US envoy visits distribution site in Gaza as humanitarian crisis worsens

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff visited southern Gaza on Friday amid international outrage over starvation, shortages and deadly chaos near aid distribution sites.

With food scarce and parcels being airdropped, Witkoff and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee toured one of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s distribution sites in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. Chapin Fay, the group’s spokesperson, said the visit reflected Trump’s understanding of the stakes and that “feeding civilians, not Hamas, must be the priority.”

All four of the group’s sites are in zones controlled by the Israeli military and have become flashpoints of desperation during their months of operation, with starving people scrambling for scarce aid. Hundreds have been killed by either gunfire or trampling.

The Israeli military says it has only fired warning shots at people who approach its forces, and GHF says its armed contractors have only used pepper spray or fired warning shots to prevent deadly crowding.

Witkoff’s visit comes a week after US officials walked away from ceasefire talks in Qatar, blaming Hamas and pledging to seek other ways to rescue Israeli hostages and make Gaza safe.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Witkoff was sent to craft a plan to boost food and aid deliveries, while Trump wrote on social media that the fastest way to end the crisis would be for Hamas to surrender and release hostages.

Officials at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza said they have received the bodies of 25 people, including 13 who were killed while trying to get aid, including near the site that US officials visited. GHF denied anyone was killed at their sites on Friday and said most recent incidents had taken place near United Nations aid convoys.

The remaining 12 were killed in airstrikes, the officials said. Israel’s military did not immediately comment.

Human Rights Watch: ‘Near impossible’

International organizations have said Gaza has been on the brink of famine for the past two years. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the leading international authority on food crises, said recent developments, including a complete blockade on aid for 2 1/2 months, mean the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in Gaza.”

Though the flow of aid has resumed, including via airdrops, the amount getting into Gaza remains far lower than what aid organizations say is needed. A security breakdown in the territory has made it nearly impossible to safely deliver food to starving Palestinians, much of the limited aid entering is hoarded and later sold at exorbitant prices.

At a Friday press conference in Gaza City, representatives of the territory’s influential tribes accused Israel of empowering factions that loot aid sites and implored Witkoff to stay several hours in Gaza to witness life firsthand.

“We want the American envoy to come and live among us in these tents where there is no water, no food and no light,” they said. “Our children are hungry in the streets.”

In a report issued Friday, Human Rights Watch called the current setup “a flawed, militarized aid distribution system that has turned aid distributions into regular bloodbaths.”

“It would be near impossible for Palestinians to follow the instructions issued by GHF, stay safe, and receive aid, particularly in the context of ongoing military operations, Israeli military sanctioned curfews, and frequent GHF messages saying that people should not travel to the sites before the distribution window opens,” the report said. It cited doctors, aid seekers and at least one security contractor.

Since the group’s operations began in late May, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in shootings by Israeli soldiers while on roads heading to the sites, according to witnesses and health officials. The Israeli military has said its troops have only fired warning shots to control crowds.

Responding to the report, Israel’s military blamed Hamas for sabotaging the aid distribution system but said it was working to make the routes under its control safer for those traveling to aid sites. GHF did not immediately respond to questions about the report.

The group has never allowed journalists to visit their sites and Israel’s military has barred reporters from independently entering Gaza throughout the war.

International condemnations have mounted as such reports trickle out of Gaza, including from aid organizations that previously oversaw distribution.

A July 30 video published Thursday by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs showed an aid convoy driving past a border crossing as gunfire ricocheted off the ground near where crowds congregated.

“We were met on the road by tens of thousands of hungry and desperate people who directly offloaded everything from the backs of our trucks,” said Olga Cherevko, an OCHA staff member.

We’ve never lived through such rapid change in the politics of Israel as we are now. Two nights ago more than half of Democratic senators – 27– voted to block some arms sales to Israel. A day before that, the UK and Canada said they will recognize a Palestinian state at the U.N, echoing France’s recent statement.

These are steps that advocates for Palestinians thought might be years away. But today the world is shocked by Israel’s starvation of Gaza, and the mainstream press is at last reporting the charge of genocide.

Israel’s international isolation has begun.

