Foreign Affairs

By Jacob J. Lew and David Satterfield

• In Defense of Israel

Yechiel (Michael) Leiter

    In “How to Stop a Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza” (August 14, 2025), Jacob Lew and David Satterfield set out to highlight problems that have bedeviled humanitarian aid distribution in Gaza. But they misdiagnose those problems’ root causes, and they are wrong to inculpate Israel for them.

    From the very outset of its war against Hamas, the Israeli government set a clear policy: Gaza must not be allowed to reach a state of famine. Israel has implemented this policy continuously and assiduously. As a result, between October 2023 and September 2025, Israel facilitated the transfer of well over two million tons of humanitarian aid into Gaza, including more than 1.6 million tons of food. This far exceeded the 2,100 kilocalories per capita per day that the Sphere Handbook, the leading standards-setting guide in such contexts, considers the minimum standard for war zones. Israel’s policy has been grounded in its legal obligations, its sense of moral duty, and its independent view of Israel’s interests.

    As the Israeli government told the Supreme Court in April 2024, “The political echelon sees great importance in making a constant and vigorous effort to avoid a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, as an integral part of the commitment to achieving the war’s aims. From the beginning of the war in Gaza, Israel’s Ministerial Committee for National Security Affairs and its war cabinet have held dozens of meetings, and on many occasions the importance of this policy was emphasized. The clear directives of the political echelon and the actions of state agencies on the ground indicate that Israel does not intend to cause famine” in Gaza.

    Lew and Satterfield point an accusatory finger at the 11 weeks this spring during which aid deliveries were suspended, calling it the “pivotal decision” that launched a “new and unparalleled humanitarian crisis.” This downplays the significance of the large quantity of food that entered Gaza during the cease-fire that preceded this period. The flood of aid that entered Gaza during the six-week cease-fire that began in January—on average, 4,200 trucks per week—would well exceed the amount required to meet civilians’ needs during the subsequent cease-fire suspension.

    Israel’s Gaza policy was grounded in its sense of moral duty.

    The U.S. government strictly prohibits aid funded by American taxpayers from reaching terrorist organizations. Lew and Satterfield allow that if Hamas had been diverting substantial aid, that would have been a grave problem that potentially required more oversight. But they insist that the terrorist group did not divert aid by dwelling on a misleadingly narrow definition of diversion, writing that although “criminal gangs” may have seized aid, Hamas was not “physically diverting U.S.-funded goods” and “there was no evidence of substantial Hamas diversion of any major assistance funded by the UN or nongovernmental organizations.”

    As early as November 2023, the USAID Office of Inspector General identified Gaza as a high-risk area “for the potential diversion and misuse of U.S.-funded assistance,” stressing that USAID’s “investigative priority” was to “ensure that assistance does not fall into the hands of foreign terrorist organizations including, but not limited to, Hamas.” In the same statement, USAID defines aid diversion to include not only the physical takeover of aid but also the imposition of taxes, duties, and fees on the agency’s awardees and beneficiaries—which Lew and Satterfield concede was widespread.

    Over the course of 2024, Israeli intelligence assessments concluded that aid managed by UN-affiliated agencies was consistently diverted by Hamas. (It is important to emphasize that the widespread nature of the diversion was already known to Israeli intelligence agencies even earlier.) Hamas used a variety of methods, including commandeering deliveries, imposing taxes and fees, smuggling prohibited goods through aid distribution systems, and directly infiltrating aid organizations. According to Israeli intelligence, in 2024 aid diversion generated an estimated $500 million in revenue for Hamas, its largest single source of income. This revenue financed the group’s efforts to recruit new fighters and exercise control over the Gazan population. Although it was certainly not what Lew and Satterfield intended, continued advocacy for this broken system had the effect of prolonging the war in Gaza.

    The foundation of the claim by Lew and Satterfield that Hamas did not divert substantial humanitarian aid is their allegation that until January 20, 2025, neither the Israeli military nor the UN shared evidence to that effect with them—or even privately asserted it. I am aware of many meetings in which Israeli representatives, including officials from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), explicitly presented evidence of aid diversion by Hamas to senior U.S. officials, including at least one of the two authors.

• WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

    Lew and Satterfield choose to lay the blame on Israel for an increase in hunger in Gaza this summer. But the incompetence of UN affiliates was responsible for that debacle. Despite the UN’s accusations about logistical difficulties, the IDF sought to help by opening additional humanitarian no-combat corridors in July to facilitate additional aid distribution. But UN affiliates continued to fail to deliver aid in the required quantities, all while persisting with fallacious claims that Israel was blocking aid.

    Perhaps the UN’s most egregious failure has been its refusal to cooperate with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was established in May to prevent the diversion of aid and deliver food directly to civilians rather than terrorists. Contrary to what Lew and Satterfield claim, the GHF did not become Gaza’s “primary food distribution model.” Parallel to the GHF, UN distribution mechanisms continued to operate. The GHF repeatedly offered to deliver aid on the UN’s behalf, a no-brainer proposal that would have immediately ameliorated any UN concerns about its own distribution capacity or the safety of its workers. But the UN refused the offer. To their credit, Lew and Satterfield called on the UN to cooperate with the GHF, but they understated the consequences of that noncooperation.

