How former Biden officials defend their Gaza policy

During the war in Gaza, there were two main phases of delivery of aid to the Palestinians: the original UN -leading effort, which included hundreds of facilities, and the current system run by the Human Gaza Corporation, a non -profit American institution created with Israeli support. Last March, after Israel ended the ceasefire with Hamas, the Benjamin Netanyahu government imposed almost discrimination on the region until May, and then GHF assumed responsibility. The United Nations food delivery operations were unable to meet the overwhelming need in Gaza, but at least occurred throughout the region. GHF opened only four sites. Hundreds of Palestinians were shot in chaos there. Since July 1, two hundred and four people have died due to malnutrition. (The total number of Palestinian deaths for the war is now more than sixty thousand.) Even President Donald Trump confessed to hunger. In response, Netanyahu allowed more assistance in the region, and Mike Hakapi, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, announced that GHF would create more distribution sites. But Ghazan is still starving, and Netanyahu said he was planning to expand the war and occupy Gaza City. In Israel, he motivated these protests against his government, and gained the families of the remaining hostages that Hamas maintains – there are about twenty years – that he continues war for political reasons.

in Modern piece in Foreign affairsEntitled “How to Stop a Humanitarian A catastrophe”, former Biden administration officials explains Jacob J. Liu and David Satterfeld why they believed that the Trump administration was failing to succeed. Lu Ambassador to Israel became less than a month from October 7, and Satterfield was a special envoy to Piden for humanitarian issues in the region. In this article, they write, “Although the results of our work have never satisfied us, our critics are much less, in fact, the efforts we made in the Biden administration to maintain Gaza open to human dilution prevented starvation. The truth remains that during the first and semi -war is unabated, the Ghazan of the masses did not face because humanitarian assistance was reaching them.”

I recently spoken by phone with Lew, who served in the second Obama administration as Minister of the Treasury, who is currently a professor of international public affairs at Columbia University, about this American -Israeli relationship. During our conversation, which was liberated for length and clarity, we also discussed whether the Biden administration was trying to keep Netanyahu in power, the extent of the formation of Israeli behavior, and what Lua learned in phone calls late at night with Israeli officials.

You are writing in the article that the Biden administration prevented comprehensive hunger in Gaza while it is in his post. What did you do to prevent mass hunger?

Since the beginning of the war, President Biden has been unambiguous in his saying that he had the back of Israel, and would continue to support Israel and his legitimate effort to defeat Hamas. But there should be a very serious effort to deal with civil issues in a war in Gaza. So we literally shared us every day and night in questions about how to have an effective strategy to provide aid in a war zone. We worked hard to attract the attention of Israeli leaders to urge the aid crossings. So it was not one day. Literally all the time I was there, it was a large part of the work we were doing.

During your term, the humanitarian groups, the United Nations, and even the people in the Biden administration were constantly saying that there was not enough help to enter Gaza. The number of deaths ascended to more than Forty -six thousand before leaving the positions. I know that you do not say that the aid delivery system was enough, but how did it distinguish it?

At each stage, we said more. I do not say that we have achieved the goal of getting enough food to meet all the needs. But this is a completely different fact from collective malnutrition and famine. And every time there were reports of famine that was not accurate, which made it difficult to do the task of obtaining more aid. We were trying to make criticism in a balanced manner to maintain the pressure on Hamas – and would not abandon Israel’s effort to defeat every day of risk, which he objected to any day of risk. It was hard work.

The risk of promoting Hamas, if Hamas had grabbed fuel or food, was a serious question. It was not a source of makeup anxiety. We have never seen it as it was going directly from what the United States offers. So I want to be clear in that. But they were undoubtedly trying to control the aid management because it was a way to adhere to the ruling.

But I just want to be clear: people were starving to death in 2024. I know that group hunger did not happen, but people were dying, right?

I can tell you that we have not seen evidence of collective hunger leading to death. We have seen children, some of whom were children with particularly sensitive diseases, which is tragic. Any civilian, any child who dies of malnutrition is tragic. So I do not say in any way that there were no problems. Until March of 2025, it was not great, but people were alive. It was not an accident. It took continuous participation to keep this flow. I will never say that there was no problem. I think famine reports were premature and exaggerated. Even in the last month, there was a report that I found anxious as he said that there was a serious danger to starvation in the north, literally, where we were working day and night to open food routes to reach the people who were still in this northern part of Gaza.

It seems that part of what was going on with what I said was “premature” warnings of starvation is that human groups will warn of famine, and after things become bad enough, Israel will increase the amount of aid. Is it not what you say also? You say you will press the Israelis, so they will open the tap a little more and will improve things a little. This is not equal to the Trump administration, so hunger has increased.

Well, see, when I arrived in Israel in November 2023, the country was hunting. In the event of a shock from October 7, any of us will understand in New York on September 11 in a very brutal way. So people were not making decisions based on long -term thinking. I would like to say that once we came to November, we had a connection with the senior politicians who understood that there was a need to address human concerns. The challenge was that a country did not understand exactly the scope of humanitarian needs, and there was a right -wing element in the Netanyahu coalition government that opposed and had other opinions threatening to reduce the coalition. How did you get the decisions that must be taken without causing the government’s collapse? Now, people asked, why do we care about it? Because you are working with the government that you have. We do not vote in elections in other countries. We do not choose leaders.

But the government’s support in power is slightly different from saying that we will help this government try to survive.

We did not, Isaac. We did not take a position in one way or another about what the government should be. There were people in the government we thought we wanted to fall. There were people outside the government who thought we did not do enough. We are working to make politics with the existing government.

In the article, she writes, “Given the tensions within the government, it took an active and consistent participation in managing the internal Israeli political dynamics and maintaining sufficient flow to help. The message was to our interlocutors in the Israeli government in its essence,“ if the policy was difficult, and the United States blames. “Allow Netanyahu to martyred to need to satisfy our demands was very important at that time – and it is still decisive today.” This makes it look as if you were trying to help the current government to stay in power.

No, I think you miss this point. The point that you raise is if your goal is to maintain the flow of humanitarian aid and see the obstacles that must be overcome, you should be realistic about what is necessary to achieve the goal you have. Our goal was to get help. We wanted Israel to prevail in the war. What we say in the article is realistically that there are restrictions on how to make decisions and the coalition was concerned about not falling. Their concern was, and we have no. I am facing a problem in describing our position that we were trying to defend the coalition when we were trying to resolve the urgent urgent issue, which was getting humanitarian.

So when you say that, “allowing Netanyahu to cite the need to satisfy our demands was very important at that time – and it is still decisive today,” what do you mean? Netanyahu does not want to bother the extremist ministers on the right in his government by the presence of Israel providing aid. So you say that allowing Netanyahu to cite the need to satisfy our demands is very important for him in power, right?