Starvation in Gaza.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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What I got right.

On Friday, I did something I’ve never done in Tangle before: I penned an entire piece about the things I’ve gotten right. Since I had just published something on all the things I got wrong about Trump, I decided to focus on the same topic — breaking down five things I’ve written about Trump’s second term that have already come to fruition. You can read “Five things I got right about Trump” here (this is a paywalled Friday edition, and in order to read the entire thing you’ll be asked to subscribe).

Quick hits.

1. The United States and the European Union (EU) reached a trade agreement that will put a 15% tariff on most EU exports. The EU will also invest approximately $600 billion in the United States and increase purchases of U.S. energy and military equipment. (The deal)
2. The Justice Department granted convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell limited immunity during meetings with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. The Justice Department has not disclosed who or what Maxwell and Blanche discussed. (The meeting)
3. 11 people were stabbed in an attack at a Walmart near Traverse City, Michigan. A suspect was arrested and charged with terrorism and 11 counts of assault with intent to murder. (The attack)
4. The Department of Education released over $5 billion in frozen education funds that had been withheld since the beginning of July. (The release)
5. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said Thailand and Cambodia agreed to a ceasefire, ending five days of fighting linked to a longstanding border dispute. (The ceasefire)

Today’s topic.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza. On Sunday, the Israeli military temporarily paused operations in three parts of Gaza to allow aid groups into the enclave amid rising concerns over a hunger crisis. Separately, Israel airdropped humanitarian aid into Gaza for the first time since the start of its war with Hamas, one of several measures that government officials said were aimed at combatting “false claim[s] of deliberate starvation” in Gaza. Israel said the “tactical pause” in operations would take effect in the cities of Gaza City, Deir al-Balah and Muwasi, beginning every day at 10:00 AM local time and continuing until further notice. Aid trucks departed to Gaza from Egypt and Jordan on news of the policy change, and the first trucks have arrived from Egypt. 

Back up: Israel barred entry of all aid into Gaza in March in an effort to increase pressure on Hamas to release hostages, then restarted limited aid deliveries in May using foreign contractors outside the United Nations’ (UN) aid system. Israel has blamed Hamas for conditions in the strip, saying the food scarcity is a man-made crisis. Conversely, Hamas has accused Israel of using food access as a military tactic. On Monday, July 21, 31 countries — including the United Kingdom, Japan, and several European nations — issued a joint statement criticizing Israel’s aid delivery mechanisms, saying it is “dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity.” The U.S. and Israel each rejected the letter’s claims, though on Monday, President Donald Trump said, “There is real starvation in Gaza — you can't fake that.” 

The Israel-backed food distribution system — led by the U.S.-registered Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — has struggled to safely and reliably distribute food in Gaza, where demand for aid has outpaced supply. Furthermore, the GHF system uses the Israeli military to protect aid workers, but soldiers have killed scores of Gazans in incidents during aid distribution. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says that over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces while seeking aid, primarily near the GHF’s food collection sites. 

In recent weeks, aid groups have increasingly raised concerns about an impending humanitarian crisis in Gaza. On Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a statement saying that “the scale of human suffering and the stripping of human dignity have long exceeded every acceptable standard — both legal and moral.” On Sunday, the World Food Program claimed, “Some 470,000 people are enduring famine-like conditions,” adding it has enough food to feed all of Gaza for three months. Some Israeli experts have also suggested that the government’s decision to loosen aid restrictions is a response to the crisis’s mounting urgency. 147 people in Gaza have died of starvation since the start of the war, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied that Israel is deliberately starving Gazans, saying on Sunday that Israel “will have to continue to allow the entry of minimal humanitarian supplies. We have done this until now.” While many Israeli officials have long accused Hamas of stealing aid before it could reach Gazans, multiple senior military officials recently said that they had not found proof of systemic aid seizures by Hamas; the U.S. Agency for International Development reportedly reached the same conclusion in its review.  

Today, we’ll cover the latest on the aid situation in Gaza, with views from the left, right, and writers in the Middle East. Then, my take.

What the left is saying.

• The left is disturbed by the humanitarian situation in Gaza, and many call on the United States to facilitate more aid. 
• Others say Israel is misleading the world about the cause of the crisis.

In MSNBC, Sari Bashi wrote “Israel is starving Gaza. And the U.S. is complicit.”

