Trump has finally been forced to acknowledge starvation in Gaza, but is too tied to Israel to end it

It took almost two years, but the voices of outrage around the world have finally grown so loud that they are even being heard in Washington. U.S. President Donald Trump finds himself unable to treat Gaza with the lack of seriousness that has characterized his approach to the issue to date.

Unlike Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has no personal stake in the genocide in Gaza continuing until the last Palestinian has been starved to death. Unlike most of us, however, he also has no stake in ending the genocide. 

But as Israel’s image in the United States starts to more closely resemble its ugly, ethnocentric reality, Trump does need to be concerned that one of the key tools for advancing his MAGA brand of authoritarianism risks losing its power.

Trump has used the anti-Jewish and anti-Arab trope that equates activism, even criticism of Israel, with antisemitism to attack universities, freedom of speech, and support for human rights. But if people identify Israel with not just genocide but with genocide by the torture of mass, enforced starvation, that tool becomes blunted very quickly. It becomes all the more so when Republicans come to see Israel that way.

In response, Trump is not trying to reel in Israel. That would mean aggravating the larger part of his base that still fully supports Israel’s actions. It also frustrates the potential for normalizing war crimes and permanently blunting human rights as a global force, as Trump and much of the pseudo-populist right desire.

Instead, Trump would prefer to allow Israel to continue using bullets, guns, and a lower level of deprivation to kill Palestinians while casting himself as a hero who will get just enough aid into Gaza to stop the worst of the immediate crisis.

This is the idea that was behind statements on Tuesday attributed to White House officials. “The starvation problem in Gaza is getting worse. Donald Trump does not like that. He does not want babies to starve. He wants mothers to be able to nurse their children. He’s becoming fixated on that,” the unnamed White House official told the news outlet Axios.

They added that Trump is “not thrilled” about the U.S. taking the lead on aid in Gaza, “but it kind of has to happen. There doesn’t seem to be another way.” This, however, ignores the fact that the U.S. and Israel have destroyed the entire mechanism for delivering aid in Gaza. 

When getting into details about how the United States would change its approach to aid for Gaza, Trump himself has talked largely about funding—which is not where the problem is, of course—and has been deliberately vague and evasive about what steps would actually be taken to improve the situation in Gaza. There is no apparent plan for forcing Israel to allow access to the whole of Gaza for aid distribution, nor is there any plan for how to replace the vast mechanism for aid distribution that was spearheaded for decades by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). 

Trump was clearer about the prospect, declared this week by Netanyahu, of Israel taking over the Gaza Strip completely. On Tuesday, Trump told reporters that this plan was “pretty much up to Israel.” 

That effectively gave Netanyahu the green light, and, despite vociferous objections from his own military leadership, he has submitted this plan to the cabinet for discussion. 

When we put these things together, we see a policy of the moment, with no plan behind it. Trump’s notion of a new Middle East with Arab Gulf states lining up alongside Israel, with countries like Egypt and Jordan behind it in a pro-American, authoritarian sphere, has been buried underneath Israel’s zealous drive for genocide in Gaza and its beginning a parallel program in the West Bank.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, is setting up a perpetual war in Gaza. The genocide will continue and move to a different phase, one with more direct contact between Israeli forces and Palestinians. But it will continue gradually, creating the conditions that allow Netanyahu to keep Israel on an emergency footing for the long term, thereby avoiding the political reckoning that his corruption and his failure to eliminate Hamas or to protect Israeli citizens from attacks like October 7 will bring upon him. 

It’s taken a contemptibly long time, but political pressure has finally grown, even if it still isn’t happening because people are finally seeing Palestinians as fully human. In Israel, a huge percentage of the Jewish public still seems indifferent to Palestinian suffering but are weary of the “war” and don’t see a good reason for it to continue. In the U.S., Israel’s image has taken a beating as it never has before, and it is clear, to both pro-Israel zealots and supporters of universal human rights, that the assumption of blind aid to Israel is finally starting to be questioned.

Trump never anticipated that Israel’s actions would cause its standing to fall so low in the United States. He’s scrambling to save this powerful tool.

Focus on the starving hostage, not the starving babies

While Trump grudgingly offered the understatement that babies in Gaza “look hungry,” he was much more elaborate in his description of the video of Israeli hostage Evyatar David. “I think it’s horrible. I hope a lot of people do get to see it as bad as it is because I think it’s a horrible thing,” Trump said.