These political changes were driven by the street. For years, Israel’s favorability has been sliding in global opinion and in the U.S. among Democratic voters. But party leaders defied the shift — and then Zohran Mamdani won the NY primary for mayor last month, in a groundswell that overwhelmed Cuomo’s $25 million in negative ads. A poll shows that nearly four of five Democrats in NY say Israel is committing a genocide. And Trump’s base is catching up. “My people are starting to hate Israel,” Trump reportedly warned a “Jewish donor”.

There are several lessons the left should recognize.

Pressure works

We always said that the way to stop Israeli war crimes is for western nations to sanction or abandon Israel. The change in official tone proves the point. Israel is now seeking to moderate its brutality, and reports from Israel say that some Israelis are ashamed by the front-page coverage of starvation. The west could have ended the occupation a long time ago.

Our media failed us

When the reckoning on genocide comes, it will include all the voices who explained away children buried in rubble by American bombs. Liberal voices in the Times, on the cables and NPR acted like Gaza was normal—then the people arose.

“Truthfully, it goes back decades,” Donald Johnson writes. “Israel has been an apartheid state for a long time, even by liberal Zionist standards. Jimmy Carter was right about apartheid in 2006 and the press didn’t want to listen.” (In fact, Carter was pilloried by Wolf Blitzer and Terry Gross and ostracized from the Democratic Party.)

The Israel lobby is exposed

Biden and Harris and Blinken and Power did nothing to stop a genocide, just sent more bombs—why? Democrats for years embraced the illegal settlement project, and Obama insisted on “undivided Jerusalem” language in the Democratic platform in 2012–why? Dem leadership in NY has failed to endorse Mamdani weeks after his victory—why?

There is only one factor that keeps leading Democrats “allegiant” to Israel, as James Carville phrased it, and that is the pro-Israel forces inside the Party, embodied by DMFI and AIPAC and the big donors.

The good news is that the corruption is now obvious. “Support for blocking bombs to Israel, recognizing Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and holding Israel accountable for its violations of the law is not simply the opinion of the majority of Democratic voters, it is the vast, vast majority, and any Democrat who stands with AIPAC instead of their own voters is running the real risk of getting voted out of office,” says Margaret DeReus of IMEU.

While former Obama aide Tommy Vietor said on his podcast that the Dems’ policy of hugging Netanyahu is a failure, he pleads guilty, and — “there is no going back to a pre-October 7 Democratic Party”.

For years the lobby claimed that the U.S. was on Israel’s side because Israel served the American interest, and anti-Israel activists claimed that if Americans only knew they would abandon Israel. The anti-Israel activists were right. There is no American interest in racial oppression. There is no American interest in arming a country that bombs one neighbor after another creating instability across the world.

The liberal Zionist branch of the lobby is also vulnerable. For over a year it has denied that there is a genocide– as it has denied apartheid and ethnic cleansing and war crimes in years past. The liberal Zionists served a vital function for the lobby, keeping progressive Democrats on board. To that end, they have fostered delusions — that real pressure on Israel is bad policy and antisemitic, and that Israel is a “democratic Jewish state.”

Today the liberal Zionists are scrambling to get ahead of the shifting Democratic politics of the issue, but they ought to be challenged. For instance, J.J. Goldberg says Americans should sympathize with Israelis’ “fear at the prospect of accepting a new structure of full equality and integration, as though a century of Palestinian anger will just go away”. There were similar fears in the Jim Crow south and South Africa.

The Jewish community is in turmoil and it should be

The American Jewish community is the most reactionary force in the Democratic Party on Israeli apartheid. Leading Jewish organizations sought to kneecap any politician who stepped out of line. These politics among the most liberal highly educated voting bloc in the U.S. should have produced an internal Jewish crisis a long time ago. Yes, horror over Israeli actions generated Jewish Voice For Peace and IfNotNow 10 and 20 years ago, but today is a revolutionary moment. As Arielle Angel writes, “The Gaza genocide has made plain what many leftist Jews have long feared: that virtually the entire enterprise of Judaism—and nearly every organization charged with stewarding it—is infected with a voracious rot.” (This rot sadly extends to Bernie Sanders, the leading moral voice for Democrats, whose refusal to call a genocide a genocide surely reflects his youth volunteering at an Israeli kibbutz.)

It’s understandable that many Americans are so afraid of the antisemitism label that they won’t call out Jewish organizations’ role in oppressing Palestinians. But Jews can do so freely—and young Jews must take down the pro-genocide establishment.

