The claim that Israel is solely responsible for the suffering of civilians in Gaza ignores important context and has been clearly rebutted by Ambassador Mike Huckabee in his late-May interview with NPR.
Huckabee stated: “The prolonged suffering for everybody is on Hamas, and I’m outraged that the UK, Canada, France – they’re blaming the wrong perpetrator.” He also noted, “I’m not in the position to tell the Israelis how to conduct their war... My family members weren’t murdered and massacred, mutilated” by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023.
Israel is not engaging in indiscriminate violence but conducting a war against terrorism – a campaign with no more moral ambiguity than America’s response to Al-Qaeda after 9/11. Hamas made the deliberate choice to start this war, and Israel is acting not only in self-defense, but also to prevent future conflicts.
Let’s be clear: Hamas started this war. Refusing to hold them accountable only emboldens more violence.
Intensifying food crisis in Gaza
Let’s focus on another part of Huckabee’s comments. If what the ambassador meant by “prolonged suffering” are the claims of hunger and famine, how can we know what the real situation with food has been in Gaza?
The claims that Gazans were starving and that Israel was to blame started within days of the Hamas-led onslaught on October 7. The accusations against Israel were as wrong then as they are now.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) on October 8, 2023, already said Gazans were running out of food.
Here’s what the WFP said within 36 hours of the Hamas invasion: “As the conflict intensifies, civilians, including vulnerable children and families, face mounting challenges in accessing essential food supplies, with food distribution networks disrupted and food production severely hampered by hostilities.”
One of the contacts listed on the October 8 WFP press release was Alia Zaki. In an October 28 video on X.com, Zaki was featured saying “Nearly half of the population in Gaza was already struggling to find food even before this war started.”
WFP already stated in a September 19, 2023, press release that: “Increased poverty, stagnation, and limited access to employment and essential food supplies are key challenges in Gaza today.”
So the WFP claimed weeks before the Hamas attacks that Gazans were already having such difficulties that its “cash-based transfers play a fundamental role in establishing a robust social safety net.”
Hamas does not prioritize feeding the people
It is safe to bet that Hamas was taking the WFP’s money in order to buy their terrorists weapons and pay their salaries. Gaza’s Hamas government made its priority readying for war and not the feeding of the people.
WFP wants us to believe that even though there was not enough food over 600 days ago, that people are starving now: these accusations defy common sense. If Gazans were already nearly starving 600 days ago, how didn’t hundreds of thousands starve to death since October 7?
The truth is that the UN agency has always been wrong and we may never know if it has all been caused intentionally or through incompetence.
On May 25, Politico published an article quoting WFP’s top bureaucrat Cindy McCain as saying “Right now, we have 500,000 people inside of Gaza that are extremely food insecure, and could be on the verge of famine.”
This despite Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs explaining on X/Twitter the very same day that “since the beginning of the war, [the] IDF has facilitated the entry of over 1.7 million tons of humanitarian aid into Gaza [and] just this past week... 388 aid trucks delivered food [and other supplies].”
Why didn’t McCain and the WFP praise the IDF for this? The agency will never praise Israel and it refuses to place any blame on Hamas, or the Gazans that chose Hamas at the ballot box.
WFP’s director told NBC’s Meet the Press on May 3, 2024, that “there is full-blown famine in the north [of Gaza], and it’s moving its way south.”
Surely a “full-blown famine” a year ago would have meant a huge percentage of Gazans would have already starved to death – but that has not happened.
How can anyone take WFP at their word?
The facts do not add up. The WFP cannot be trusted. Gazans are not starving – and it is Israel that is preventing that from happening. The UN agency’s top leaders and its managers in the Middle East must be replaced if WFP is to be ever seen as a true source of information.
The writer is national chairman of Americans For A Safe Israel (www.AFSI.org), a leading pro-Israel advocacy and education organization.