Today, Explained - All eyes back on Gaza

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

From podcaster Theo Von to children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel to the new pope to President Trump, a strange coalition of people is criticizing Israel’s latest actions in Gaza. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Denise Guerra, edited by Jollie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. A Palestinian man in Rafah carrying food aid delivered by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana. Help us plan for the future of Today, Explained by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey. Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Things in Gaza have been bad for like forever, but they're getting so bad that the coalition of people talking about it has got to be the most far-reaching it's ever been. From the podcaster Theo Vonn, that I think we're watching probably like, you know, one of the sickest things that's ever happened, to the children's entertainer Miss Rachel, it's sad that people try to make it controversial when you speak out for children that are facing immeasurable suffering. To the new pope, Pope Bob.

To a former Israeli prime minister. Couple of million people living in Gaza and they say they should all starve and be demolished. This is a call for war crime by— To even President Trump. We're going to help the people of Gaza get some food. We're going to ask if it'll make a difference on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from Sophos. With Sophos, no matter your business's size,

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so download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees exclusions and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Tia Goldenberg is a correspondent for the Associated Press in Jerusalem. We asked her what's going on with aid in Gaza. Israel and the US are trying to get a new aid system off the ground. Throughout the war, you've had traditional aid groups like the UN and other charities providing aid to Gazans where they are in the Gaza Strip. And Israel for the entirety of the war has accused Hamas of siphoning off that aid and

using it to bolster its rule in Gaza. Hamas steals the supplies and prevents the people of Gaza from getting them. It uses these supplies to finance its terror machine, which is aimed directly at Israel and our civilians. And this we cannot accept. Aid groups say there's been no significant diversion, but Israel's been looking for a way to get aid away from the UN and aid groups. It also obviously has lots of years long skepticism and tensions between Israel and the UN. So what we've seen over the past couple of days is this new aid mechanism get off the ground. The linchpin of this aid

mechanism is a group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is backed by the US and Israel and uses American contractors for security. The shadowy organization faces accusations of helping Israel fulfill its military objectives, of excluding Palestinians, and of failing to adhere to humanitarian principles.

The American company running this new scheme says that 8,000 boxes of food have been handed out so far. But remember, the population of Gaza is 2.2 million. Now what we've also seen over the past couple of days is the chaos that surrounds this attempt to kind of wrest aid from the traditional aid groups delivering it. There's video circulating online now and it shows the moment that thousands of Palestinians flooded this distribution center in Rafa. There was no order. The people rushed to take something. We didn't get anything. There was shooting and we fled. Now this came hours after the organization's executive director said that he was resigning even before the foundation began working.

Jake Woods's resignation comes just two months after he was asked to lead the organization. In a statement issued by the foundation, Wood made his reasoning clear. It is clear that it's not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence, which I will not abandon. The effort itself is really controversial because the UN and aid groups say they're not going to work with the GHF. They think that if they do, it will violate their core humanitarian principles because Palestinians have to essentially be displaced. They have

to move to reach these aid centers and they don't want to be part of that. They see that aid is being politicized or even weaponized. The project has been controversial, seen by critics as politicizing and militarizing aid and using food distribution to cattle Palestinians into diminishingly smaller areas with selective distribution used to starve out Israel's adversaries. We need all types of aid, not aid that is cherry picked by the Israeli side that we are allowed to get in. And what we've seen over the past few months, since March 2nd, is Israel blocking aid from entering Gaza entirely. That ended about a week ago when Israel decided

it would let in a limited amount of aid. And so during these few weeks, or nearly three months actually, no aid was being let into Gaza, no food, no medicine, no fuel, and you had a situation where food experts were warning that nearly one million Palestinians barely had enough access to food, and nearly half a million Palestinians barely had enough access to food. And nearly half a million Palestinians were at the risk of possible starvation.

I saw people running there. I decided to go too. People said it was scary. I didn't care. It was dangerous or not. I was going to go. I want to feed my children. Just trying to get rice is a struggle for this 18-year-old.

Everyone's pushing, she says. There's no flour. This is the beginning of a famine. So the situation is incredibly dire, and it remains so, even though Israel has begun letting a limited amount of aid into Gaza. You're calling it a limited amount of aid, so it's by design not enough aid? 18 S1

I mean, I can't tell you what the designs of the Israeli government are. Israel is accused of aid groups and world courts of using starvation as a weapon of war. But Israel says that it has legitimate concerns that this aid is being used to fuel Hamas's rule in Gaza. At the end of the day, Palestinians on the ground are the ones that are suffering and suffering dramatically. How are these policies around aid going over with Israelis in Israel? October 7th, 2023, Hamas's attacks were a huge, huge shock for Israelis, and they're

still traumatized. This also falls in the context of an ongoing war, where there are still 58 hostages, about a third of them believed to be alive, being held in Gaza. And so Israelis believe that soldiers are not just fighting in Gaza, they're fighting to free these hostages. So throughout the war, it's important to note that Israeli media has also limited the type of coverage that it has shown to Israelis. Some of the harshest images that you see on international media just don't find a place in Israeli media. They tend to promote the Israeli narrative that Hamas is solely to blame

for what's happening to civilians in Gaza. And so there isn't, there hasn't been too much of a discussion about the humanitarian crisis in the public discourse. That said, there has been somewhat of a shift in recent days or weeks. We're seeing there's a protest movement, an anti-war protest movement, that has a very small but growing contingent of protesters who hold up pictures of Palestinian children who have been killed throughout the war. I want to say to the people of Gaza, we are with you. We know that you are innocent and we are fighting to end this destruction of your city and of your lives. We are refusing genocide, also Jewish people in Israel.