    The UN claimed that it would not allow the GHF to deliver food on its behalf—or let the IDF secure a perimeter around its convoys—because of a supposed policy opposing the “militarization” of aid. It did not have the same qualms about exposing its aid deliveries to hijacking by armed Hamas gunmen. This hypocrisy is only a local expression of a global phenomenon: in conflict zones around the world, the UN has a long record of failing to prevent terrorist groups from seizing aid. In Gaza, the UN has withheld aid to adhere to a purported ethical principle it does not truthfully uphold.

    Lew and Satterfield allege that Israel has used aid as a “coercive means to pressure Hamas.” The very opposite is true: the UN treats aid as a coercive means to pressure Israel politically. UN officials have attached their complaints about difficulties delivering aid to Gaza to calls for an end to the war—a political agenda that was unsurprising for a parent organization that spends a great deal of time condemning Israel but that falls far outside the mandate of UN aid organizations. All the while, more food went missing from people in need, prolonging Hamas’s campaign of terror and Israel’s military campaign.

    Dragging its feet on delivering aid effectively has been politically convenient for the UN. Implementing efficient aid systems immediately would have forced it to admit that a unilateral cease-fire was not a prerequisite to feeding the hungry.

    It was a strategic imperative for Israel to break the link between Hamas and humanitarian aid by securing Gaza with alternative solutions. Israel always sought to do exactly that. The claim that Israel denied food to Gazans to worsen a humanitarian crisis is untrue. Organizations such as the GHF met the moment. Those who refused to do so, as well as those who supported them, failed the people of Gaza and undermined the stability of the region.

    YECHIEL (MICHAEL) LEITER is Israeli Ambassador to the United States.

• Revisionist History

Andy Hall

    In their article, Lew and Satterfield misrepresent their role in facilitating humanitarian assistance to Gaza and minimize the level of suffering that Palestinians faced during their tenures as the U.S. ambassador to Israel and the U.S. special envoy for Middle East humanitarian needs, respectively. Between January 2024 and June 2025, my colleagues and I served months-long rotations on the Disaster Assistance Response Team that USAID established in October 2023 to coordinate the U.S. government’s humanitarian assistance with UN partners and nongovernmental organizations in Gaza. (The DART was discontinued in June 2025 as part of the dissolution of USAID.)

    As mandated by the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, USAID often deployed DARTs—staffed by highly trained disaster-relief specialists—to coordinate and implement the U.S. government’s response to humanitarian catastrophes. In Gaza, the DART oversaw the disbursement of hundreds of millions of dollars the government contributed to relief programs undertaken by the UN and partner NGOs. It was tasked with gathering information on humanitarian needs, population displacements, civilian casualties, and obstructions to assistance efforts in order to advise Lew, Satterfield, and other decision-makers in Washington and Jerusalem. But our work was censored, restricted, and undermined by high-level Biden administration officials, including Lew and Satterfield. These officials ignored reporting from humanitarian-assistance experts and never publicly called for the kind of consequences that their own stated national security policy required them to impose after Israel restricted humanitarian aid and committed daily attacks on civilians, aid workers, hospitals, and homes.

    In August, the Famine Review Committee of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—the multinational panel responsible for assessing food insecurity—officially confirmed that famine had taken hold in parts of Gaza. It is imperative to underscore that actions taken by the Biden administration enabled this catastrophe. By the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the Gaza Health Ministry had found that at least 46,600 people—including 13,300 children—had been killed in Gaza as Israel pursued its military offensive in response to Hamas’s heinous October 7, 2023, terrorist attack. Ninety percent of Gaza’s population had been forcibly displaced, and according to an IPC report released in October 2024, more than 1.9 million people had been plunged into acute food insecurity. The Aid Worker Security Database, a project to record major incidents against aid workers that was funded by USAID, reported that by the time Biden left office, Gaza had become the most dangerous operating environment for aid workers in the world.

    Yet Lew and Satterfield downplay these details and claim that their efforts “prevented famine.” The Trump administration’s break with their approach, they complain, created “a new and unparalleled humanitarian crisis.” But the famine that was officially declared in August is a technical determination: suffering, starvation, and death occurred in Gaza at a horrifying scale well before famine was declared. Gazans faced a severe and sustained hunger and malnutrition crisis on Lew and Satterfield’s watch thanks to Israel’s military offensive and cyclical Israeli restrictions on aid access.

    Since October 2023, the Famine Review Committee, which convenes whenever food security experts assess famine thresholds have potentially been breached, has met five times—four times during the Biden administration—to determine whether famine has taken hold in Gaza. In its August 2025 report, the group noted that it had “never before . . . had to return so many times to the same crisis,” calling its repeated attention to Gaza “a stark reflection of how suffering has not only persisted but intensified.”

• UNHEEDED WARNINGS

    Lew and Satterfield claim that they always “underscored” to Israeli officials that delivering aid was “unquestionably a moral obligation.” But they go on to admit that they encouraged Israel to permit humanitarian assistance on the grounds that it was a “strategic necessity” to defeat Hamas. That formulation subordinated aid delivery to the primary goal of maintaining the conflict—the very driver of widespread civilian casualties and catastrophic humanitarian need.

