As the hunger in Gaza draws increasing international condemnation, Mike Huckabee, the United States ambassador to Israel, said on Wednesday that an American-backed aid initiative in the enclave would soon “scale up.”
The initiative, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (G.H.F.) and conceived by Israelis, is run by American contractors and has the diplomatic and financial support of the United States. Currently, the G.H.F. runs four distribution sites, mostly in southern Gaza. That figure could soon quadruple, Mr. Huckabee said.
“The immediate plan is to scale up the number of sites up to 16 and begin to operate them as much as 24 hours a day,” he said in a Fox News interview, responding to questions about whether and how the United States planned to get more involved in aid distribution in Gaza.
The G.H.F. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the plans to run up to 16 sites around the clock. Mr. Huckabee and Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy for peace missions, visited a G.H.F. aid distribution site in Gaza last week.
Mr. Huckabee’s statement comes as aid groups say Gaza is in the grip of a hunger crisis, with Palestinians there facing famine. The World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations, has also said that the crisis in Gaza had reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row.”
The foundation has also been boycotted by the United Nations, which led a network of hundreds aid sites in Gaza. The U.N. says that the G.H.F.’s methods fly in the face of established principles of humanitarian law and that there are not enough distribution sites.
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The post Huckabee Says U.S.-Backed Aid Sites in Gaza Will ‘Scale Up’ appeared first on New York Times.
