It is evident that US foreign aid is not premised on humanitarianism and alleviating suffering.
By Robert Williams, Gatestone Institute
The US has donated close to a billion dollars of taxpayer money to Gaza, ruled by the officially designated terrorist group, Hamas, in the eight months following October 7, 2023.
On that day, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Iranian proxies that invaded southern Israel, carrying out this act of war on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
There, they brutally murdered 1,200 people, raped and mutilated women and children, burned children to death in front of their parents, and abducted more than 250 people into Gaza.
Also, starting on October 7, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad – in close cooperation with their allies in Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon – have launched more than 19,000 rockets, missiles and attack-drones at Israel, a country smaller than New Jersey.
And yet, since October 7 the Biden administration has rewarded Hamas with the gift of close to a billion dollars in US taxpayer money, disguised as “humanitarian aid”, most of which clearly ends up in the hands of Hamas.
Since October 7, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) gave more than $674 million in “humanitarian aid” to Gaza.
On July 11, USAID announced another $100 million for Gaza, making it a total of more than $774 million.
In addition, since October, the Biden administration has given $122 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which effectively functions as a branch of Hamas in Gaza, bringing the total of US taxpayer funds donated to Gaza as a reward since the October 7 massacre on to $896 million, or close to a billion dollars.
The overlap between UNRWA and Hamas has been an open secret for the past decade, but became fully public only after October 7 with the findings that at least 12 UNRWA staff actively participated in the October 7 attack.
Most recently, on July 4, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked UNRWA to terminate the employment of 100 terrorist operatives still working for the organization.
“In recent months Israel has discovered that hundreds of terrorists, members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) have been employed by UNRWA in the Gaza Strip, some of them holding high-ranking positions in UNRWA or in Hamas,” Ambassador Amir Weissbrod wrote in the letter to UNRWA.
A lawsuit, brought in December 2022 and updated in March 2024, by Rep. Ronny Jackson and victims of terror attacks in Israel, alleges that President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken “knowingly and unlawfully” provided more than $1.5 billion in aid to Gaza and the West Bank since taking office.
Biden and Blinken have “known for years” that the US aid is providing “material support” for Hamas’ “tunnels, rockets, weapon procurement, and command and control infrastructure,” among other terror structures, the lawsuit stated.
The Biden administration has sought to have the case dismissed twice but failed.
On June 28, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled that the lawsuit can proceed, and that there is evidence the Biden administration continued awarding taxpayer cash to UNRWA even after Congress blocked funding to that group due to its support for Hamas’s military infrastructure.
So, billions in US aid for the Gaza Strip, which is home to just two million people, most of whom actively support the terrorists running the territory and their Iranian handlers according to poll after poll.
The Biden administration would have Americans believe it is all about humanitarian aid for people in extreme need.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (ICP), a UN-affiliated body, published two reports in June, concluding that there is no famine and that the supply of food to Gaza has, in fact, increased, not decreased, in recent months.
The UN has also admitted that until now there have only been 32 deaths in Gaza from malnutrition, 28 of them among children under 5 years old.
The question nobody seems to ask is whether it is a reasonable policy to send billions in aid to a terrorist group supposedly for two million people who apparently do not receive it — rather than to, for instance, according to the US World Food Program (US WFP), which works in cooperation with USAID, “nearly 350 million people around the world [who] are experiencing the most extreme forms of hunger right now. Of those, nearly 49 million people are on the brink of famine.”
US WFP lists the ten countries suffering the most from hunger right now (updated on June 25), including Sudan (26 million people facing extreme hunger), the Democratic Republic of Congo (23.4 million facing extreme hunger), Yemen, (17 million), Syria (12.9 million), Afghanistan (12.4 million), and South Sudan (7.1 million people). Gaza is nowhere to be found on the list.
Sudan is the country in the world with the most people facing hunger and the situation is extreme, with people eating grass and peanut shells.
“At least 750,000 people are on the brink of starvation and death in Sudan, where a devastating civil war has left over half the country’s 48 million people in a situation of chronic hunger,” the New York Times reported last month.
The famine has been deliberately induced by the warring sides, according to anonymous sources within the UN, and is therefore a war crime.
By the UN’s own admission, although Sudan is the country with the worst famine, it is also the most forgotten and ignored.
How much aid has the Biden administration, so concerned with humanitarian assistance and people in dire need, donated to Sudan in fiscal year 2024?
About one-third of the aid to Gaza, namely $280 million.
Let that sink in: Gaza’s Hamas terrorists, who shoot at their own people when they try to take some of the aid intended for them, received almost three times as much as Sudan in fiscal year 2024, even though Sudan, a country of 48 million, is in the midst of devastating famine.
How about DRC Congo, where 23.4 million people face starvation?
The Biden administration, so concerned with humanitarian compassion for victims of famine and war, has donated around $424 million dollars from June 2023 to June 2024 to DRC Congo — about half the amount that Gaza received.
In short, the Biden administration has donated less to Sudan and DRC Congo combined, where a total of nearly 50 million people face starvation, than to Gaza, where 2 million people face no such thing.
What is going on? And where is Congress?
There is more: Hamas is an Iranian proxy: Iran orchestrated the October 7 attacks. Iran sends $100 million to Hamas, $700 million to Hezbollah, and tens of millions to Islamic Jihad every year.
Biden has actively enabled those Iranian donations by propping up the Iranian Islamic regime’s generous financing of its terrorist proxies, most recently in March by offering Iran sanctions waivers worth $10 billion.
It is evident that US foreign aid is not premised on humanitarianism and alleviating suffering, as the Biden administration would like to have us all think.
Because if it were, its foreign aid would be channeled where people are actually starving to death — not to Gaza and straight into the pockets of Hamas.
According to FBI director Christopher Wray, “the actions of Hamas and its allies will serve as an inspiration the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS launched its so-called caliphate years ago.”
Iran, officially labeled the world’s leading sponsor of state terrorism by the 2023 US annual Terrorism Report, calls the US “the Great Satan” and continues to vow “Death to America.”
Blinken casually announced in a July 19 interview that Iran had reduced the time it would need to create sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon “to one to two weeks.”
He then went on to gaslight the audience by claiming that the Biden administration has been “maximizing pressure on Iran across the board.”
Why is the Biden administration, under the pretense of “humanitarian aid,” drowning these terrorist enemies of America in US taxpayer money? And what, if anything, is Congress going to do about it?