Gazan Humanitarian Foundation Chairman Johnnie Moore on How Food Distribution Could Determine Hamas’s Fate

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As reports emerge of widespread starvation in Gaza and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steven Witkoff works to negotiate the creation of a humanitarian corridor, Nina Shea will interview Reverend Johnnie Moore, the executive chairman of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The foundation, backed by both Israel and the United States, has been distributing food aid to Gazans since May. Notably, GHF staff have denied the media narrative that Israeli Defense Forces personnel have killed Gazans seeking aid at its distribution points.

The interview will examine GHF’s accomplishments and the immense challenges it faces in providing aid to two million people in an active war zone. Reverend Moore will also discuss how the GHF can help distribute UN food aid that is currently sequestered in trucks inside the Gaza Strip—a request that the secretary general and his deputy at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) have thus far ignored.

Event Transcript

This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.

Nina Shea:

Hello, welcome to the Hudson Institute. I’m Nina Shea and I direct the Center for Religious Freedom. Here I have with me today a very important person in today’s world, and that is Reverend Johnnie Moore, who is the executive chairman of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. And Johnnie and I have worked together for many years. It’s been really a decade working on peace and helping besieged peoples in the Middle East. And so you have other hats that you wear, one of which was being a commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, where I also served as a commissioner a different point of time. And I’m very grateful for you taking the time out of your incredibly busy schedule over several continents to talk to us today to help us walk us through these issues, major controversy surrounding what is going on in the control of the distribution of food aid in Gaza. And really what we’re seeing is an issue that’s emerging that whoever controls this food aid distribution controls Gaza. That’s how this issue is being framed by, I guess, critics of Israel and the whole situation in Gaza. But Johnnie welcome and we’d love to hear about what the foundation is doing and what you have achieved so far.

Johnnie Moore:

First of all, Nina, it’s great to be here at the Hudson Institute. I, as a young religious freedom and human rights advocate, I first encountered the Hudson Institute through you. I was concerned about a declining Christian community in the Middle East, and I remember I was always a writer, and so I wrote an editorial that said, calling for us to be more concerned about.

Nina Shea:

I remember Fox News.

Johnnie Moore:

That’s exactly right. And then all of a sudden, it was one of the first things I’d ever published. And I get an email from this place called the Hudson Institute in the legendary Nina Shea. And in many, many ways, so much of my career as a religious freedom advocate is somehow intertwined with Hudson. And I’m quite inspired by your work. So it’s always great to be with you and to be with you again. There is no difference between my concern for religious freedom and human rights and my motivation for being involved in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as a religious Christian. There is nothing more Christian than feeding hungry people. And there’s nothing more profane than when food is used by a terrorist organization in order to control a repressed and oppressed people. And the people of Gaza have always been the first victims of Hamas, and we’re starting to discover, and everyone sort of knew there were problems with the aid system in the Gaza Strip. It was an aid based economy for many, many years. We’ve all seen these images of whole convoys of trucks going into the Gaza Strip, and they’re immediately taken over by armed militants, by Hamas militants.

Nina Shea:

Yeah, but wait, it was on the UN distributing the food and the Gaza Strip.

Johnnie Moore:

Exactly. So UNRWA, which is the UN agency that was mainly responsible for humanitarian food in the Gaza Strip. There’s been all kinds of controversy around Unah. I’ve read reports that as many as half of the UNRWA employees in the Gaza Strip were linked to Hamas. The reports that UNRWA employees held hostages over the course of this conflict. But even apart from UNRWA, which by the way in the United States now, the Department of Justice issued an opinion a few months ago that UNRWA the international organizational immunity that generally is applied to the UNRWA, that it’s the position of the Department of Justice in the United States. That UN doesn’t qualify for that because of, aside from the legal opinion from the Department of Justice, this opinion corresponds with a number of cases working their way through the courts in the United States about Americans who are victims of terrorism at the hands of Hamas.

Putting all that aside, the fact is, is that every ounce of food that went into the Gaza Strip when Hamas was in charge, was somehow under the control of Hamas, either by violence or threats of violence. Sometimes voluntarily the food would be warehoused in warehouses Hamas could control over the course of this war. There are reports that Hamas actually communicated with fighters through UN convoys move fighters via these convoys. So aid has become at the heart of this conflict and prolonging this conflict. Those are all the pieces of context where the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation enters.

Nina Shea:

And I just read that Hamas was actually selling some of this food

Johnnie Moore:

More than selling it. They were actually monetizing at multiple levels. They would tax the food when it came into the Gaza Strip. They would take a certain portion of the food and they would award it to their fighters or their allies. They would sometimes use it to recruit more fighters, and then they would sell some of it. And so there’s some reports that Hamas made a billion dollars or more even over the course of this war, just through commoditizing the aid in the cause.

Nina Shea:

And they were buying weapons with it, presumably?

