President Donald Trump spoke Friday about his administration’s support for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the American nonprofit group that is supplying millions of meals to Palestinians in Gaza.
Speaking in an Oval Office with the foreign ministers of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, who had just signed a peace deal at the State Department, Trump answered a reporter’s question about Gaza.
“We’re supplying, as you know, a lot of money, a lot of food, to that area — because we have to,” the president said. Though he did not mention GHF directly, the president was referring to the announcement earlier this week that the State Department had approved $30 million in funding for the group, which is distributing two to three million meals a day in Gaza.
The GHF is an alternative to aid provided by United Nations (UN) agencies, which is often looted by armed gangs and Hamas. Hamas keeps some aid for itself and sells the rest on the black market, causing Palestinians to suffer twice over — once from a lack of food, twice from exorbitant prices.
Hamas and the United Nations have denounced the GHF, and Hamas has published claims that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers are killing Palestinians who arrive at GHF distribution sites for food. Mainstream media outlets in the west have often repeated such false claims, before retracting them. (The GHF notes that there is no violence at its sites, while violent incidents have taken place at UN aid sites.)
The GHF has offered to work with the UN, though UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has rejected that outreach. On Friday, he claimed that GHF is “inherently unsafe” and that it is “killing people,” without providing evidence.
In the Oval Office, Trump noted the problem of theft from other aid sources: “Some of it’s being taken by some bad people. … they end up stealing the food, and selling it. But we have a pretty good system now. So we’re helping with that.”
He also referred to the effort by the UN and other international critics to discredit GHF. “It’s too bad other countries aren’t helping out. Nobody’s helping out. We’re doing that because I think we have to, on a humanitarian basis.”
Trump added that he believed a deal could be reached to end ongoing fighting in Gaza soon: “We think within the next week we’re going to get a ceasefire.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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