Mike Huckabee Goes to Gaza and Declares Everything Is A-OK
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee met with the U.S.-backed aid organization that’s been setting death traps for starving Palestinians.
Huckabee said Friday morning that he and special envoy Steve Witkoff visited Gaza to “learn the truth” about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, whose aid sites have become the locus of mass casualty events on a near-daily basis.
The United Nations reported Thursday that at least 859 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to receive aid at GHF sites between May 27 and July 31, mostly by the Israeli military.
Huckabee seemed pleased after receiving a briefing from the Israeli military and meeting with GHF workers on the ground. “GHF delivers more than one million meals a day, an incredible feat!” Huckabee wrote in a post on X.
But GHF has now been implicated in hundreds of Palestinians deaths, as the widespread famine in Gaza worsens.
“Israeli forces are not only deliberately starving Palestinian civilians, but they are now gunning them down almost every day as they desperately seek food for their families,” said Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch. “US-backed Israeli forces and private contractors have put in place a flawed, militarized aid distribution system that has turned aid distributions into regular bloodbaths.”
GHF’s funding sources are opaque, but Trump said Friday that Israel had agreed to match a $30 million donation, according to Reuters.
GHF has also been criticized as systematically ineffectual. Anthony Aguilar, a retired 25-year U.S. Army veteran and Green Beret who’d been working for the group as a security contractor described GHF as “an enterprise that has failed from the beginning.”
“It’s abhorrent. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comedy. It’s not comedy, because it is absolutely tragic,” he told Mother Jones. Aguilar also alleged that his fellow contractors used nonlethal and lethal munitions in unauthorized ways, cheering as they fired blindly into a crowd of Palestinians.
For his part, Huckabee doesn’t seem all that interested in easing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza—seeing that it would require him to acknowledge Palestinians’ humanity. Earlier this week, Huckabee said that France’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state was “like letting the Nazis have a victory after World War II.”
And for all of Trump’s too-little too-late statements about the starvation in Gaza, he seems to feel about the same. After Canada issued a statement backing a two-state solution Thursday, Trump lashed out in a Truth Social post, threatening a prospective trade deal between the U.S. and Canada.
Laura Loomer is feeling emboldened, as the Trump White House this week further deepened the impression that it farms out personnel decisions to the far-right provocateur.
Loomer, who seems to enjoy ready access to the president’s ear, on Thursday unveiled a tip line to help fire more Trump officials. “Know an Obama-Biden holdover inside the Trump admin who needs to be exposed for their misdeeds?” she posted on X. “Contact the Loomered Tip Line.”
“I guess you could say that my tip line has come to serve as a form of therapy for Trump administration officials who want to expose their colleagues who should not be in the positions that they’re in,” Loomer told Politico. She also mentioned that she has “people in the West Wing,” as well as fans and informants “in pretty much every single agency within the federal government.”
Loomer promised that the string of staffing shake-ups for which she’s already responsible—including firings of federal prosecutors, National Security Council personnel, and top National Security Agency officials—is only the beginning. She told Politico she plans to purge “hundreds” more in her effort to address a “vetting crisis” supposedly plaguing the Trump administration, which she considers to be overrun with Democratic sleeper cells.
Strikingly, within the course of 24 hours earlier this week, Loomer played a direct role in two high-profile departures.
First, she ginned up a campaign against supposed “progressive leftist saboteur” Vinay Prasad, a top Food and Drug Administration official, who stepped down on Tuesday so as not to be “a distraction.” Loomer then targeted Jen Easterly, a newly announced distinguished chair at West Point and former Biden official (who also worked for the Bush II administration), as a “Biden holdover.” Not only did the secretary of the Army then order West Point to fire Easterly, but it also announced plans for the academy to adjust its hiring practices, seemingly obliging Loomer’s demands that it further weed out “moles.”
“So many scalps this week! Stacking them up” Loomer posted to X Wednesday, before adding, the following day, “I will continue my independent vetting operation to help protect President Trump, his administration and the American people from nefarious people.”
A federal judge ruled on Thursday against the Trump administration’s plans to end Temporary Protected Status for 60,000 immigrants from Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua, saying that the decision was partly motivated by the “discriminatory belief that certain immigrant populations will replace the white population.”
TPS is a protected status that allows immigrants to live and work in the United States if conditions in their home countries are deemed unsafe. The administration has already ended the protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, Ukrainians, and people from Afghanistan and Cameroon.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem put Nepalese, Honduran, and Nicaraguan immigrants next on the chopping block, claiming that the situations in their home........© New Republic