We are standing beside Palestinians. They are going through the worst period in their history, including the Nakba in 1948, and we absolutely cannot stay silent. A leading opposition politician the other day made some of the harshest comments against Israel's conduct and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. You have an Israeli former general, Yair Golan, saying a sane country does not attack civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not expel civilian populations.

Which sparked an uproar and there was lots of condemnations across the political spectrum, but it also sparked a discussion about Israel's conduct and what it is doing and the toll of the war on civilians. So I mean, it's not a wave yet of discussion, but there is kind of sparks looking into or beginning to discuss the humanitarian situation in Gaza among Israelis. And meantime, is any of this getting Israel closer to getting back these 58 hostages, one third of whom are believed to still be alive?

Israel and Hamas were engaged in a ceasefire earlier this year, which Israel ended up shattering about eight weeks in. And, you know, the ceasefire led to hostages being freed, it led to a lull in fighting. And then after Israel resumed fighting, it decided it was going to ramp up the pressure on Hamas. You know, part of that tactic was to block the aid going into Gaza. It also said it would ratchet up its offensive on the territory with the aim of defeating Hamas and freeing the hostages.

That's been its war aims throughout. In the past couple of weeks since this new offensive began, there's been intensification of strikes. Israel says that as part of this plan, it wants to seize all of Gaza. Our forces are capturing more and more territory, eliminating and clearing out Hamas terrorists. All of the Gaza Strip will be under the security control of Israel. It wants to hold onto territory. It wants to move the population of Gaza to the south.

Ultimately, we intend to have large safe zones in the south of Gaza, and the Palestinian population will move there for their own safety while we conduct combat in other zones. And that aid plan we discussed earlier is part of this, of moving the population south. So, I mean, it's trying all these new tactics to try to reach its war aims. So far, it's still unclear how different this intensification of its offensive, how it'll manage to do anything different than the last nearly 20 months of fighting did. You know, this war has been going on for so long, and Israel still has not reached its aim of dismantling Hamas and freeing the hostages. And in fact, an overwhelming amount of hostages

who have been freed, have been freed through ceasefire deals and not through military pressure that Israel is now ramping up. So why ramp up military pressure instead of negotiating? Is that desperation? Israel and Hamas stand very far apart on how they see the end of this war playing out. Hamas says it's prepared to free all the hostages immediately for a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and an end to the war. Israel obviously wants its hostages freed, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he's not prepared to end the war unless Hamas is dismantled. This war can end tomorrow. It can end if Hamas lays down its arms and returns our hostages. And so this has been a key sticking point throughout the war, and neither side is relenting, you know, no matter how much military pressure Israel puts on Hamas you know it's killed its leaders it's devastated

the territory it's just been an intense intense conflict and yet that hasn't dislodged Hamas from its position Netanyahu meanwhile is under a lot of political pressure from his governing coalition to continue the war it's hard to see how the sides reconcile and come to an agreement that ends this war. Tia Goldenberg, Associated Press AP News.com. Trump ices out Netanyahu when we're back on Today Explained. Support for this show comes from Storyworth. Storyworth for Father's Day.

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I'm Sean Rommers for I'm here with Josh Keating who covers national security and foreign policy here at Vox. Josh, Gaza was one of the things that Donald Trump wanted to solve as soon as he entered office. How is he talking about Gaza now? Well, you know, in some ways, to give him credit, he didn't solve it, but there was a ceasefire in place when he took office. This deal was developed and negotiated under my administration,

but its terms will be implemented, for the most part, by the next administration. So incoming Trump's team's cooperation with the outgoing Biden's team helped secure a ceasefire in January, which lasts until March. The war in Gaza reignited. Israel's military says it is targeting Hamas with new airstrikes in the Gaza Strip. Hamas says it means the ceasefire is over. Various proposals by U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff had been rejected by Hamas. You know, now reportedly he's very upset by the images coming out of Gaza, the sort of

pictures of Malinor's children he's seeing. And you know, he's made several statements to the effect that he wants to see this war wrapped up quickly. On Gaza, we want to see if we can stop that. And Israel, we've been talking to them, and we want to see if we can stop that whole situation as quickly as possible. We're almost oddly back kind of where we were

under the Biden administration, where we have all these stories coming out every few days, where either Trump or senior officials speaking on background are quoted saying how frustrated they are with the Netanyahu government, how they're losing patience. We've got to get that taken care of. A lot of people are starving. A lot of people are, there's a lot of bad things going on. But the war doesn't seem to be ending.