“The Israeli government denies famine or aid obstruction and blames the United Nations and Hamas for any shortages. Israeli officials accuse aid agencies of ‘distributing lies,’ say restrictions are needed to prevent diversion by Hamas, and argue that because tons of U.N. aid is still on the Gaza side of crossings, waiting to be distributed, there’s no need to allow more in,” Bashi said. “Official Israeli misinformation is not particularly sophisticated, but it’s repetitive, relentless and reliant on Western dehumanization of Palestinians… Only racism — the belief that some people’s lives are worth less than others, and that some people’s statements are inherently unreliable — can explain American susceptibility to Israel’s denial of starvation in Gaza.”

“There are two things the United States government should urgently do to end U.S. complicity in the mass starvation. First, the U.S. must tell the Israeli military to open all crossings into Gaza, end onerous bureaucratic restrictions and allow aid groups to flood the strip with food. On average since March 2, just 28 international aid trucks have entered Gaza daily, compared with 500 total trucks per day before the war,” Bashi wrote. “Second, the U.S. must end support for dangerous, militarized distribution schemes like the GHF and instruct the Israeli military to resume cooperation with the United Nations and the other principled, impartial aid groups.”

In The Guardian, Peter Beaumont argued “Israel [is] trying to deflect blame for widespread starvation in Gaza.”

“David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesperson, told Sky News this week: ‘There is no famine in Gaza — there is a famine of the truth,’” Beaumont said. “Israel’s attempts to deflect blame, however, are undermined by its single and overarching responsibility: that as an occupying power in a conflict, it is legally obliged to ensure the provision of means of life for those under occupation. And while Israel has consistently tried to blame Hamas for intercepting food aid, that claim has been undermined by a leaked US assessment, seen by Reuters, which found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group of US-funded humanitarian supplies.”

“Israel has also recently intensified efforts to blame the UN for the problems with aid distribution, citing a ‘lack of cooperation from the international community and international organisations.’ Israel’s claims are contradicted by clear evidence of its efforts to undermine aid distribution,” Beaumont wrote. “Instead Israel, backed by the US, has relied on the private, inexperienced and controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; its sites have been the focus of numerous mass killings of desperate Palestinians by Israeli soldiers.”

What the right is saying.

• Many on the right refute that Israel is to blame for the lack of food in Gaza, saying Hamas is responsible.
• Some argue Israel should do more to facilitate aid distribution or risk its global standing. 

In Commentary Magazine, Seth Mandel wrote about “the enablers of Hamas’s starvation strategy.”

“For the first time since the war began, there are credible concerns of hunger in Gaza. The main indicator, as expressed both by Gazans and economists, is the price of food in the enclave, a variable that can at least be used to calculate supply and demand and therefore offers a general picture of the overall trend. And that trend suggests that a future hunger crisis might be on the horizon if nothing changes,” Mandel said. “The caveat — and it’s a big one — is that there is enough food in Gaza… Hamas is intentionally starving the rest of Gaza.”

“Additionally, nearly a thousand UN aid trucks have passed through the Israeli inspection points and sit in Gaza with their goods undistributed. Trey Yingst, a fairly harsh critic of the Israeli counteroffensive, reports that the IDF offered the UN five different routes to distribute the aid; as of yet the UN does not appear to have accepted any of the distribution offers,” Mandel wrote. “Hamas will hoard the aid and resell some for astronomical markup. In other words, Hamas’s strategy is to keep the people of Gaza perpetually close to a hunger crisis because that triggers international pressure on Israel to let Hamas restock its own shelves and refill its own coffers.”

The Wall Street Journal editorial board said “Gaza’s aid crisis helps only Hamas.”

“Gazans have suffered for what the U.S. official calls the ‘my-way-or-the-highway approach’ of the traditional aid groups. Israeli military stubbornness has also been to blame, including an unwillingness to divert assets that would help expand aid efforts,” the board wrote. “It’s notable that shutting down the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the new U.S.- and Israel-backed aid group, was the no. 2 item on Hamas’s list of demands in cease-fire negotiations on Thursday… Whatever its flaws, the new aid group usually provides some two million meals a day directly to Gazans free of charge. That’s a threat to Hamas, which fired a rocket at a GHF aid site on Thursday.”

“Aid also needs to get to the weak, not only the strong, which is difficult when aid sites are rushed and trucks are looted. Opening an aid site to women only, as the GHF did Thursday, is one promising idea,” the board said. “Israel is running out of time to ensure more aid gets through to Gazans. Blaming the U.N., though fair, doesn’t suffice. In a good sign on Friday, Israel allowed Arab states to resume aid airdrops. Jerusalem will also have to prove to its allies that the GHF can work and scale up operations, or risk losing their support.”

