments. It’s a new level of complicity in a rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis.

Kiera Butler and Dan Friedman contributed reporting.