President Trump said on Friday that “a lot of people are starving” in the Gaza Strip under an Israeli blockade preventing aid deliveries, adding that the U.S. wanted to help alleviate the suffering.
“We’re going to handle a couple of situations that you have here,” Mr. Trump said, speaking in the United Arab Emirates on the last leg of his visit to three Persian Gulf nations this week. “We’re looking at Gaza, and we got to get that taken care of. A lot of people are starving. A lot of people. There’s a lot of bad things going on.”
Aid groups have warned for weeks that the population of Gaza is on the brink of famine, and some Israeli military officials have begun to privately express concerns over the risk of starvation in the territory, 19 months after the war there began.
On top of the siege it has imposed on Gaza for more than two months, Israel has escalated its military campaign in recent days. Strikes on Friday killed more than 100 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry, a day after Israeli bombardment forced the closure of one of the enclave’s major hospitals. The Gaza authorities do not distinguish between civilians and militants when issuing death tolls.
The Trump administration had remained largely silent on Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, but Gulf Arab leaders who met with Mr. Trump during his trip to the region this week seized on the opportunity to address that issue, among others. They scored a remarkable turnaround in U.S. policy when the president announced on the first day of the visit that he would lift sanctions on Syria.
Mr. Trump emerged from his trip to the Middle East with a more sympathetic tone on Gaza — a notable shift given his longstanding relationship with the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Unlike his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose administration had criticized Israel’s conduct of the war and threatened to withhold some military aid, Mr. Trump has shown support for Israel’s campaign. Mr. Trump has even suggested removing all Palestinians from Gaza to make way for a U.S. takeover of the enclave and a luxury waterfront development.
Boarding Air Force One on Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters that the United States must take action on the Gaza crisis. He was en route home after the first major state visit of his second term, which took him to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“I think a lot of good things are going to happen over the next month ,” Mr. Trump said. “We have to help also out the Palestinians,” he added, noting that the United States would look at both sides of the issue. “We’ll do a good job,” he said.
The comments are the latest in a string of words and actions by the president that have strained the often-chummy relationship between Mr. Trump and Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Trump also recently announced a deal with the Houthis in Yemen, another avowed enemy of Israel, to end U.S. strikes on the militants in return for them agreeing not to attack U.S. shipping interests passing through the Red Sea. That deal included no guarantees for Israel, which has continued to face Houthi strikes.
Israel, in turn, has continued to bomb Yemen. On Friday, Israel’s military said it struck two ports in Yemen, which it said were “used to transfer weapons and are a further example of the Houthi terrorist regime’s systematic and cynical exploitation of civilian infrastructure.”
The Houthi-controlled al-Masirah news channel said four people were killed in the strike.
Mr. Trump, who was greeted throughout his visit with lavish welcomes, enjoyed boisterous applause and even a standing ovation at some points in his first speech in Riyadh, where he addressed a gathering of business leaders.
The one point when his speech was met with stark silence was when he expressed a “fervent wish” that Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords, the 2020 deal in which two of its neighbors established diplomatic relations with Israel.
Polling has shown that the normalization of relations with the Israeli government is deeply unpopular among the Saudi people, especially since the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 50,000 people and reduced vast swathes of the enclave to rubble. Saudi officials say that recognizing Israel would hinge on the creation of a Palestinian state.
Gulf Arab leaders, aware of the symbolic potency to their own people of the Palestinian plight, sought to change Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and thinking on Gaza. Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, asked Mr. Trump to use American leverage to bring about peace in Gaza and end the killing.
Israel started its total blockade on March 2. For more than 70 days, it has barred the entry of food, water and other supplies while cases of malnutrition and disease are spiraling.
Israel says it is aiming to force Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that dominates Gaza, to accept new cease-fire conditions after a two-month truce fell apart. It also wants to secure the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which set off the war.
Israel has been threatening to escalate its military campaign in Gaza even further and recently stepped up the intensity of deadly military strikes.
The United Nations-backed body that monitors starvation conditions in the world warned this week that Gaza is at “critical risk of famine,” saying that 100 percent of the enclave’s two million residents face a malnutrition crisis.
The conditions in Gaza have spurred the creation of an aid group with backing from the Trump administration, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The new group appears to have come in response to a plan that Israeli and U.S. officials have been working on in recent weeks, which involves distribution zones for food that would have Israeli forces stationed outside their perimeters.
That is similar to what the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation described as its plan for establishing a new system for aid to flow into the territory, in agreement with Israel.
The foundation said it would set up a number of distribution centers where Gazans could pick up food, hygiene kits and other humanitarian support, though it did not mention Israeli forces.
The U.S.-Israeli plan has been met with widespread skepticism from established humanitarian groups and U.N. agencies, which argue that the system could force sick or older Gazans into long and dangerous treks for aid.
Vowing not to join the effort, the United Nations also warned that the foundation’s distribution system could become a means for forced displacement, as most centers were expected to be in the southern part of the enclave. More than 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced in the war, many of them multiple times.
Israel has declared about 70 percent of the enclave to be either “no go” zones or under evacuation orders.
