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Let's talk a little bit about Gaza
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Donald Trump has been touring the UAE and he has sort of emerged with a sort of new
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slightly softer line on the situation in Gaza. Having been sort of broadly fairly quiet
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on the suffering of the Palestinians, who of course have now had no aid for 70 days
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he's now saying, you know, people are starving. It's a really bad situation
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Now, some of us may say that this newfound awareness may be as a result of hanging around in Arab countries
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where the Israeli situation is perhaps viewed even more sternly than it might be elsewhere on the planet
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I'm joined by Tom Gross, international affairs commentator, human rights campaigner and Middle East expert
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Morning, Tom. Good morning, Matthew. When it's Donald Trump, I don't even really know where you start with this
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You know, the United States in arming Israel. It said virtually nothing about the blockade
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Highly critical of the ICC and the ICJ. And now suddenly Trump is aware the situation is is terrible
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What do we what do we glean from that? Well, Trump says contradictory things about this issue, as he does about a whole range of other issues
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And he has in the past also said critical remarks about the Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza
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So it's not the first time he's said something like this. But I wouldn't read a change of policy into this because, you know, there's also a report out now from NBC News that he has a plan to move one million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya
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So, you know, I wouldn't be too much into this as being critical of Israel or and also something else I want to say
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There is clearly enormous hardship in Gaza and food insecurity But as I understand there a very clear legal definition of what is a famine or what is starvation and that not actually the case
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And I, for one, am quite careful with terminology. I mean, also, for example, with terms like
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genocide and so on, which have been used really from the beginning of the conflict. They're very
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clear legal definitions. And in fact, I've checked, there've only been four official famines
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in recent years, three of them in Sudan and one of them in Somalia
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So there's a lot of kind of fog of war. But clearly something needs to be done to alleviate the humanitarian situation
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for the population of Gaza. Do you foresee the United States? I have heard all your caveats, but do you foresee the United States
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are playing any pressure in that direction? Yes. Well, they've come up with an idea, which is essentially that they will hire private firms which will be supervised by Americans
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And probably the staff will probably be locals or maybe Egyptians or something
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Israel will keep security around Gaza. But the aid will no longer be distributed through UNRWA, the UN agency, because the accusation goes by Israel, but also by neutral parties, that UNRWA is largely sort of has been co-opted by Hamas
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And therefore, Hamas uses food distribution as a way of suppressing internal dissent
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In fact, yesterday there were again anti-Hamas demonstrations inside Gaza by Palestinians
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But you have to be very brave to do that because lost in the story a little bit is that Hamas are not a bunch of
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they attack Israel, but they also have an iron grip over the population of Gaza
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many or most of whom certainly do not support Hamas. Tom Grace, pleasure talking to you. You're listening to Matthew Wright on LBC
