The US has approved a $30 million (€25.5 million) grant to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and called on other nations to fund the controversial Israel-backed aid scheme despite the killings of hundreds of Palestinians travelling to secure supplies in the first month of its chaotic introduction.
The state department grant is the first time anyone has openly acknowledged financing the GHF, which has until now not disclosed its sources of funding.
“We call on other countries to also support the GHF, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and its critical work,” state department spokesperson Tommy Pigott said in a briefing.
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“We’re seeing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in line with president [Donald] Trump’s call to deliver aid in a way where it can’t be looted by Hamas. We’re seeing those creative solutions.”
GHF operates three distribution sites in southern Gaza and one in the centre of the strip, which are staffed by US private security contractors and guarded by Israeli forces.
The US, Israel and GHF argue the militarised scheme is needed to prevent aid from reaching Hamas, whose October 7th, 2023 attack on Israel triggered the 20-month war.
Palestinians must travel dozens of kilometres on foot to the sites, which are often open for a short period of time and overwhelmed by desperate Gazans, who have faced extreme food shortages after Israel imposed a multi-month blockade in March. Many leave with nothing.
Israeli forces have killed more than 400 Palestinians trying to reach the distribution sites, according to Gaza’s health ministry, with thousands of others injured.
The Israeli military has acknowledged that its soldiers have opened fire on several occasions but claimed they did so after people approached them in a way they deemed threatening.
Mr Trump’s administration has championed the scheme, but this is the first time the US government is openly financing it. GHF has previously said that an unnamed “foreign government” provided funding in advance of its launch.
Israel has allowed the GHF mechanism to largely sideline the long-standing aid system run by the United Nations, which operated more than 400 distribution points across Gaza.
The UN and most international NGOs have refused to work with GHF, saying that, by concentrating its distribution sites in southern Gaza, rather than in the north and elsewhere, the scheme amounted to a “fig leaf” for displacement.
Israel this week said it was halting aid deliveries into the north, from where the UN has been able to send a trickle of supplies into the enclave, after claiming they were being hijacked by Hamas – something Palestinian community leaders denied.
The head of the UN’s Reliefs and Works Agency this week called GHF “a deathtrap, costing more lives than it saves”.
Earlier this week, GHF’s executive chair Johnnie Moore, an evangelical preacher and White House adviser in the first Trump administration, wrote a letter to UN chief António Guterres, calling on the UN to collaborate with GHF.
“The UN has the means. GHF has the mechanism. What remains simply is the will,” Mr Moore wrote. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2025
