Today, Explained - Gaza's breaking point

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

Israel says it will allow more food aid to reach starving Palestinians, but it’s going to be tough if the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation remains in the mix. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Jolie Myers, fact checked by Rebeca Ibarra and Amina Al-Sadi, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, 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 charity distributes meals to Palestinians facing food shortages in Gaza. (Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Basically everyone except Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be gravely concerned about starvation in Gaza. More than 108 organizations like Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam just signed a letter saying that restrictions, delays, and fragmentation under Israel's total siege have created chaos, starvation, and death. Thirty-ish countries, including a bunch of Israel's own allies, have issued a statement condemning the drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.

Even President Trump is balking. Here's a bit of what he said on Monday from Scotland. We have to help on a humanitarian basis before we do anything. We have to get the kids fed. Gaza's breaking point on Today Explained. This is a true story. It happened right here in my town. One night, 17 kids woke up, got out of bed, walked into the dark, and they never came back. I'm the director of Barbarian. A lot of people died in a lot of weird ways. You're not gonna find it in the news because the police covered everything all up.

On August 8th. This is where the story really starts. You're listening to Today Explained. My name is Anat Pellad, and I'm a reporter for the Wall Street Journal based in Tel Aviv covering the war. And it seems like this war has reached maybe yet another breaking point in just the past few days. Can you tell us what's going on?

Definitely. So we're seeing a dire hunger crisis, starvation in the strip. And you know, this has just caused international condemnation. We're seeing a lot of countries, we saw a group of almost 30 countries speaking out against it, and we saw over 100 humanitarian and charity groups talking about it. And what this caused was a lot of pressure on Israel in the past few days. And on Saturday, it actually had to up the aid as a result of this pressure. They're saying a few things will happen.

They're saying that they're going to reintroduce air drops, which are a very expensive form of aid distribution that actually is not the most effective. You can get a lot more aid through aid trucks on ground routes. And they're saying they're going to, you know, have these pauses and the fighting so that people can get to the aid safely. And they're saying they're facilitating more aid to come in from the UN. The starvation that we're seeing inside the Gaza Strip is a result of two things and that is the first that Israel basically stopped any aid, fuel or medicine from coming into the strip after, you know, a January ceasefire fell

apart. And that just caused a really, you know, like horrible situation in terms of food security. And then when it ended that it launched a new controversial program along with the US. It's an Israeli, you know, American backed program to basically totally reshape how aid is going to enter Gaza. And that did not work. And that program, of course, is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. We've talked about it on the show before. We're going to talk about it much more today.

But before we do, can you just tell us how dire things have become? I mean, people have been hungry in Gaza throughout this war, but it feels like things have become far more deadly in the past few weeks. There's reporting that one in five children is malnourished and that dozens so far at least have died. Yeah, the situation is, I think, the worst we've seen since the start of the war. And you see that, I think, in the images, the videos that are all over the news. And you see a lot more desperation.

We've had enough of starvation and oppression, enough of staying in the streets like dogs, where no one looks at us, where we can't find anything for our children to eat or drink. Nohan Salha's five-month-old daughter is one of 30 children here suffering from malnutrition. I can't do anything for her, she says. It's a really hard thing for a mother to feel like this. It's indescribable. We've also seen other scenes in Gaza, you know, where, you know, UN trucks are coming in and people just storm them because they're so, they hungry they're desperate so the scenes are just horrible. We entered the death trap near the tanks and we saw the soldiers and they shot at us.

They shot us with flares and bullets. Look at the young men all the bags of flour have blood on them. Listen we are bringing this for our children. It gets overcrowded it's like an ocean of people coming and waiting for aid. Crowded, chaotic and dangerous, as there is ongoing heavy shooting by machine guns. And of course, adding to the sense of chaos and anarchy in Gaza around aid, or just around the entire situation, is the fact that something like a thousand Palestinians have died trying to get aid. And your team at the Wall Street Journal has been doing on the ground reporting

on what exactly is going on at these aid sites through this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Can you tell us what you've seen there? Yeah. So basically, Israel launched this controversial new program. Israeli-American-backed, a little more than two months ago. Our reporting shows that it was meant to eventually replace a system that has been in place since the start of the war, and that is basically aid trucks coming in from the UN mostly, and aid organizations, and they were going to around 400 aid distribution sites across Gaza.