The root cause of the Israel/Palestine conflict is Zionism

An ideology that grants Jews greater rights to land and to civil freedoms is inherently hateful and will always produce the sort of revolt we saw on October 7 (horrific war crimes against civilians took place in Algeria and South Africa too).

It is great that European politicians are finally trying to give Palestinians sovereignty. The effort is way too late, but it demonstrates the truth that political freedom is all that will guarantee security in the land.

The recognition and denunciation of Zionism must accelerate. Zionism might have made sense 100 years ago (or even 80) as a liberation from European persecution. But over and over as they gained power, Zionists took the wrong path. They chose ethnic cleansing, occupation, and apartheid. They chose disdain for their neighbors in favor of superpower politics. They bragged of their “villa in the jungle” – a racist fantasy of Jewish supremacy that even liberal Zionists like J Street promoted.

Can Israel be reformed? I don’t know. But Zionism cannot be. Know it by its fruits. It is apartheid genocide and famine, and the American people have awakened.

David Grossman, widely considered to be Israel’s most prominent novelist, has described his country’s campaign in Gaza as a genocide.

Speaking to Italian daily La Repubblica, in an interview published earlier today, the award-winning author and recipient of the 2018 Israel Prize for literature said that, after years of resistance to the term, he now “can’t help” but use it:

But now I can’t help myself—not after what I’ve read in the papers, not after the images I’ve seen, not after speaking with people who’ve been there.

Grossman’s comments come just days after two major Israeli rights groups—B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights—said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, amid growing global condemnation of the enforced starvation that has brought the strip to the brink of famine. Israel’s 22-month assault on the besieged enclave has claimed the lives of more than 60,000 people, at least 18,500 of them children (though leading authorities such as The Lancet consider these figures to be a significant undercount). B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights join Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch, and dozens of other human rights organizations in classifying Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.

“The occupation has corrupted us,” Grossman—an outspoken peace activist who was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2017 for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar—went on to say. “I am absolutely convinced that Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. Maybe people are tired of hearing about it, but that’s the truth. We’ve become militarily powerful, and we’ve fallen into the temptation born of our absolute power, and the idea that we can do anything.”

Grossman’s comments are welcome, and will hopefully encourage other prominent cultural figures to finally speak up, but one wonders what took him so long. As is the case with the dozens of western politicians, journalists, and assorted public figures who have concluded that this is the opportune week to become a vertebrate, I can’t help but think about the thousands—the tens of thousands—of innocent lives that would have been saved had those with clout decided, at any point during the last year and a half, that stopping the indiscriminate slaughter of caged civilians was more important than protecting Israeli and American Zionists from terminology they find distasteful.

[h/t The Guardian]

Keir Starmer is preparing to recognise Palestinian statehood as soon as September unless Israel meets key conditions, including reaching a ceasefire and committing to a long-term peace process.

The prime minister’s announcement on Tuesday marked a significant shift in the UK’s longstanding position that it would recognise Palestine as part of a peace process at the point of maximum impact.

Downing Street said Starmer would decide the extent to which Israel and Hamas had met his conditions before he made a decision beforethe UN general assembly in September.

This is the first time the government has set concrete conditions and a timeline for recognition of a Palestinian state.

What will recognising Palestine mean? Recognition is a symbolic step but one that would infuriate the Israeli government, which argues that it would encourage Hamas and reward terrorism. It is in effect a formal, political acknowledgment of Palestinian self-determination – without the need to engage in thorny practicalities such as the location of its borders or capital city. It also allows the establishment of full diplomatic relations that would result in a Palestinian ambassador (rather than a head of mission) being stationed in London and a British ambassador in Palestine. Advocates say it is a way of kickstarting a political process towards an eventual two-state solution. Out of the 193 UN member states, about 140 already recognise Palestine as a state. These include China, India and Russia, as well as a majority of European countries such as Cyprus, Ireland, Norway, Spain and Sweden. But until Thursday, when France announced it intended to recognise Palestine, no G7 country had committed to it.