It's continuing and it's not really clear just how much pressure the Trump administration is willing to bring to bear to get a ceasefire in place. I guess it wasn't surprising to most people that he couldn't figure this out instantly, considering I don't know the history here. But maybe more surprising is that his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cooled down so much. What exactly happened there? Yeah, I mean you could basically define the Trump administration's

mid-east policy in its first term as give Netanyahu what he wants. I speak to you today as a lifelong supporter and true friend of Israel. Some of the dramatic moves included moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the dispute at Golan Heights, and what may have been the kind of crowning achievement of the Trump administration's first-term foreign policy, the Abraham Accords, which are this series of deals under which

several Arab countries established formal diplomatic relations with Israel for the first time. I took a risk in doing them and they've been an absolute bonanza for the countries that have joined. So I think the Israelis, when Trump came in, had every reason to assume that, you know, they had their guy in the White House again, you know, after, you know, some of the frustrations they had with the Biden administration. But putting Gaza to the side for a second, what's been really striking to me

is the degree to which the Trump administration is just kind of pursuing its priorities in the Middle East without seemingly any concern over appearing to be aligned with Israel. It's hard to imagine any of the last few administrations doing things like having direct negotiations with Hamas to secure the release of an Israeli-American hostage. Now we understand that this was the result of direct four-way talks which led to the release again with countries like the U.S., Qatar, Egypt and Hamas. In Gaza, we know that the president during his trip throughout the Middle East will not meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Some say it is viewed as somewhat as a slight.

They've also restarted nuclear talks with Iran, perhaps willing to countenance a deal that would leave Iran with some kind of nuclear enrichment, which is a deal basically comparable to the one negotiated by Barack Obama that Trump tore up a decade ago, and which the Israelis famously hated that deal, wanted it torn up. And then a third example is, yes, the US launched this bombing campaign against the Houthis,

the rebels in Yemen who've been attacking, shipping in the Red Sea. But when they agreed to stop that bombing a week ago, the deal that they reached with the Houthis basically stipulated that this group wouldn't attack American ships anymore. It said nothing about continuing attacks on Israel. And actually, the Houthis have continued lobbing missiles at Israel. And so, you know, the implicit message of that is that they basically left Israel on its own to deal with the Houthis. So this is stuff that's just kind of remarkable to see from an administration, from a president

who's basically touted himself as the most pro-Israel US president in history. What about the rest of the world? How are they responding to the situation in Gaza right now? Well, I mean, we're seeing European allies who were long reluctant to criticize Israel, kind of making their positions a lot more clear. I mean, there was a joint statement from the leaders of France, Canada and the UK. We will not stand by while the Netanyahu government pursues these egregious actions. If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive

and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response. We oppose any attempt to expand settlements in the West Bank. Even Germany, the government that has perhaps been, other than the US, been the staunchest supporter of Israel within the West, within NATO, has said that it sort of no longer finds Israel's actions acceptable.

What the Israeli army is now doing in the Gaza Strip, I no longer understand, frankly, what its objective is. To cause such suffering to the civilian population, as has increasingly been the case in recent days, can no longer be justified as a fight against Hamas terrorism. Is it making any difference? This may also have been one factor among many that led to the resumption of humanitarian aid. But it's a lot easier for him to brush off the pressure from these European governments who are sort of viewed as sort of implicitly anti-Israel anyway, than it would be for him

to brush it off coming from Trump, who's supposedly Netanyahu's guy. He's, you know, this is supposed to be the most pro-Israel government ever. So if they're losing Trump's backing, I think that's in a lot of ways more meaningful. Okay, so you're saying that if Trump did the thing that Biden did actually do briefly and suspended military aid to Israel in some fashion,

it could actually turn the tide here. Trump wants to figure out a deal here, he says, at least. He's turned his back on Netanyahu, a little, at least. Why not go the extra step? I think cutting off support for Israel would be, you know, a much more dramatic step that I have a hard time seeing this president take. I mean, it's important to remember too that there's almost this split screen going on

with how Trump approaches this issue. When it comes to domestic policy, I think he's sort of like followed through on this most pro-Israel president ever title. You know, the president has effectively tried to criminalize criticism of Israel in many respects. He's deported US residents who've been involved in anti-Israel protests. He's punished universities.

You know, it's funny. In some ways, Israel's almost been a domestic issue for this administration rather than a foreign policy one, but I think maintaining that split screen is going to be harder if you get to actually taking steps to sort of punish or restrict aid to Israel on the international stage. That puts the president in a very tricky situation here. If he is genuinely concerned about these images of starving children, where does that path lead him?

I could see it leading to effective sort of public disengagement. I mean, we're seeing a sort of similar dynamic play out in the Russia-Ukraine situation where they're just kind of getting frustrated progress is not being made and they might just sort of wash their hands of the negotiating process you know and continue sending weapons to Israel and say it's not really our problem anymore. Josh.KeatingVox.com, Avishai Artsi and Denise Guerra produced the program today, Jolie Meyer is edited, Laura Bullard is our senior researcher on factsax and Andrea Christensdottir was our sole

audio engineer for this episode of Today Explained. you