Washington: About three months after the October 7, 2023, attack, which intensified Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip, employees of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had warned officials in the then US president Joe Biden‘s administration that northern Gaza has turned into an “apocalyptic wasteland,” with extreme food and aid shortages, with the written memo being blocked from being widely circulated in the government.
According to a Reuters report, the internal draft of 2024 detailed the harrowing condition observed by the United Nations staff who went there on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission in January and February.
The UN staff said they saw human bones on the roads, bodies in abandoned cars, and “catastrophic human needs, particularly for food and safe drinking water.” However, the then US ambassador to Jerusalem, Israel, Jack Lew, and his deputy Stephanie Hallet, stopped the message from being distributed widely within the US government, Reuters said.
According to them, the cable had no balance.
One of the five such messages sent in the first half of the year, it documented the quick deterioration of health, food and sanitary conditions and the collapse of social order for people living in Gaza.
Three former US officials who Reuters spoke to said that descriptions from Gaza were “unusually graphic” and would have drawn the attention of senior US officials if the message had been spread more broadly within the administration.
They also said that it would garner more criticism towards Biden’s National Security Memorandum (presidential order that tells US government agencies what to do on national security matters), which allowed the supply of US weapons and intelligence on Israel’s observance of international law.
The US embassy in Jerusalem supervised most of the cables about Gaza, including the ones from other countries.
“While cables weren’t the only means of providing humanitarian information … they would have represented an acknowledgement by the ambassador of the reality of the situation in Gaza,” Andrew Hall, then crisis operations specialist for USAID, said.
US officials were aware of the humanitarian situation in Gaza
While the cables were being drafted in early 2024, White House and other top US officials knew of the worsening condition in northern Gaza, through the National Security Council. The same time when aid organisations were warning of famine risks.
“There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop,” Biden told reporters in February 2024, adding that Israel’s action in Gaza was “over the top.”
In January 2024, the embassy had approved the wider circulation of an internal message about Gaza’s food insecurity and even made it to the President’s daily briefing, which is the compilation of the most prioritised national security analysis and information.
The cable looked at famine risks in northern Gaza and the potential for acute food insecurity in the other regions of the Strip because of the amount of food deliveries.
It was reportedly one of the first intensive reports from the US agency on the situation inside Gaza, including the rising food insecurity in the southern part of the enclave, the report said.
As it was noticed by several top officials, Jon Finer, deputy national security advisor, who also received the cable had told colleagues at the time that he was astonished by how fast the food situation had worsened, the report said.
Six former US officials reiterated that senior officials were not receiving consistent first-hand accounts due to limited access to the area during the military action.
“Simply put, humanitarian expertise was repeatedly sidelined, blocked, ignored,” a former member of USAID’s Middle East disaster response team told Reuters.
No USAID staff in Gaza since 2019
Since USAID has had no staff in Gaza since 2019, its reporting has relied mainly on UN agencies, unlike earlier periods when US officials depended heavily on the agency’s reporting.
The report also alleged that deputy ambassador Stephanie Hallett would sometimes ask for cables to be edited or reframed and questioned whether certain cables were necessary. Moreover, White House officials would argue against the USAID analyses that said civilians were starving in Gaza.
Doubts over the humanitarian reporting led to internal tension within the National Security Council and frustrated USAID officials working on Gaza. The question was always like “where are all the skinny kids?” one former official said.
The February cable was cleared internally, but Stephanie Hallett allegedly blocked it from wider circulation. According to former officials, she would not have done so without the knowledge or approval of ambassador Jack Lew, since only one senior sign-off was required.
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