    In their government roles, Lew and Satterfield were responsible for pursuing U.S. foreign policy interests rather than strictly principled humanitarianism. But in their work with us, they downplayed the humanitarian risks posed by Israel’s strategic priorities and military objectives. DART staff repeatedly sought to communicate to Biden officials the dire humanitarian consequences of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza. These staffers often faced pushback from senior members of Biden’s team, including Lew and Satterfield, who downplayed Gazans’ needs and overstated the efforts Israel made to facilitate aid entry.

    For example, in a press briefing he conducted on April 23, 2024, Satterfield inflated the number of trucks that Israel was allowing to reach northern Gaza to back up his claim that Israel had “taken significant steps” toward achieving humanitarian objectives. “Nearly 100 trucks a day have been moving to the north over the course of the last several weeks,” he said. But the DART was responsible for acquiring a daily truck count from the Israeli government, and the data that it relayed to the State Department from April 1 to April 23 clearly showed that an average of only 44 trucks per day were moving to Gaza’s north. Lew, in a March 2024 diplomatic cable, claimed that Israel’s war cabinet would not “arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede” U.S. food and medicine from reaching Gaza, an assertion that was unsupported and proved false.

    That same month, the U.S. embassy in Israel, led at the time by Lew, removed from a diplomatic cable drafted by the DART several credibly sourced sections describing the extent of humanitarian needs in Gaza as a result of Israeli actions. Embassy staff then instructed the DART to avoid reporting on “doom and gloom” and instead highlight positive steps the Israelis had taken to address Gazan civilians’ suffering. When the full text of the cable—the primary tool by which embassies and Washington communicate—was leaked to the press, Lew blocked the DART from sending additional cables to Washington.

    Top Biden officials failed to hold Israel accountable for violations of international law.

    Although the DART had prepared a cable nearly weekly beginning in January 2024, between the beginning of March and mid-May, the embassy permitted it to send only one, even as the humanitarian needs in Gaza intensified. The DART had no reason to believe that this cable contained classified information. But the embassy insisted that it be classified, severely limiting its reach in Washington. That spring, Lew and Satterfield also acquiesced to the disastrous idea of installing a floating pier to deliver aid to Gaza, failing to amplify warnings delivered by the DART and a chorus of UN and NGO experts that the plan would be dangerous, expensive, and inefficient.

    In December 2024, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET)—a USAID-funded food security monitor—reported that famine had likely taken hold in parts of North Gaza Governorate. Lew released an unusual public statement rebuking the organization, complaining that its warning was “inaccurate” because it used a mid-November UN population estimate that had become “outdated” after a fall 2024 Israeli offensive displaced northern Gazans. “It is now apparent that the civilian population in that part of Gaza is in the range of 7,000–15,000, not 65,000–75,000,” Lew wrote, citing both Israel’s assessment and a newer UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees estimate for his figure. “At a time when inaccurate information is causing confusion and accusations, it is irresponsible to issue a report like this.” In fact, the FEWS NET report acknowledged the UNRWA estimate and noted that the evaluation of famine would hold even if the lower bound of UNRWA’s estimate were accurate. Less than 24 hours after Lew released his statement, however, senior Biden administration officials forced FEWS NET to remove the report from its website, prioritizing Israeli government data over the analysis of an expert U.S. body.

    Top Biden officials also consistently failed to hold Israel accountable for its gross violations of international humanitarian law. In February 2024, the Biden administration implemented National Security Memorandum 20, a policy that requires recipients of U.S. security assistance to adhere to international law and ensure the timely delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid. In April 2024, USAID experts, including members of the DART, provided U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken with a detailed 17-page memo documenting Israeli violations, such as attacks on aid workers. NSM 20 legally required the State Department and the Biden administration to cut off U.S. arms shipments in case of an Israeli violation. Instead, after briefly pausing the delivery of 500-pound and 2,000-pound bombs in May 2024, Biden officials ignored USAID’s findings and continued approving shipments of the 500-pound bombs at record rates, allowing the Israeli military to operate with impunity.

    Lew and Satterfield defend their efforts to avert a humanitarian catastrophe by highlighting diplomatic wins that quickly dissolved—an affront to the USAID staffers who pushed, in vain, for decisions that truly could have averted catastrophe. The Biden administration was complicit in the suffering of Palestinians, and the Trump administration’s subsequent failures to facilitate aid delivery cannot be used to minimize its responsibility. The situation in Gaza is not a “new and unparalleled humanitarian crisis” but a continuation of a calamity that Biden officials failed to halt.

    ANDY HALL was Deputy Team Lead for USAID’s Humanitarian Information Team in the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance and served as a USAID Information Officer from 2017 to 2025. He was a member of the Disaster Assistance Response Team established to coordinate the U.S. government’s humanitarian assistance in Gaza with nongovernmental organizations and UN partners. He wrote this response with three other former members of the DART, who wish to remain anonymous.