Johnnie Moore:

Yeah, I mean, they were doing all kinds of nefarious things. Imagine you get a whole international community giving you free food, and you can do with it what you want. And if you sell it for 50 cents, your profit is 50 cents. And this is definitely the case. And it had prolonged this conflict. So a lot of people recognize this issue, but this is a bipartisan controversy. So the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation comes on the scene and says, we have one mission as an organization, which is to get food directly to the people of Gaza, directly to the people of Gaza without having to go through the intermediary of Hamas. So the mission is really simple, it’s just to feed the people of Gaza. That’s the mission. There’s nothing more than that. Get as much food as possible to the people of Gaza.

Nina Shea:

And it started in June, end of May, June.

Johnnie Moore:

That’s right. Of this year. So after the breakdown of the ceasefire, basically we’ve been operating in the war, not in a ceasefire. In fact, we’ve been operating in two wars because over half of the time that we were operating in the Gaza Strip, we had a second war. We had the 12 day war between Iran and Israel and our guys and ladies on the ground, who by the way, are incredibly experienced. One of our leaders on the ground spent 30 years in the aid community. All of our contractors on the ground that are facilitating the secure convoys. We basically created a humanitarian convoy, humanitarian convoys, and humanitarian corridor in order to transport the aid into the Gaza Strip so the trucks aren’t diverted. What this looks like today, Nina, is we will soon surpass 100 million mills of food delivered to the people of Gaza. We have directly served half of the people of Gaza through four distribution sites in a community distribution mechanism that we’ve created that takes food further, more deeply into the Gaza Strip into the north of the Gaza Strip. This should not be controversial. Everyone in the world should be celebrating this.

Nina Shea:

But your staff, your workers were shot at and some killed.

Johnnie Moore:

Yeah.

Nina Shea:

Most at the beginning of this operation, tell us about this. This is lost. I remember reading it at the time, and it’s rarely mentioned these days.

Johnnie Moore:

These people are heroes.

Nina Shea:

I mean, these were Palestinians, right? 

Johnnie Moore:

These people are heroes. These are 12 Gazans, 12 Palestinians that were murdered by Hamas, many more that were injured by Hamas.

Nina Shea:

In the process of distributing this?

Johnnie Moore:

Yeah. So what Hamas, first of all, three days before this happened, Hamas issued a direct threat to anybody that goes to get our aid, or anybody that helps us distribute aid. Their lives are threatened. We begged the United Nations, we begged countries all around the world. The international community issue a statement telling Hamas, humanitarian aid workers are off limits. No one responded. And then one day, 12 of our local Gaza aid workers are brutally murdered, others are injured. And Hamas piles them in front of the Nasser hospital in Gaza and refuses to allow them to get any medical treatment at all. And these people, Palestinians, they died just trying to feed their neighbors. And that wasn’t the end of it. Hamas also threatened the Americans that are there, in fact launched an attack, right? As the ceasefire negotiations were starting, we believe trying to foil the ceasefire negotiations, injuring two of our veterans on the ground with grenades that were originated in Iran.

Nina Shea:

So who mans your operations now? Is it ongoing? I mean, do you do it?

Johnnie Moore:

Yeah, it’s ongoing. So every day we distribute between one and 3 million meals of food. It’s a huge operation. I mean, one day this week, I was looking at the numbers, 37,000 boxes distributed in one day. A box has enough food to feed a family of five for three and a half days. Unlike many of the UN organizations like the World Food Program will have a trailer of flour and they’ll drop it somewhere and people will get it. Our boxes have flour and oil and lentils and pasta, and it’s enough in the caloric count, it’s a kit. The caloric count is higher than the requirement that UN average, the quality of the food is better. But what we did is we set up four secure distribution sites. Our plan is to open eight, including further into the Gaza Strip, and we do the mass distribution of food. So every day, sometimes twice a day at a distribution site, we distribute thousands of boxes of food to people in need and not a single truck diverted. So these images of convoys, of trucks being taken over by Hamas and through the international system, that doesn’t happen with us because we prioritize security and safety.

Nina Shea:

So who provides the security and who provides the aid?

Johnnie Moore:

So we have American contractors on the ground. So these are incredibly, incredibly experienced veterans of the US armed forces who at this phase of their life have decided they want to feed people. You have experienced veterans not because they know how to use weapons, it’s because they know how not to use them.