And Israel has claimed over the war that Hamas has been taking over control of aid, and specifically, it argues UN aid. Hamas rob, steals this humanitarian aid, and then accuses Israel of not supplying it. Israel, for a long time, we know starting as early as December 2023, there were meetings about this, decided to try to completely change the way aid goes in by basically privatizing it. So it brought in private American contractors, and a new foundation was launched called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And so it set up four aid sites to replace hundreds of sites. My colleague, Dov Lieber, who I reported a piece on this last week,

we basically got access through an army embed to go see how the distribution goes. And so basically what my colleague saw, and he took videos and he's shown me that and we describe it in the article. About an hour I watched people walk about two kilometers from their homes in Khan Yunus or in the Marwasi tent camp near the seaside and gather outside the aid distribution site. And so my colleague stood at the height of a makeshift military installation and he could see this pool of people growing. But it was clear that already the crowd near the site was getting rowdy,

even if people were walking to it slowly and calmly. And then suddenly an instant, you know, this rush began, and men broke through the security line. All hell broke loose, very, very fast. Suddenly everyone began sprinting towards the aid distribution site, running as fast as they could. And everybody, as quickly as they could,

grabbed the boxes of aid. We could hear what sounded like the sound of semi-automatic gunfire. And basically within 15 minutes, all the food was gone. It was this mad dash. The moment people recognize that order has broken down, they move as quickly as they can to get any aid because what they don't know is if this site will be open tomorrow

or the next day. They don't know if this is the last box of aid that they'll be getting for some time. And you know, while there were no casualties reported from that site that day, the next day on July 16th, the Wednesday, at least 20 people were trampled to death at the same exact site. And GHF said that its security contractors had pepper sprayed people rushing that day. So you know, it did not go very smoothly. Who's doing the shooting at these sites?

You guys were there, you have video, what did you see? Yeah, so our reporting shows that it's Israeli troops that have been firing what they call warning shots at Palestinians trying to come to these aid sites. And basically, the army has acknowledged that, but I was able to speak to a reservist, so an Israeli military soldier who was stationed in Southern Gaza. And he told me that he saw the troops opening these warning shots,

which could be in the air and towards the knees, but also at times were just directed at the crowds if forces thought they were in danger, the people were coming too close to them. And he saw that even happen to a group that was carrying white flags, Palestinians carrying white flags. So Palestinian authorities say that hundreds of Palestinians have been killed from IDF

fire and the Israeli military acknowledges that it has fired towards crowds, but it claims that the numbers are inflated. It's so hard for people to wrap their heads around the fact that in this situation where people are so desperate, they can't even survive trying to get food. And you mentioned that the whole reason for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, you know, being introduced to this war was these allegations that Hamas was stealing food from the United Nations, from the United States. Reuters reported just Friday, I believe, that USAID stated that while Hamas may have stolen

food at some point, they weren't stealing anything from the United States. And I think there's been further reporting that there's been no significant theft from the United Nations. Was the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation ever needed in this situation in the first place? Why are they there? I mean, it depends who you're asking. The Israelis would argue that it is needed, at least publicly. We should say that there has been a major issue with looting of trucks, including UN

trucks. Gunmen have been doing that throughout the war. It's really hard to tell who's doing the looting. Our reporting has shown that Hamas has stolen some aid, but it's hard to know if they were stealing, was it specifically more UN aid or other kind of aid? You know, publicly, Israel is still arguing that it's that this solution is needed and, you know, is saying that it works, although it's clear to a lot of people that it's not working. And even the goal of getting the aid out of Hamas's hands, you know, there is no screening at these sites. It's just a mad rush, you know, first come first serve and

you know, they don't know who's coming to these sites. So that's also another factor. We still need to see what's going to happen to GHF going forward because you know, one of Hamas's you know, major demands in the ongoing ceasefire negotiations is actually to get rid of GHF and go back to the old UN backed system. And right now we still don't have a ceasefire. We don't know what will happen before this. GHF and Israel have been talking about expanding and opening more GHF sites. But that wouldn't seem possible if the ceasefires reached.