What writers in the Middle East are saying.

• Gazan writers report that suffering runs rampant amid ongoing food shortages.
• Some writers in Israel worry that the government has no strategy to end the war or avert a humanitarian disaster. 

In Middle East Eye, Ahmed Aziz wrote “starving Palestinian families face the unthinkable.”

“Famine in Gaza has become a daily reality. It is no longer merely a sensation of deprivation; it manifests in the sight of people collapsing in the streets from sheer exhaustion. Children, women, the elderly — no one is spared. We have witnessed, with our own eyes, bodies slumping on the pavement and lives lost outside the ruins of bakeries or at aid distribution points that never deliver,” Aziz said. “The price of a kilogram of flour has surpassed $30, while a kilogram of sugar now costs over $130. Most foods are either entirely unavailable or so scarce as to seem imaginary. The tragedy is not just in the prices, but in the absence of essential goods. People are not simply refusing to buy; there is nothing left to buy.”

“Children now cry out daily: ‘We want bread!’ ‘We want to eat!’ But no one feeds them. My young cousins, only five years old, wake at dawn begging their father to bring them a loaf of bread, but he cannot afford one. A single loaf has become a luxury,” Aziz wrote. “Some fathers have begun to flee their tents, unable to bear the look of disappointment in their children's eyes. I saw a mother praying for her children to die, simply because she could no longer feed them. Some mothers sit at the entrances of their tents, tears falling, whispering broken prayers: ‘Oh God, please take them... relieve them of this suffering.’”

In The Times of Israel, David Horovitz explored “how Israel made itself responsible for Gaza.”

“The Israel Defense Forces today says it controls some 75 percent of the Gaza Strip — meaning that, by its own declaration, Israel is responsible for most of Gaza,” Horovitz said. Israel “has found itself responsible for securing access to GHF sites and for overseeing other aid distribution mechanisms. Yet it is not trained or equipped to do so… Israel simply cannot have its soldiers, believing themselves in genuine danger and lacking nonlethal means of protection, killing numerous Gaza civilians almost daily. It undermines the war effort. It is immoral and indefensible. Yet that is what is continuing to happen.”

“A war that began because of the absolute imperative to destroy Hamas’s military machine and get back the hostages has metastasized into an Israeli military takeover of most of Gaza,” Horovitz wrote. “The Gaza terror state built by Hamas in its ongoing declared goal of destroying Israel is largely in ruins, largely uninhabitable, and the Gazans that Hamas most deliberately placed in harm’s way are indeed suffering terrible harm — but with Israel, not Hamas, now having chosen to make itself responsible. Israel is rapidly alienating most of its closest allies while, internally fragmented, the vast majority of the public is desperate to end the war in exchange for the release of all the hostages.”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• The exaggerated claims of starvation that have persisted since the war began have now become reality.
• Regardless of the justifications, this starvation has been directly caused by Israel’s blockade.
• I am heartbroken to see a country that I love reduced to such acts of inhumanity.

Where should I start? 

That’s all I could think when I sat down to start today’s “My take” section. Starvation, occupation, terrorism, entrenched warfare, generations of bloody conflict — the history weighs heavy, the cursor blinks at me tauntingly, and I feel stuck. 

Maybe I should begin by rerouting people to all my previous writing on this topic and let it be. I could revisit the way my opinion on this war has evolved, or my warnings that we’d get here, to my worst nightmares coming true. Or I could disassociate emotionally, and start by neutrally describing the horrors of war — how suffering becomes inevitable when two peoples lock in a battle to try to destroy one another. I could start with Hamas, and how their refusal to surrender is leading to Gaza’s ruin, or with Netanyahu, and how his refusal to accept an “all for all” deal to get the hostages home is prolonging a war most Israelis want to end. 

Maybe I should do the opposite; I could lean into the human side of this war, sharing images of Gazans climbing over each other at aid sites, skeletal and desperate, reaching out for food. I could try to describe how painful it is to see an image of an emaciated baby on my screen while my healthy six-month-old son is happily rolling around on the floor at my feet on a beautiful Sunday evening in Philadelphia. 

Where should I start? 

