Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump recently had a phone call featuring shouting by Trump over the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, a report said Thursday.
According to NBC News, which cited unnamed senior US officials, the fiery phone conversation took place on July 28, after Netanyahu said at an event that, despite widespread reports of hunger and starvation in the Strip, “there is no starvation in Gaza.”
Trump publicly responded the next day that he was “not particularly convinced” by Netanyahu’s assurance, saying there was “real starvation” in the Strip and adding: “You can’t fake that.”
The report said that after the comments by Trump, Netanyahu demanded a phone call with the US president, and the two spoke hours later.
During the call, the premier told Trump that the reports of starvation in Gaza had been “fabricated” by Hamas and that hunger was not widespread in the enclave. Trump then interrupted Netanyahu, NBC said, and began yelling, saying that the president’s aides had shown him proof that children in Gaza were starving and that he didn’t want to hear it dismissed as “fake.”
The report described the conversation as “a direct, mostly one-way conversation about the status of humanitarian aid” in which Trump “was doing most of the talking,” according to a former US official who was briefed on the call.
The same official added that Washington “not only feels like the situation is dire, but they own it because of GHF” — a reference to the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been set up to oversee the distribution of aid in the devastated enclave, but which has been plagued by daily reports of gunshots and deaths near its sites.
According to the report, officials in both the White House and Israel declined to comment on the phone call.
Israel denies the allegations of widespread starvation and has said it makes efforts to allow sufficient aid into Gaza. But facing heavy international pressure, the government recently increased the flow of supplies, after having barred aid for 11 weeks between March and May.