Anat Pellet and her colleague Dov Lieber wrote a big story about the dire aid situation in Gaza titled, Why Israel's Chaotic New Food Program in Gaza Has Turned So Deadly. You can find it at wsj.com. Guess who's in charge of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation? The answer is either not what you'd expect or exactly what you'd expect. We'll have it when we return on Today Explained. Support for today's show comes from GiveWell. Perhaps you've heard about these cuts to foreign aid, perhaps you've even heard about them on Today Explained. GiveWell is a non-profit research organization that says for the last

18 years they've helped guide more than 130,000 donors and two and a half billion of their dollars to highly cost-effective aid. GiveWell does not claim to have all the answers, but they do say their researchers are analyzing the effect of cuts to UID in real time and sharing what they've learned with everyone for free through research updates, grant write-ups, and candid conversations on podcasts. GiveWell says they've already committed tens of millions of dollars in response to this year's cuts and that their researchers are working to forecast, find, and fund other cost-effective needs. For trusted, evidence-backed insights into this evolving situation

and information on how you can help, follow along at givewell.org slash USAID. Hey, this is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, a show about media and tech and what happens when they collide. And this may be hard to remember, but not very long ago, magazines were a really big deal. And the most important magazines were owned by Conde Nast, the glitzy publishing empire

that's the focus of a new book by New York Times reporter Michael Grinbaum. The way Conde Nast elevated its editors, the way they paid for their mortgages so they could live in beautiful homes, there was a logic to it, which was that Conde Nast itself became seen as this kind of enchanted land. You can hear the rest of our chat on channels wherever you listen to your favorite media podcast. Sean Rameshwaram at Today Explained, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is at the center of this starvation story and just about every story about people being shot and even killed while trying to get aid. So we wanted to figure out who's in charge. We asked Arno Rosenfeld from The Forward,

the largest Jewish news outfit here in the United States. He said it wasn't someone with deep experience in humanitarian aid. It's a guy with deep experience in public relations. Yeah, so Johnny Moore is an evangelical leader with a long history in Republican politics. He graduated from Liberty University and then worked in communications for them for a number of years. At Liberty University, we have welcomed God, who authored all knowledge into the educational process. God is not an exile to this campus. God is in the heart of this campus.

That's the university founded by Jerry Falwell, like a sort of big evangelical Mecca in the country. And then he went from that into basically PR. And so he was running a boutique PR firm that got acquired recently by a larger firm, and they do work for both like Marriott hotels and also focus on the family. So it's not exclusively sort of conservative religious causes, but it includes that. And then he's had various roles in the government. So he was an evangelical advisor to

President Trump during his first campaign, you know, prayed with Trump in the White House. Prayed with Trump? Didn't know Trump was a big prayer. Well, you know, he's surrounded himself with these leaders. Yeah, someone asked me not long ago, you know, is it true that, you know, an evangelical is in the White House, like, every week or every day or something? And my answer was, you know, maybe, like, a dozen times a day, you know?

And liberty was, I think, a big part of furnishing his conservative evangelical bona fides during that first race. Two Corinthians, right? Two Corinthians, 317. That's the whole ball game. Where the spirit of the Lord, right? Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. And here there is Liberty College, but Liberty University. But it is so true. So he has a long history there and then he's held various posts in the government.

He was on the committee that the US has to sort of promote religious freedom around the world. So he's traveled around the world to defend the religious liberty of Muslims in China and different groups in different countries in the Middle East. The world is safer because of this administration's policies.

It is unprecedented when it comes to religious freedom. So he's had long ties to the Trump administration, and now he is in this new role as a humanitarian. Right. Everything makes sense up until, and now he's in this new role as a humanitarian. Because as you're saying here, he's basically a PR guy. How does he go from PR flack in the Trump administration

to in charge of maybe one of the most humanitarian missions on the planet? You know, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a very strange entity. But the sort of most direct answer to your question is he has a long history of supporting Israel, of traveling to Israel. Israel has impacted me far, far more than almost anything else. I almost can't think of my life inseparable from Israel in some ways. He's deep into the world of Christian Zionism. Of course, a lot of Israel's strongest supporters in the United States are evangelical Christians. So he comes out of that world and has these ties. And I think for a variety of reasons,

when they were looking for someone to take over this organization after the executive director stepped down just before they started operations, they brought him into, I think, burnish its reputation. He's been on a big media tour. So he's leaning into his sort of PR expertise in this new role. What's he saying on his big media tour?

