July 16, 2025 Editor, The News-Gazette: The Trump administration is continuing to support Israel’s genocide. The latest crime is the U.S.-Israeli operated “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF). Netanyahu explained its purpose in a video: “Our best friends in the world — senators I know as strong supporters of Israel — have warned that they cannot support us if images of mass starvation emerge. They come to me and say, ‘We’ll give you all the help you need to win the war … but we can’t be receiving pictures of famine … We need to do it in a way that they won’t stop us.”
Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich explained that the GHF would allow “our friends in the world to continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and The Hague Tribunal … The aid that will enter Gaza in the coming days is the tiniest amount … Truth be told, until the last of the hostages returns, we should also not let water into the Gaza Strip. But the reality is that if we do that, the world will force us to halt the war immediately, and to lose … We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us.” Smotrich continues that they are forcing Gazans south “and from there, God willing, to third countries, as part of President Trump’s plan.”
Israel has stopped neutral aid organizations, chiefly UNRWA, from supplying Gaza. These groups used 400 aid distribution sites, but the GHF uses only four, and provides insufficient food. Their flour has been laced with the opioid Oxycodone; the IDF has been shooting Palestinians seeking this aid, killing 805 Gazans and wounding 5,252. The UN and over 200 aid organizations have denounced the GHF as inadequate and weaponizing aid. Yet the State Department has appropriated $30 million for the GHF. EDWARD QUBAIN Rockbridge County
