Aaron Mate: As Gaza starves, Trump tells Israel to ‘finish the job’

“The US-Israeli starvation siege and dismantlement of the United Nations aid system serves the guiding Israeli goal of making Gaza unlivable and pushing its surviving residents into permanent expulsion.”

(86) As Gaza starves, Trump tells Israel to ‘finish the job’

As global outcry mounted this week over the Israeli siege of Gaza, President Trump and his Special Envoy, Steve Witkoff, announced that they are abandoning ceasefire talks with Hamas, and with it any pretense of concern for the territory’s two million Palestinians.

“Hamas didn’t really want to make a deal. I think they want to die and it’s very, very bad,” Trump told reporters. “It got to a point where you’re going to have to finish the job… They’re going to have to clean it up.” Witkoff likewise accused Hamas of failing to act in “good faith,” and said the US would “now consider alternative options” to “try to create a more stable environment for the people of Gaza.”

In the current environment, the people of Gaza are enduring Trump-backed, Israeli-imposed “mass starvation,” as a joint statement from 115 aid organizations warned. The Israeli siege, the groups said, is leading to “record rates of acute malnutrition,” particularly among children and the elderly. According to the United Nations, over a third of Gaza’s population is going without food for several days and 90% lack access to clean water.

The aid groups’ warning comes more than two months after Trump acknowledged that “a lot of people are starving” in Gaza, and promised to “take care” of it. Yet Trump has done nothing but support the Israeli blockade. Right before Trump promised to “take care” of starving Palestinians, an Israeli official expressed gratitude that when it comes to pressuring Israel “to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza, Trump [has] made no such requests.”

Instead of pushing Israel to allow in aid, Trump has partnered with Israel to destroy the United Nations system for delivering it. As Trump took office in January, Israel enacted a ban on the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, UNRWA, the culmination of a campaign that began under Joe Biden. In the months since, Israel has blocked UN groups from delivering aid, denied visas to senior UN officials, and replaced them with the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” a US-funded Israeli front group run by veteran intelligence operatives and private mercenaries. Even some GHF executives and board members have been unable to go through with the ruse. This includes founding CEO Jake Wood, who resigned upon the group’s inception and accused it of failing to uphold “humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality.”

The GHF has reduced the number of aid sites in Gaza from around 400 to just four – all but one in the south of Gaza, forcing desperate people to make dangerous, lengthy marches by foot. The GHF’s “aid” sites, run by armed US contractors operating under Israeli military control, have doubled as death traps. Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire on hungry crowds, killing over 1,100 Palestinians since the GHF began operations. This means that more Palestinians have been murdered lining up for food under the GHF’s watch than Israeli civilians– including by Israeli military fire under the “Hannibal Directive” – were killed on Oct. 7^th 2023.

Israel and the US have waged their siege of Gaza and deployment of the GHF on the pretext that Hamas has stolen UN food deliveries, a transparent lie newly exposed by Israeli and US insiders. According to Israeli sources, including two senior military officials, “the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations,” the New York Times reports. In fact, the military officials conceded, the UN “was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.” An internal US government analysis reached the same conclusion, finding “no reports alleging Hamas” stole aid from US-funded humanitarian deliveries.

The US-Israeli starvation siege and dismantlement of the United Nations aid system serves the guiding Israeli goal of making Gaza unlivable and pushing its surviving residents into permanent expulsion. In a visit to Washington this month, Netanyahu referred to his vision as “free choice… if people want to stay, they can stay, but if they want to leave, they should be able to leave.” He added that the US and Israel are working “very closely” to find countries that will “give the Palestinians a better future.” This future denies Palestinians the right of return to their ancestral, stolen homes in Israel or to an independent state of their own. The latter possibility was once nominally supported by US presidents like George W. Bush, but is now dismissed with open contempt. After French President Emmanuel Macron announced this week that his government will recognize Palestinian statehood, Trump responded: “What he says doesn’t matter. That statement doesn’t carry any weight.”

As a practical observation, Trump is correct. The only international actor that matters in the Israel-Palestine crisis is the United States, which has long used its weight to block a diplomatic settlement and support Israeli aggression, including the overlooked land theft and terror in the occupied West Bank.

As a senior administration official recently told the Wall Street Journal, “the White House coordinates closely with Israel and has considerable influence over Netanyahu because the prime minister knows that ‘the United States literally is the sole reason the state of Israel exists.’” Accordingly, the US is the sole reason why Israel is getting away with denying the starving Palestinians of Gaza that same right.