You know, his argument is basically that the Gaza humanitarian foundation is the victim of a series or a variety of conspiracy theories. Despite what you may read in the press and the criticism that you hear from the United Nations and other institutions, what we're doing has actually been unbelievably effective and so effective that Hamas itself is not happy about it. So the Gaza humanitarian foundation is a victim of a conspiracy promoted by the United Nations,

which wants to sort of hoard all of the aid and the glory for delivering food for themselves. And so it seems to us that the United Nations is basically saying either UNRWA can do everything UNRWA did before and UNRWA is the only coordinating mechanism. It's UNRWA or the people of Gaza stars. And also on the part of Hamas, which is promoting, he's sort of claiming that Hamas is on their own PR tour and has sort of snookered all of these reporters around the world into repeating lies about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Amass has intentionally harmed Gazans in order to allege that it was the IDF or that it was

GHF, in order to disincentivize people from coming to our aid distribution sites to fuel their disinformation narrative. So basically, GHF is doing great work. They're doing the most Christian thing possible in his words, feeding people. There's nothing more Christian than feeding people. And unfortunately, the basically entire international aid community

at the behest of the UN and perhaps also Hamas just has it in for them. It's very unfair, but they're not gonna let that stop them from doing the Lord's work. What does he have to say about all the dead Palestinians? The dead Palestinians as a result of starvation or as a result of being shot while trying to get food from his organization. The second one. So his argument is, again, it's very tragic. They never want anyone to lose their lives. is again, it's very tragic. They never want anyone to lose their lives.

He said that they complain often to the IDF when the IDF shoots at people queuing for aid. He says the IDF has taken responsibility for those incidents. He says Hamas has also attacked GHF employees and Palestinians trying to get aid from GHF and that Hamas has not taken responsibility from that. He also said that more people are being killed trying to get UN and World Food Program aid

than have been killed trying to get his organization's aid. It depends a little bit how you parse the statistics. I don't think that's true, but that's what he's been saying in these kind of public appearances. Is he convincing anyone? So I think that one of the things that's important to understand about his role and really about what I think the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is intended to do is that there is a segment of Israel supporters in the United States that live in a little bit of an alternate reality.

And I think his job is to convince those people that Israel and that the United States is not responsible for Palestinian civilians starving in Gaza. So for example, the piece that I wrote was about him addressing the American Jewish Congress. Thank you so much for having me today. And I just want to begin by saying that I joined all of you and also waiting for the return of the hostages. And his argument to them was basically, yes, there is a humanitarian crisis, we're doing everything in our power, the United States and Israel are doing the right thing.

Unfortunately, all these other aid groups are just letting food rot. So I think it's a fairly persuasive, he's a charismatic guy, he's good at talking to these audiences. So I do think it's a fairly persuasive, you know, he's a charismatic guy. He's good at talking to these audiences. So I do think it's a convincing message for that audience. It's just a very specific audience. Does it tell us something though that this is the kind of person that was put at the top of this operation?

That it wasn't someone with deep experience in aid, but instead someone who would sort of fight the PR war around the effort? It's another good question because Cindy McCain, you know, John McCain's widow runs the World Food Program. So it's not totally unprecedented to have people who have a sort of public profile and political connections sort of in these figurehead roles atop humanitarian organizations. But Cindy McCain, after a lot of pressure, has become increasingly critical of the Israeli government. So I think, yes, the fact that they put someone in that role who, it's not just that he has these political connections or that he doesn't have deep expertise in humanitarian aid, but he's specifically defending his job is basically to defend the United States and Israel, which is really just

incredibly unusual. It's not anything that I've seen an aid organization do in the past. Certainly, sometimes they speak out politically here or there, but they're not typically primarily promoting what almost seems like a political agenda. And that's a lot of what we've seen Johnny Moore do, even as he insists the politics are the worst possible thing for humanitarian aid, and he doesn't want anything to do with them, he's certainly playing a certain political function. I really do think that there is a need for someone like Johnny Moore to reassure, you know, a lot of Israel's supporters in the United States are liberal, they do care about

civilians in Gaza, and they're very alarmed by what they're seeing in the news about starvation in Gaza. And so I think those people desperately want to be reassured that Israel, you know, that the Jewish state that they support is not responsible for mass starvation and civilian suffering in Gaza. And he's presented a very compelling narrative to them. And so I think that's a lot of the role that he's playing right now. And I think that he's playing it well.

["The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation"] You can read Arno Rosenfeld at forward.com. We reached out to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation for comment on the show today, and here's what they had to say. They operate independently and have pushed for more aid and cooperation from the United Nations. They said that with more cooperation, they could open more sites to distribute aid, and

that there have been crowd crushes and tramplings at aid sites run by the UN as well. Their spokesperson told us that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is also pushing the IDF for safety improvements. Avishai Artsy produced our show today, Jolie Myers edited, Rebecca Ibarra and Amina Alsadi checked the facts, Andrea Christensdottir and Patrick Boyd mixed this episode of Today Explained. I'm going to be back. celebrities on the red carpet. But before all that, I was just another girl running late to her desk job, transferring calls, ordering printer ink. I don't miss that.

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