Indeed, the video of David is horrifying. Israel, ever on the lookout for ways to portray itself as the victim, to claim that they are fighting “human animals,” and that their mass slaughter of Palestinians and their starving babies to death is somehow justified, broadcast the video of Evyatar in Times Square.

Many have used the video as an example of Hamas’ cruelty, including world leaders and pro-Israel propagandists. The video is indeed awful and horrible, but why is it being treated as worse than the hundreds of thousands of equally emaciated children, women, and men of Gaza? After all, what exactly did Israel and its supporters think would happen when they decided that no food would be made available to the people in Gaza? The starving hostages are an obscenity, and so are the starving babies of Gaza. And every one of them is the responsibility and fault of the power that forbids the people food: Israel.

Yet some insist on ignoring this obvious reality. On Thursday, Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen claimed that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—the group responsible for the four aid distribution sites that have seen the murders of nearly 1,500 Palestinian aid seekers—had delivered over 108 million meals in Gaza. The source for this obviously false claim? The GHF itself. 

This nonsense that Hamas is, against the wishes of Israel, starving the people of Gaza rings particularly hollow for most people, and for all people with even the slightest bit of knowledge of reality or even common sense. The reality, of course, is that Israel has restricted aid, disallowing all food for three months and now allowing only a trickle. Even Israel’s own figures confirm this. 

The reason you don’t see any maritime or airdrop figures above is that they are so tiny as to be completely insignificant. When Netanyahu said, “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza. There is no starvation in Gaza,” even Trump couldn’t support that blatant a lie. 

But Israel wants to imagine that there is some way that the remaining hostages could be nourished while people are literally fainting in the semblance of streets that still exist in Gaza, while Palestinian babies are barely able to move and are nothing but a thin layer of skin over their protruding bones. 

Israel has decided to allow the remaining hostages to die rather than stop its torture of Palestinian babies to death. It makes perfect sense that they don’t want Americans, Europeans, or even many Israelis to see that.

Aid delivery without UNRWA is a fantasy

Both the U.S. and Israel are dealing in pure fantasy. Neither of them has either the capacity or the desire to take on the task of bringing aid into Gaza. There are no patchwork solutions to this monumental crisis.

We know that there is no real desire to save the people of Gaza from starvation. In Washington, it is a matter of appearances at best, but far from a priority. In Israel, it is nothing more than a desire to continue the program of gradual genocide while allowing those Israelis who might have qualms about starving babies sufficient space to deny the genocide happening right next to them.

Israel and the United States didn’t just conspire to stop aid from entering or being distributed in Gaza. For years, long before October 7, they worked to undermine the one mechanism that could reliably and professionally bring that aid to the people of Gaza. That was UNRWA. 

UNRWA was, for years, a convenient punching bag for both Israel and the U.S., but always before, they always stopped short of destroying the organization’s presence on the ground. If they went that far, Israel would have found itself responsible for supporting the people of Gaza, the vast majority were refugees and thus were served under UNRWA’s mandate. 

For all those years, the U.S. and Israel leveled empty, but devastating, accusations at UNRWA, accusations that were often either supported by or even derived from shady organizations that used their considerable resources to build a wall of propaganda about UNRWA. 

Finally, when Israel was set on its final solution for Gaza, UNRWA served only one purpose: as an organization to be demonized, a symbol for how the entire international system has a fanatical hatred of Israel, based, of course, on antisemitism.

Now, in a Gaza that has been destroyed and where even those who are not on the brink of starvation have already suffered what is likely to be long-term damage to their bodies, there isn’t a real mechanism to deliver aid even if, by some miracle, Israel could be persuaded to allow it. 

However, it is a simple metric for gauging whether anyone is really serious about getting aid to the people of Gaza. Where are the calls to let UNRWA do its job? 

We hear empty slogans of moral outrage in the UK Parliament or in the EU meetings in Brussels. They cry crocodile tears over the suffering in Gaza. 

But none of these Western leaders call for UNRWA to be allowed to do its job. Nor do they object to the ongoing propaganda and lawfare campaigns against UNRWA, campaigns based on hearsay and fabrication. 

Even UNRWA, fully staffed, equipped, and permitted to do its job, would find delivering aid in Gaza challenging, given the total destruction there. But no other agency has even a fraction of the know-how, experience, contacts among the people, or tools to do the job.

You’ll know someone is serious about ending the starvation in Gaza when they demand that UNRWA be allowed to work.