The Independent presses White House on humanitarian support efforts in Gaza | EUROtoday

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The Independent’s White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg pressed Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on US efforts to get support into Gaza through the White House press briefing on Thursday.

“How can you stand there and say the president is doing everything he can, when for weeks… even as NGOs and aid groups warned that famine was imminent, you continued to refuse to… link defence aid to humanitarian aid?” Mr Feinberg requested.

“We’ve done air drops, we’re going to do this pier,” Ms Jean-Pierre stated of the US efforts to get support into Gaza, which features a short-term pier within the Mediterranean Sea. “We’ve talked about for the past several months how we need to do more and how we’re going to uptick our efforts to get that humanitarian aid into Gaza.”

Of the round 250 hostages taken from Israel into Gaza final October, 133 stay, in keeping with Israel.

On Wednesday, a US official stated for the primary time that famine might be already underway in Gaza.

Administrator Samantha Power of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) appeared earlier than the House Foreign Relations Committee the place she was requested by Democratic Rep Joaquin Castro if it’s “plausible or likely that parts of Gaza, and in particular northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine?”

“The methodology that the [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative] used is one that we had our experts scrub, it’s one that’s relied upon in other settings, and that is their assessment, and we believe that assessment is credible,” Ms Jean-Pierre stated.

“So famine is already occurring there?” Mr Castro pressed.

“That is – yes,” she stated.

Mr Feinberg famous that President Joe Biden has “not until recently even suggested that he would condition military aid which Israel needs on them allowing food and humanitarian aid into Gaza”.

“The hostage deal includes getting the humanitarian aid in. We’ve been working on getting that hostage deal done. We’re going to continue to do that,” Ms Jean-Pierre stated.

More than 33,000 folks in Gaza have died throughout Israel’s conflict on Hamas, principally girls and kids. The conflict was declared after Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 folks in Israel and took quite a few hostages on October 7, 2023.