I really don’t know. After nearly two years of fighting, the situation in Gaza has, somehow, worsened. Weeks into this war, when aid groups said Israel was starving Gaza and activists in the West almost immediately described the nascent conflict as a “genocide,” I expressed my concern about overstating the horror — the risk of removing the meaning from words that should be reserved for particular, definable actions. Now, after years of crying wolf, the wolf is in Gaza. As Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur put it, “We are very close to real, actual, desperate hunger in Gaza… It's hard to convince Israelis of that because literally everything said to them for 22 months on this topic has been a fiction… We need to wake them up.”

What changed Gur’s assessment was not the images of hunger — those dead from starvation, the hospitals full of malnourished children — or the reports from journalists or aid groups of the destroyed streets and homes and markets, but the brute economic fact of the price of flour. His assessment is accurate and his criticisms of early exaggerated claims about mass starvation are fair, but his realization is months late. The hunger did not start in July; it’s been here for most of this year. Describing the economics of war unnecessarily complicates our understanding of responsibility; it was Israel’s decision to impose a full blockade from March until May that got us here. 

Even after the blockade ended, Israel totally reset the way Gazans accessed their food, and it has not gone well. The United Nations ran nearly 400 aid sites across the Gaza Strip. While the U.N. is still operating in some parts of Gaza, those sites have been replaced by four centralized, massive distribution sites, all run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. These four sites were placed in Israeli-controlled areas, forcing Palestinians to cross military lines to get food. Just hours before those sites were to begin distributions, Jake Wood, the organization’s public face, resigned suddenly, saying the plan could clearly not be implemented while also adhering to humanitarian principles. 

He was right.

Israel has said, repeatedly, that their blockade and new system were necessary to stop Hamas from stealing food and supplies. They’ve framed their decision as a gift to Gazans — a response to an organized effort by the terrorist group to deprive its own people of food and ransack international aid groups. And, yes, Hamas has stolen aid from international groups before, it has a track record of controlling resources coming into Gaza as a means of power and repression, and aid already in Gaza has still not been distributed due to credible fears of Hamas. 

Yet, when pressed on their framing, Israeli military officials have admitted that the United Nations aid operation was actually pretty reliable, and that Hamas was stealing primarily from smaller and less coordinated aid groups. Indeed, an analysis conducted by USAID, which then leaked to Reuters, “found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies.”

The threat to aid workers from both Israeli strikes and Hamas is extreme — and has been present since the early days of the war. To take just one notable example, six months into the war, Israel killed seven aid workers from celebrity chef José Andrés’s organization World Central Kitchen. Now, the threat to Gazans trying to get the food appears to be equally real. Since May, hundreds of Gazans have been killed at the new aid sites, where Israeli soldiers have repeatedly opened fire at perceived threats. Gazans have been shot at UN-run aid sites, too, but not nearly as often. Some soldiers have sounded the alarm that they are being told to fire at unarmed civilians (and even critics of those reports have conceded the underlying claims for soldiers are true). Hunger has become so pervasive that, in the few hospitals that remain functioning in Gaza, nurses and doctors are beginning to faint from hunger and dehydration while treating starving children and infants. 

Allowing aid into Gaza is simply a moral imperative. As most of you know by now, the population of Gaza was roughly two million people when the war started, half of whom were under 18. The current number is a rough estimate, as most civilians have been displaced while trying to follow Israel’s directives. They are constantly being evacuated, relocated, bombed, evacuated, relocated, and then bombed again. Their homes, schools, hospitals, and markets are destroyed. Their entire existence has been reduced to figuring out 1) How to avoid getting killed in an Israeli attack, 2) How to avoid being killed by Hamas, 3) How to find food to eat or water to drink.

Even putting aside the moral imperative, ensuring civilians in Gaza don’t starve would be a wise political move for Israel, given that its international support has completely collapsed; only one government in the world continues to vote against UN censures and supply Israel with military support. The Trump administration has, thus far, been steadfast in its support of Israel. Trump is encouraging Israel to further escalate the war while also acknowledging that children in Gaza are starving and undermining Netanyahu’s denials. This approach is confusing and disjointed, and I have no idea what (if anything) Trump will do or say next. For now, the working presumption should be that Netanyahu can do as he pleases and continue to receive U.S. support.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, it is stories like this — the images, the reports, the reality — that have been so destructive to my love for and faith in Israel. My spirit is inconsolable, and I have begun to question my very association with Zionism. How can a Jewish state reconcile itself with such inhumanity? How can we not have a better means of extricating a group like Hamas than this? How can our tolerance for the suffering of Gazans be so high? 

