Trump: We’ll help ‘starving’ Gazans get food, but Hamas ‘making it impossible’

US President Donald Trump said Monday that his administration will help get food to “starving” Gazans amid a two-month-and-counting Israeli aid blockade, but added that Hamas has made it “impossible” by diverting humanitarian assistance for its fighters.

“We’re going to help the people of Gaza get some food. People are starving, and we’re going to help them get some food,” Trump told reporters during an event at the White House.

Israeli officials to date have claimed that Gazans are not yet starving and that enough aid entered the Strip during a six-week ceasefire to sustain the Strip for an extended period of time, even though they have also argued — like Trump — that Hamas has been stealing aid.

Data and testimony from inside the Strip point to a worsening hunger crisis and rising rates of malnutrition, while Jerusalem works on implementing a new system to distribute aid in a manner that it hopes will prevent its diversion by Hamas. International aid organizations briefed on the initiative said Sunday that they won’t cooperate with it, as it doesn’t properly address the humanitarian crisis.

“A lot of people are making it very, very bad,” Trump continued. “Hamas is making it impossible because they’re taking everything that’s brought in.”

The president added that Palestinians in Gaza are “being treated very badly by Hamas.”

Plans for a major offensive against Hamas if no hostage deal is reached with the terror group by the end of Trump’s visit to the region next week include moving the Palestinian civilian population toward the south of the Strip, attacking Hamas, and preventing the terror group from taking control of humanitarian aid supplies, a senior Israeli defense official said Monday.

The official said the “blockade” on humanitarian aid entering would continue, and “only later, after the beginning of operational activity and a broad evacuation of the population to the south, a humanitarian plan will be implemented.”

He said the plan includes delineating an area in southern Gaza’s Rafah — south of the Israeli-held Morag Corridor — to be secured by the IDF as civilian companies hand out aid to Palestinian civilians. Those entering the “sterile zone” in Rafah will undergo a security screening by the IDF to prevent Hamas from taking aid, the official said.

The overhaul to the aid delivery system, approved by the cabinet late Sunday and first reported by The Times of Israel on Friday, would entail the IDF transitioning away from wholesale distribution and warehousing of aid and instead have international organizations and private security contractors hand out boxes of food to individual Gazan families.

According to Israeli and Arab officials familiar with the matter, the IDF would not be directly involved in the distribution of aid, amid pushback from Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, but troops would be tasked with providing an outer layer of security for the private contractors and international organizations handing out the assistance. Israel believes this method will make it harder for Hamas to divert aid to its fighters, the officials said.

The UN in a statement Sunday said it would not participate in the plan as presented, saying it violates its core principles.

According to a memo by the defense body in charge of coordinating aid to Gaza, COGAT, seen by The Associated Press, all aid will enter Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, on approximately 60 trucks daily, and be distributed directly to people. Some 500 trucks entered Gaza every day before the war.

The memo said that facial-recognition technology will be used to identify Palestinians at logistics hubs, and text message alerts will notify people in the area that they can collect aid.

COGAT did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After Israel said it was going to assert more control over aid distribution in Gaza, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs sent an email to aid groups, urging them to reject any “draconian restrictions on humanitarian work.”

The email, which OCHA sent Monday to aid groups and was shared with the AP, further stated that there are mechanisms in place to ensure aid is not diverted.

Earlier, OCHA said in a statement that the plan would leave large parts of the population, including the most vulnerable, without supplies. It said the plan “appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic — as part of a military strategy.”

The plan to take over the distribution of humanitarian aid to Gaza is “fundamentally against humanitarian principles,” the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) told AFP on Monday.

He said, “The United Nations agencies, all other international humanitarian groups and NGOs have said no to be part of this idea coming from the Israeli cabinet and from the Israeli military.”

Egeland said the Israeli government wanted to “militarise, manipulate, politicise the aid by allowing only aid to a few concentration hubs in the south, a scheme where people will be screened, where it’s a completely inoperable system.”

“That would force people to move to get aid, and it would continue the starvation of the civilian population,” he said, adding: “We will have no part in that.”

“If one side in a bitter armed conflict tries to control, manipulate, ration aid among the civilians on the other side, it is against everything we stand for,” he stressed.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, the only one to vote against the cabinet’s aid proposal, asserted that “the only aid that ought to enter Gaza should be for voluntary migration, to allow them to emigrate voluntarily.”

“As long as we have hostages languishing in the tunnels, I don’t understand this discussion at all,” he told members of his far-right Otzma Yehudit party during its weekly faction meeting in the Knesset.

Until the hostages come home, “the enemy should not receive either food, electricity, or any other aid, neither through the IDF nor by way of civil society,” he said.

More than 52,500 Palestinians have been killed since the war in Gaza was sparked by the Hamas onslaught of October 7, 2023, according to the Hamas-controlled health ministry.

The figures cannot be independently verified, and do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January, and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the Hamas onslaught.

The Hamas-led massacre saw thousands of terrorists storm southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, of whom 58 remain in Gaza, including at least 35 who are thought to be dead, in addition to the remains of a soldier who was killed in the Strip in 2014.

Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 416.

Nurit Yohanan contributed to this report.