Starvation is spreading in Gaza and threatens to escalate further — and American lawmakers, including some of Israel’s closest allies in Congress, are urging officials in Israel to do more to get food into the war-torn region.
“The Israelis have a concern about the food being misappropriated to Hamas fighters. I have that concern, but I’d like to get some aid in,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told NOTUS. “I don’t want the food to sit there and rot.”
Graham said he planned to speak about how to get more aid into Gaza with Cindy McCain, who directs the United Nations’ World Food Programme.
He’s not the only one: Rep. Seth Moulton had three meetings with foreign officials this week about it.
“It’s essential to Israel’s victory that they take away this leverage over food that Hamas has,” said Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who has backed the war in Gaza while urging Israel to shift course to limit civilian casualties. “My view is they should flood the zone with humanitarian aid, the way we did in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it’s never an issue that the enemies could exploit.”
An Israeli blockade between March and May earlier this year, intended to deprive Hamas of funding, has left Gaza’s civilian population facing mass starvation, according to international humanitarian groups. People there are already dying of starvation. An American–Israeli effort to send aid into Gaza in the months since then has also been beset with violence, with people dying in stampedes as they sought to receive assistance and others being shot by Israeli soldiers, according to witnesses. Israeli officials have said the soldiers were responding to people who appeared to pose threats.
The State Department has approved $30 million for that aid program, but lawmakers are growing alarmed by the violence around its distribution sites.
“That’s not working,” Rep. Jim McGovern, a Democrat, told NOTUS of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. “People are starving as we speak. It’s not just the money, it’s the way they’re delivering it and how it’s not getting to people.”
A group of Democratic senators spent time this week preparing a statement to raise alarms about the program, according to three senators who spoke with NOTUS, offering sharp criticism and demanding access for other humanitarian groups.
“It’s been a real disaster compared to letting international NGOs do the work that they’re trained to do,” Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said. “We should let the humanitarian organizations that do this work and are specialists at it do it rather than have this jerry-rigged scheme.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, told NOTUS that “so far, the State Department has not been very forthcoming with answers” about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, whose office is preparing the joint statement, told NOTUS in an interview Wednesday night that the aid distribution process has “become a killing field.”
“It is a death trap, and United States taxpayers should not be complicit,” he said.
Israel’s supporters argue that depriving Hamas of revenue from taxes or potential redirection of humanitarian aid gives Israel a better hand in negotiations to end the war and rescue hostages, who have been trapped in Gaza since Hamas’ brutal terror attack on Israel started the war nearly two years ago.
Some lawmakers this week pushed back on the idea that Israel should shift course in response to starvation across Gaza.
“I’m really concerned that the media seems to try to normalize this and take and parrot what comes from the health ministry, which is Hamas,” said Sen. John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat. “Hamas, that was their primary source of income. And that’s a fact. That’s a fact. And now that’s why Hamas is trying to destroy that process now, because they can’t make a cut off of aid that way.”
When asked about the chaos at aid distribution sites, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said that “the violence in Gaza is a direct consequence of Hamas terrorists who target civilians and carry out, as a matter of policy, murder and murder of civilians.”
“This war could end today, if Hamas will simply lay down their weapons and release the hostages,” Cruz said. “They’re unwilling to do so because their stated objective is to murder every Jew in Israel. And the IDF, quite reasonably, is not interested in complying with that genocidal objective.”
The deteriorating conditions in Gaza are prompting pushback from other countries, however, as well as from people who have largely backed Israel’s war to end Hamas.
Rep. Dan Goldman, a Democrat who was in Israel during the Hamas attack in October 2023, told NOTUS this week he was “very, very concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
“It is simply unacceptable, at this point in time, for Gazan civilians to not be receiving aid and to suffer from violence, allegedly, in an effort to get aid,” Goldman said. “The Israeli government has an obligation, in my mind, to do everything that it can do to get aid to the Gazan civilians who are the unwitting victims of a conflict that was started by Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack on October 7th.”
“Separate and apart from whatever the issues are between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian civilians cannot suffer any more than they already have,” he added.
Goldman said he hopes the State Department will give Congress a briefing on what is happening with aid on the ground in Gaza.
Some GOP lawmakers said they hope President Donald Trump gets more involved in pushing food assistance into Gaza.
“We should certainly be speaking out and ensuring that people are getting access to aid and food,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York told NOTUS. “The president has a very good relationship with Netanyahu. He should leverage that relationship to try to make sure that there’s no blockages there.”
And Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who largely opposes American intervention abroad and has criticized Israel, argued that the United States’ role now “is to quit sending them the bombs.”
“There’s nobody in Gaza now who doesn’t have a family member who’s been killed or maimed,” he said. “I’m not sure what Israel’s exit ramp is now. Like, are they just going to keep churning the buildings — the rubble — over with more bombs?”