Trump Envoy Witkoff Visits Gaza as Aid Crisis Deepens

Steve Witkoff went to the Palestinian enclave amid growing pressure on Israel to ease a deepening hunger crisis there. Hamas derided the visit as a “propaganda show.”

Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy for peace missions, went to the Gaza Strip on Friday and visited an aid distribution site as a hunger crisis in the territory deepens.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the past two months in Gaza while trying to secure aid, which has led to growing international pressure on Israel to ease the humanitarian situation.

Mr. Witkoff posted a photograph on social media of himself and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, at an aid site overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or G.H.F. The much-criticized, Israel-backed group run by American security contractors has taken over a large part of the aid distribution system in Gaza since May.

“We spent over five hours inside Gaza — level setting the facts on the ground, assessing conditions, and meeting with @GHFUpdates and other agencies,” Mr. Witkoff said in a X post. “The purpose of the visit was to give @POTUS a clear understanding of the humanitarian situation and help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza.”

In his own social media post, Mr. Huckabee said that he and Mr. Witkoff had been briefed by the Israeli military and “spoke to folks on the ground.” It was not immediately clear whom he meant.

Mr. Witkoff was wearing a black “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” hat and a blue flak jacket in photographs included in the post.

The G.H.F. has aided Israel in overhauling the system for aid distribution in Gaza as a part of an effort that Israeli officials said was meant to prevent Hamas from benefiting from supplies entering the territory.

However, some Israeli military officials told The New York Times recently that the military has found no evidence that Hamas systematically stole aid from the United Nations, which has provided much of the aid to Gaza since the war there began almost two years ago.

Witnesses have reported that, on a number of occasions, Israeli troops opened fire on crowds of desperate Palestinians as they made their way toward the new aid hubs in search of food. The Israeli military has said repeatedly that its troops have fired “warning shots” when people approached its forces in a threatening manner.

On Thursday, Izzat al-Rishq, a senior Hamas official, predicted that Mr. Witkoff’s visit to Gaza would be a “propaganda show.”

“Witkoff will only see in Gaza what the occupation wants him to see,” he wrote on social media.

In an unusual break with Israeli leaders, Mr. Trump this week acknowledged starvation in Gaza after largely deflecting on the issue, and said more food was urgently needed.

The Gaza health ministry said on Friday that the bodies of 53 people who had been killed while seeking aid were brought to hospitals on Thursday. The exact circumstances of their deaths were unclear.

The U.N. Human Rights Office said at least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food in Gaza since May 27. That includes 859 people killed in areas surrounding G.H.F. sites and another 514 along routes used by trucks carrying aid.

It said the Israeli military was responsible for killing most of the people.

While the rights office acknowledged “other armed elements” were in the same areas where killings took place, it said it was not aware of their involvement in the violence.

Israeli officials had hoped the G.H.F. would largely supplant the U.N.-led aid system, but the group has only operated four distribution sites, mostly in southern Gaza. Earlier in the war, hundreds of aid distribution points had been active under the U.N.-led system.

Still, the United Nations and other international organizations have been delivering some aid since the G.H.F. launched its operations, bringing supplies by way of trucks to both northern and southern Gaza.

But those efforts have also devolved into mayhem. Most of the trucks have failed to reach their destinations in Gaza in recent weeks, with hungry people intercepting them en route, often minutes after they enter the territory, and grabbing whatever aid they can.

Witnesses have reported harrowing scenes near the trucks, including people trampling over others and threatening each other with knives.

One U.N. official who toured Gaza in recent days described an increasingly dire situation, especially for children. Ted Chaiban, the deputy executive of UNICEF, said on Friday after returning to New York from Gaza that the enclave was facing a “grave risk of famine,” with some 320,000 children at risk of acute malnutrition. “The marks of deep suffering and hunger were visible on the faces of families and children,” he said.

During the past several days, Israel has allowed airdrops of aid into Gaza, but critics have said they are not an effective way of reaching the population. On Friday, aid packages containing food were parachuted into Gaza in an effort involving Spain, France and Germany.

Mr. Witkoff’s visit to Gaza on Friday was his second this year. He also toured the area in January.

He is the top American official involved in trying to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza and secure the release of hostages held by militants. Israeli authorities have said that up to 20 hostages in Gaza are believed to be alive.

On Friday, Hamas’s military wing published a video of Evyatar David, who had been abducted from a music festival in southern Israel during the Hamas-led, Oct. 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war in Gaza.

Mr. David, 24, appeared emaciated as he sat in a dark tunnel.

Rights groups and international law experts say that a hostage video is, by definition, made under duress, and that the statements in it are usually coerced. Israeli officials have called the videos of hostages periodically released by Hamas and Islamic Jihad during the war a form of “psychological warfare,” and experts say their production can constitute a war crime.

On Thursday, Islamic Jihad, the second-largest militant group in Gaza, released a six-minute video of the Israeli hostage Rom Braslavski. He had been taken hostage from the same music festival.

Mr. Braslavski, 21, seemed pale and thin and cried as he spoke.

“They succeeded in breaking Rom,” the Braslavski family said in a statement shared by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing many of the family members of captives in Gaza. “Even the strongest person has a breaking point. Rom is an example of all the hostages. Everyone needs to be brought home now.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.

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