WASHINGTON: US Agency for International Development staffers in early 2024 drafted a warning to senior officials in Joe Biden’s administration: Northern Gaza had turned into an “Apocalyptic Wasteland” with dire shortages of food and medical aid.
Three months after the Oct 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip, the internal message laid out in gruesome detail scenes observed by United Nations staff who visited the area on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission in January and February.
The staff reported seeing a human femur and other bones on the roads, dead bodies abandoned in cars and “catastrophic human needs, particularly for food and safe drinking water.”
But the US ambassador to Jerusalem, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked the cable from wider distribution within the United States government because they believed it lacked balance, according to interviews with four former officials and documents seen by Reuters.
Reuters is the first to report on the cable and why it was suppressed.
Hallett and Lew did not respond to requests for comment.
The February 2024 cable was one of five sent in the first part of that year documenting the rapidly deteriorating health, food and sanitary conditions and breakdown of social order for Palestinians living in Gaza resulting from Israel’s military campaign, six former US officials told Reuters.
Reuters saw one of those cables. The other four, also blocked by Lew and Hallett because of their concerns about balance, were described by four former officials.
