U.S. envoy Witkoff’s visit to Gaza criticized as a publicity stunt

Weeks of anger against the anger against the hungry Palestinians due to the offensive restrictions and aid of Israel reached the White House, President Donald Trump shifting the sight of the enameled children on the edge of the famine.

Friday, his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, entered Gaza in a rare visit of senior American officials with the besieged enclave.

Accompanied by the Israeli army, Witkoff visited a help distribution site in the south of Gaza led by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation supported by the United States and Israeli, where hundreds of Palestinians were desperately awaited behind barbed wire for food.

“An incredible feat!” Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, who accompanied Witkoff, said in an article on X on Friday, after visiting GHF operations and spoke to “people on the ground”.

The Palestinians and others inside Gaza criticized the visit as a public relations for GHF, whose aid distribution process was marked by chaos, looting and fatal fire, often by Israeli soldiers, who killed hundreds of hundreds of Palestinians in search of help.

“It was a stroke of public relations, a supervised controlled visit and dictated by the Israeli army,” said Ellie Burgos, an American intensive care nurse at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in NBC News, the NBC News team. “What they saw was not reality.”

Burgos had previously called Witkoff to visit Gaza, asking him to see the conditions on the ground for himself, but estimated that his limited tour did not do much to change the situation on the ground.

“Food is always incredibly difficult to find, people are always slaughtered on aid distribution sites and violence continues,” she said.

The day of the visit, at least 92 people were killed on Friday in Gaza, including 51 people who asked for help, Dr. Mohammed Saqr, director of nursing at Nasser Hospital, told NBC.

Mohamed Saddak, 47, who hoped to collect food for her nine -year -old family, NBC News’ crew that the tanks had advanced to him and others when they were trying to receive help.

“They are constantly shooting us,” he said, “pulling tanks, and sometimes by drones.”

Israeli defense forces did not immediately respond to a request for comments from NBC News on fire on help sites after Witkoff’s visit.

Israeli officials have continued to refuse generalized hunger allegations in Gaza, although as a sign of discourse, senior US officials began to recognize the crisis.

“You have small children who are clearly starving,” said Vice-President JD Vance on Monday.

In an article on X, Witkoff said that the aim of the visit was to give Trump a “clear understanding of the humanitarian situation and to help develop a plan to provide food and medical aid to the inhabitants of Gaza”.

After Gaza, Witkoff visited Hostages Square on Saturday in Tel Aviv, where Israeli hostage families captive by Hamas demanded that the Israeli government obtain an agreement to disclose the remaining hostages. Fifty hostages remain in Gaza, of which around twenty are considered alive.

According to a press release from the Smarting and missing families forum, Witkoff said to them: “We will bring your children home and keep Hamas responsible for all bad acts on their part.” He added: “We will do what is good for the Gazan people.”

The demonstrations intervened after an Israeli hostage video in Gaza, Rom Braslavski, was published Thursday by the Palestinian Islamic jihad. A day later, Hamas published a video of another Israeli hostage, Evyatar David, showing him alive but fragile. We don’t know when the videos were filmed.

“We cannot bear one more minute without bringing him home,” said the cousin of Braslavski, Adam Hajaj, in a statement. “This video has torn my family!”

Huckabee, on the other hand, praised GHF’s distribution of more than one million meals a day, which, in the population of Gaza, of around 2 million people reached an average of half a repair per person per day.

The GHF intervened to distribute food in the weeks which followed Israel its total blockage of almost three months on all the foods and supplies entering the enclave. But the aid that GHF has distributed, as well as certain quantities limited by other international organizations, are not far from the needs of the population. Last Sunday, Israel said that he widen access to assistance to Gaza after contempt of generalized famine and the death of malnutrition.

The GHF manages four aid sites in Gaza, and even if it claims the independence of any government, it manages the sites within the militarized area of Israel with the support of the Israeli army.

Witnesses and assistance agencies have decreed the assistance delivery process, which, according to the UN, led to the death of nearly 1,400 people while collecting aid, including 859 near the GHF sites.

The Israeli army and the GHF recognized that certain shots had been drawn but said that as warnings.

“Israeli forces and private entrepreneurs supported by the United States have implemented a defective militarized aid distribution system that has transformed blood aid from New York based on Friday.

The colleague of Burgos, Dr. Tom Adamkiewicz, urged diplomats to see “what happens to children, families, these young boys, women and men who are essentially slaughtered as rabbits”.