My critics will say this is weak-kneed thinking that allows Hamas to win a war of attrition. I say it is the very basic human instinct that we can only repress for so long before we become the very evil we loathe. 

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Your questions, answered.

Q: How is the Social Security Fairness Act fair?

The way I read it, employees who paid into a pension but not Social Security are now entitled to Social Security benefits. 

— George from Gunnison, CO

Tangle: You’re mostly right, George, but with a significant amendment. 

During a lame-duck January session, Congress passed the Social Security Fairness Act (SSFA). In short, it repealed an aspect of the Social Security benefit calculation called the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP). That provision reduced the Social Security payment owed to beneficiaries who did not have portions of their salaries pay into the Social Security trust fund but instead contributed to a pension plan. 

In theory, since people who were owed pensions after their employment had not paid into Social Security, it would not be fair to send them double benefits when they only paid into pensions. However, there are a few reasons why the WEP wasn’t as fair as it seemed — and why the SSFA might rectify the situation.

First, as we’ve written many times in Tangle before, Social Security is different from pension plans or a personal savings account. Beneficiaries do not receive their own money that they pay into Social Security — today’s contributors support today’s beneficiaries. So this law is less about people taking money that isn’t theirs and more about giving support to the population Social Security was created to help. 

Second, the fairness of the WEP looked very different in theory than in practice, where it served to reduce the benefit given to public servants — like teachers, firefighters, and police officers. As a result, those pension recipients ended up receiving less in combined retirement benefits than those who had not paid in. Thus, Congress passed the SSFA to try to rectify that difference.

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Under the radar.

In 2024, a solar geoengineering experiment on the San Francisco Bay was quickly halted by Alameda city officials, who said they had not been notified of the test. However, the experiment was just a prequel, as the team reportedly planned a much larger initiative to evaluate saltwater-spraying equipment that could potentially be used to dim the sun’s rays. According to a trove of documents newly obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News, the University of Washington-led team was attempting to use the Alameda test as a proof of concept to solicit funds for a 3,900-square-mile cloud-creation test off the west coasts of North America, Chile, or south-central Africa. Scientists are studying this technology as a potential means of combating climate change by reflecting sunlight away from the Earth, but it is largely unproven and unregulated. Furthermore, the documents reveal that the team eschewed steps to notify the public of their research, potentially undermining trust in the experiment. POLITICO has the story.

Numbers.

• 0%. The percentage of Gazans classified as being in Phase 1 food insecurity, meaning no or minimal food insecurity, from April–May 2025, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).
• 7%. The percentage of Gazans classified as being in Phase 2 (stressed) food insecurity.
• 37%. The percentage of Gazans classified as being in Phase 3 (crisis) food insecurity.
• 44%. The percentage of Gazans classified as being in Phase 4 (emergency) food insecurity.
• 12%. The percentage of Gazans classified as being in Phase 5 (catastrophe or famine) food insecurity.
• 71,000. The estimated number of children in Gaza under the age of five who are expected to be acutely malnourished over the next eleven months if the current situation persists, according to the IPC.
• 70. The average number of aid trucks allowed into Gaza per day since May, according to the Israeli military. 
• 120. The estimated number of aid trucks of aid needed per day to cover basic human needs in Gaza, according to the United Nations. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just written a two-part edition on Vice President Kamala Harris.
• The most clicked link in Thursday’s newsletter was the offer in the free version for 55% off Incogni (with code ‘TANGLE’ at checkout).
• Nothing to do with politics: How to turn your smartphone dumb.
• Thursday’s survey: 2,537 readers responded to our survey on Congress’s rescission package with 51% saying Congress should not have rescinded the budget at all. “Instead of recapturing a minnow, maybe we shouldn’t have released the whale. This rescission is disingenuous, following on the heels of the OBBB passage,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

In the 1980s, South Korea’s adoption program was rife with fraud and abuse, and private agencies put over 200,000 children up for adoption under a previous military government that wanted to reduce resource demand and curry favor among Western nations. This March, South Korea took a significant step to regulate the system by ratifying a treaty that establishes international conventions for adoption. “Going forward, intercountry adoptions will be permitted only when no suitable family can be found in his or her state of origin, and only if deemed to serve the child’s best interests through deliberation by the adoption policy committee under the Ministry of Health and Welfare,” a joint government statement read. The Associated Press has the story.

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