US Agency for International Development staffers in early 2024 drafted a warning to senior officials in Joe Biden’s administration: Northern Gaza had turned into an “Apocalyptic Wasteland” with dire shortages of food and medical aid.
Three months after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip, the internal message laid out in gruesome detail scenes observed by United Nations staff who visited the area on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission in January and February.
The staff reported seeing a human femur and other bones on the roads, dead bodies abandoned in cars and “catastrophic human needs, particularly for food and safe drinking water.”
But the US ambassador to Jerusalem, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked the cable from wider distribution within the US government because they believed it lacked balance, according to interviews with four former officials and documents seen by Reuters.
Reuters is the first to report on the cable and why it was suppressed.
Hallett and Lew did not respond to requests for comment.
The February 2024 cable was one of five sent in the first part of that year documenting the rapidly deteriorating health, food and sanitary conditions and breakdown of social order for Palestinians living in Gaza resulting from Israel’s military campaign, six former US officials told Reuters.
Reuters saw one of those cables. The other four, also blocked by Lew and Hallett because of their concerns about balance, were described by four former officials.
Three former US officials said that the descriptions were unusually graphic and would have commanded the attention of senior US officials had the message been widely circulated within Joe Biden’s administration.
It would have also deepened scrutiny of a National Security Memorandum, issued by Biden that month, which conditioned the supply of US intelligence and weapons on Israel’s compliance with international law, they said.
“While cables weren’t the only means of providing humanitarian information ... they would have represented an acknowledgement by the ambassador of the reality of the situation in Gaza,” said Andrew Hall, then a crisis operations specialist for USAID.
The US embassy in Jerusalem oversaw the language and distribution of most of the cables about Gaza, including those from other embassies in the region.
One former senior official said Lew and Hallett often told USAID leadership that the cables included information that had been widely reported in the media.
Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and representatives for former President Joe Biden did not respond to requests for comment about the fact that the cables never reached upper leadership of the US government.
The Gaza war started with Hamas attacks that killed more than 1,250 people. The death toll in Gaza now stands at over 71,000, according to Palestinian Health Ministry data.
With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by his side, President Donald Trump announced his Gaza peace plan in the Oval Office last September, but the fighting has not stopped. Some 481 people have been killed since the ceasefire, according to Palestinian health ministry data.
The Biden administration’s backing for Israel during the war deeply divided the Democratic Party and remains an unresolved issue for its political candidates.
More than 80 per cent of Democrats believe that Israel’s military response in Gaza has been excessive and that the United States should help people in the enclave who are facing starvation, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll last August.
As the cables were being drafted in early 2024, the White House and other senior US officials were broadly aware of the worsening humanitarian situation in northern Gaza from National Security Council reporting, four former officials said. And humanitarian organisations were warning of famine risks.
“There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop,” Biden told reporters at the White House in February 2024, describing Israel’s response in Gaza as “over the top.”
In January 2024, the embassy did approve the wider distribution of a cable about food insecurity throughout Gaza, and the information made it into the president’s daily briefing – a compilation by the intelligence community of the most important national security information and analysis.
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