Why now? Two major international factors and heavy domestic pressure have played a role in the timing of Starmer’s announcement. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, set the ball rolling last week when he announced that France would recognise Palestine at the UN general assembly in September. Starmer has now set himself the same deadline, though unlike Macron he has set conditions for Israel and Hamas. The other international factor was the tacit green light that Donald Trump gave to Starmer on Monday. Asked whether the prime minister should bow to pressure from MPs to recognise Palestine, the US president told reporters: “I’m not going to take a position, I don’t mind him taking a position. I’m looking for getting people fed right now.” Trump’s reaction to France’s announcement was similarly low-key – he said Macron’s position on a Palestinian state “doesn’t matter” or “carry any weight”. Starmer, who has himself expressed horror at the images of starvation in Gaza, has also come under heavy domestic pressure to act. Several of his most senior cabinet ministers – including Angela Rayner and Yvette Cooper – support immediate recognition. Some influential ministers, such as Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood, have raised the issue in cabinet meetings. More than 250 cross-party MPs have signed a letter calling for immediate recognition, including more than a third of Labour MPs. Polling suggests that the public also backs action. In a poll commissioned by Ecotricity, the company founded by Labour donor Dale Vince, and carried out by Survation, 49% of people said the UK should recognise Palestine as a state compared with 13% who said it should not.

What is the detail of the plan? An official government statement issued on Tuesday night said the UK would recognise Palestine at the UN general assembly unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire, makes it clear it will not annex the West Bank, and “takes substantive steps” to end the humanitarian crisis in Gaza including by allowing the UN to supply aid. This effectively requires Israel to revive the prospect of a two-state solution, an idea that Benjamin Netanyahu has long rejected. The UK government’s statement also reiterates its demands for Hamas to immediately release all the hostages, sign up to an immediate ceasefire with Israel, commit to disarmament and accept it will play no part in the government of Gaza. Starmer will assess the extent to which the two parties – Israel and Hamas – have met his conditions in September. The government said that beyond recognition, it was working on a “credible peace plan” with allies to establish transitional governance and security arrangements in Gaza and ensure the delivery of UN aid. It said this plan must involve the withdrawal of Israeli forces and the removal of Hamas leadership from Gaza as steps towards a negotiated two-state solution.

The award-winning Israeli author David Grossman has described his country’s campaign in Gaza as a genocide and said he now “can’t help” but use the term.

“I ask myself: how did we get here?” the celebrated writer and peace activist told the Italian daily La Repubblica in an interview published on Friday.

“How did we come to be accused of genocide? Just uttering that word – ‘genocide’ – in reference to Israel, to the Jewish people, that alone, the fact that this association can even be made, should be enough to tell us that something very wrong is happening to us.”

Grossman said that for many years he had refused to use the term. “But now I can’t help myself – not after what I’ve read in the papers, not after the images I’ve seen, not after speaking with people who’ve been there. This word is an avalanche: once you say it, it just gets bigger, like an avalanche. And it adds even more destruction and suffering,” he said.

Grossman’s comments come days after two major Israeli rights groups said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, amid growing global alarm over starvation in the besieged territory.

The author, who has long been a critic of the Israeli government, told La Repubblica he was using the word “with immense pain and with a broken heart”.

“Reading in a newspaper or hearing in conversations with friends in Europe the association of the words ‘Israel’ and ‘hunger’ – especially when this comes from our own history, from our supposed sensitivity to human suffering, from the moral responsibility we’ve always claimed to hold toward every human being, not just toward Jews – this is devastating,” said Grossman, who won the country’s top literary prize, the Israel prize, in 2018 for his work spanning more than three decades.

“The occupation has corrupted us,” he said. “I am absolutely convinced that Israel’s curse began with the occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. Maybe people are tired of hearing about it, but that’s the truth. We’ve become militarily powerful, and we’ve fallen into the temptation born of our absolute power, and the idea that we can do anything.”

Asked what he thought of France and the UK being among the latest countries preparing to formally recognise a state of Palestine, Grossman said: “I actually think it’s a good idea, and I don’t understand the hysteria around it here in Israel. Maybe dealing with a real state, with real obligations, rather than a vague entity like the Palestinian Authority, will have its advantages. Of course, there would need to be very clear conditions: no weapons, and the guarantee of transparent elections from which anyone who advocates violence against Israel is excluded.”

He said he remained “desperately committed” to the two-state solution. “It will be complex, and both we and the Palestinians will need to act with political maturity in the face of the inevitable attacks that will come.” He added: “There is no other plan.”