GHF chief attacks UN and media, avoids saying ‘Palestinians’ when referring to Gaza

The chairman of the scandal-plagued Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) on Thursday called the United Nations a propaganda tool for Hamas as he promoted the aid scheme at a speech in the US capital, Washington, DC.

Johnnie Moore also appeared to avoid saying the term “Palestinian” entirely, instead choosing to describe them as “Arabs” or “Gazans”. 

He did not acknowledge the more than 1,000 deaths at the four GHF sites in the enclave, and railed against the NGOs and media outlets that he said are trying to discredit his work, which he said is built exclusively on Judeo-Christian principles. The Heritage Foundation, where he was speaking, espouses those principles as a core tenet of policymaking under US President Donald Trump.

“When establishment media and international organisations spread these false narratives about GHF, they’re not attacking us. They’re attacking the hungry children that we feed, and instead of lying, they should just help us, because there’s another basic rule of life: if Hamas opposes you, it probably means you’re doing the right thing, even if the UN secretary general is on their side,” Moore said.

“As a Christian, when my Bible inspires me to go feed the hungry, it doesn’t include a footnote about cross-checking with the UN Charter,” he added.

The GHF was brought in as an attempted alternative to the United Nations aid agencies in Gaza, which have decades of experience, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu imposed a total siege on the strip in March.

It began operations in May and had a rocky start after its first CEO resigned, citing human rights concerns. The staff is made up of military contractors from the US, with some from the UK. 

GHF’s funding remains a mystery, though the Trump administration has now approved $30m for the organisation, despite initially describing it as a completely independent undertaking that is not government-linked. 

“There were 950 UN food trucks that were inspected, approved and fully loaded, sitting inside the Gaza Strip rotting because the UN refused to deliver the food while they simultaneously decried hunger in the Gaza Strip,” Moore said on Thursday as he justified GHF’s work.

The UN did not deny that its aid trucks have been waiting for months at the border, but it said its staff is not being allowed in to coordinate the distribution through its own infrastructure that has been in place in some instances since Israel’s founding in 1948.

“And here’s the bitter irony,” Moore said. “Some in the United Nations have become the press secretary for Hamas. And in effect, in the ceasefire negotiations, they were sitting on the Hamas side of the table, laundering Hamas disinformation every single day”. 

Information war

The US government still insists that Hamas is looting the aid despite the Israeli military confirming it has no such evidence.

Hamas has rejected the accusation, and while Palestinians on the ground have acknowledged there is organised theft of aid trucks, they say the perpetrators are gangs that sell the food to traders. The traders then try to sell that food in the open markets at exorbitant prices. 

“We have to recognise that the current system is prolonging this war and further oppressing the Arab victims of Hamas, the people of Gaza,” Moore said, never once saying the proper name for the people of Gaza and all of Palestine, the “Palestinians”.

Nor did anyone else at the Heritage Foundation, which does not acknowledge that Palestine exists, and openly called for the annexation of the entirety of the occupied West Bank at Thursday’s event.

“This type of work has a cost,” Moore continued. “We lost 12 local Gazan aid workers. Hamas brutally murdered them. They injured dozens more, and to make a point, they piled them in front of one of the only hospitals still operating in the Gaza Strip, guarded them within an earshot of the hospital and refused to allow them any medical treatment”.

Hamas has maintained that the dozen people it killed were part of the Israeli-backed militia known as The Popular Forces, led by a notorious convicted drug trafficker, Yasser Abu Shabab. 

The US and Israel have tried to prop up Abu Shabab as an alternative to Hamas. 

By Friday, Moore said, the GHF will have delivered “100 million meals to the people of Gaza –  food Hamas could not steal”. 

The claims of millions of meals have also often been repeated by the US State Department, but it’s unclear how they are counting these meals, given that Palestinians have described the rations as meagre. 

The GHF came under intense scrutiny this week after former Green Beret (US Army special forces) and contractor, Anthony Aguilar, revealed the chilling orders the GHF received from the Israeli military, in an interview with US Senator Chris Van Hollen. 

Aguilar said the Israeli military threatened to shoot Palestinian children if Aguilar did not “take care of this”. 

He said he only later realised that the Israeli military is in fact “the client” that GHF is serving, and that he is not allowed to “say no to the client”.

Aguilar says he has since severed his contract and is speaking out. 

The GHF has said Aguilar was fired for misconduct and that he is “disgruntled”.