U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee met with the U.S.-backed aid organization that’s been setting death traps for starving Palestinians.
Huckabee said Friday morning that he and special envoy Steve Witkoff visited Gaza to “learn the truth” about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, whose aid sites have become the locus of mass casualty events on a near-daily basis.
The United Nations reported Thursday that at least 859 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to receive aid at GHF sites between May 27 and July 31, mostly by the Israeli military.
Huckabee seemed pleased after receiving a briefing from the Israeli military and meeting with GHF workers on the ground. “GHF delivers more than one million meals a day, an incredible feat!” Huckabee wrote in a post on X.
But GHF has now been implicated in hundreds of Palestinians deaths, as the widespread famine in Gaza worsens.
“Israeli forces are not only deliberately starving Palestinian civilians, but they are now gunning them down almost every day as they desperately seek food for their families,” said Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch. “US-backed Israeli forces and private contractors have put in place a flawed, militarized aid distribution system that has turned aid distributions into regular bloodbaths.”
GHF’s funding sources are opaque, but Trump said Friday that Israel had agreed to match a $30 million donation, according to Reuters.
GHF has also been criticized as systematically ineffectual. Anthony Aguilar, a retired 25-year U.S. Army veteran and Green Beret who’d been working for the group as a security contractor described GHF as “an enterprise that has failed from the beginning.”
“It’s abhorrent. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comedy. It’s not comedy, because it is absolutely tragic,” he told Mother Jones. Aguilar also alleged that his fellow contractors used nonlethal and lethal munitions in unauthorized ways, cheering as they fired blindly into a crowd of Palestinians.
For his part, Huckabee doesn’t seem all that interested in easing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza—seeing that it would require him to acknowledge Palestinians’ humanity. Earlier this week, Huckabee said that France’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state was “like letting the Nazis have a victory after World War II.”
And for all of Trump’s too-little too-late statements about the starvation in Gaza, he seems to feel about the same. After Canada issued a statement backing a two-state solution Thursday, Trump lashed out in a Truth Social post, threatening a prospective trade deal between the U.S. and Canada.