So these are incredibly, incredibly experienced people whose job is to get the food securely into the distribution points and staged and distributed. And then they are helped by a group of incredible, incredibly brave local Gazans who come every day to help us distribute the food. And then also we have a community distribution. Some of our partners, actually, despite the fact the UN while we’re talking, the UN is still boycotting us. By the way, Nina, they are right now. When I walked here to the Hudson Institute, I saw someone with a sign saying somewhere in Washington, DC, like, stop the blockade, let aid into the Gaza Strip. All this stuff. Right now, there are 950 trucks of aid from UN agencies in the Gaza Strip already that the UN will not distribute. Yesterday I wrote a letter to the head of OCHA, the head humanitarian official in the United Nations, begging him, if you’re not going to distribute your food, let us distribute it for you. These people are starving. And until now, the UN continues to not be willing to work with us, which is crazy. And I think the reason why they won’t work with us is because they’re so invested in their existing system and they have a sense of denial about how their system has been able to be hijacked, monetized, manipulated by terrorist.

Nina Shea:

I remember when we were working together on getting aid to the Christians in Nineveh and the Yazidis and the United States at that time was writing checks, basically blank checks to the UN for the aid. Yet the aid for four years after ISIS attacked these minorities in Nineveh in Iraq, didn’t receive a penny of USAID because the UN distributed to the powers who be. And those powers were tied to the government or to terror groups, and they gave the money out as some kind of bribes or patrimony or for weapons. Who knows What they did?

Johnnie Moore:

Nina, there’s not a conflict in the world where the existing humanitarian system hasn’t prolonged that conflict. I’ll give you some examples. In the Ethiopian Tigray conflict, during the Biden administration World Food Program, flour was being used by the Ethiopian side through commercial manufacturing facilities to provide bread for the Ethiopian soldiers. And 60,000 metric tons of flour was stolen by the Tigrayan side. So simultaneously, whatever happened with that—I’m not an expert on that conflict—whatever happened with that conflict, the humanitarian support was helping both sides of this conflict. There was a point in Somalia where this is a bit of time ago, but the single highest revenue and piece of revenue in the entire Somalian economy was a $200 million basically chunk of payments that was being paid by the World Food Program to three different clans, armed clans in Somalia in order to facilitate their food distribution. And ultimately, the estimate is somewhere between 12 and 17 percent of the food actually made it to the destination in Assad’s Syria, 51 percent of the aid of all international money that went into Assad’s Syria, from the international humanitarian community, ended up in the hands of the Assad regime because Assad required it to go through sanctioned banks required it to be changed into local currency, required the UN to stay in a hotel controlled by Assad. I mean everywhere you look. And it was your idea actually in the first Trump administration to bypass the UN in northern Iraq and to get the aid directly to the people in need. And it was transformative. And here we are, and the same broken system continues to have the same issues.

Nina Shea:

It’s really tragic on many levels, including the fact that the UN was created for a situation like this. There was ideals that you’d have a neutral body that could break through the warring factions and transcend all that and ensure the security and safety of the people. And it’s instead been captive by all sorts of malign actors. And we saw that elsewhere in the Middle East and to some extent in China during COVID too. And I saw it during Cold War, frankly. So the UN is saying 1,000 Gazans have been killed by Israeli fire while seeking food. Can you shed some light on that situation and that statistic in particular?

Johnnie Moore:

First of all, some context. So over the course of this entire war, the civilian death numbers that are reported by many in the press come from Hamas controlled entities. So the health ministry in Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas. Yes, the government media office, which is controlled by Hamas. Those figures, they don’t distinguish between militant deaths and civilian deaths ever. It’s part of the information war on the Hamas side to say that everyone killed in the Gaza Strip is a civilian, so whatever. And no one really knows how many people have been killed in the Gaza Strip. But when GHF started operating, Hamas adapted their information operation and basically said that a hundred percent of anyone killed in the Gaza Strip was killed in proximity to a Gaza Humanitarian Aid Foundation site, which was crazy. And what was even crazier is that the press just reported it as if it was true. In fact, at Rutgers University, the [Network Contagion Research Institute], which studies disinformation and misinformation, they released a report recently that analyzed the 50 or so—it’s like 52 or 54 most consumed stories about GHF—and 80 percent of those stories included information that originated with Hamas. But only 49, 50 percent of the time did those media outlets even disclose to the public that the information originated with Hamas. So when it comes to this number, this is the context of this number.

That’s one thing we know. The second thing that we know is that while we’ve been operating in the Gaza Strip in an active war zone, not during a ceasefire for sure, there have been civilians killed in the Gaza Strip in proximity to aid sites for sure it’s happened. The IDF has said that they’re responsible for some of that. It’s as best as we could tell, a pretty small number. One is too many. And we are always complaining to the IDF and working with the IDF because the IDF is the professional military in the Gaza Strip. So the humanitarian corridors and everything, this is who you have to work with. The thing about the IDF though is every time there’s an accusation, they investigate it, they release the information publicly. But what we also know is that Hamas has killed many more people, many, many more people, probably hundreds of people in proximity, actually mainly, to aid distribution sites in order to allege that those deaths were at GHF or that they were killed by the IDF.

So this is part of a disinformation campaign, and like most disinformation campaigns, there’s like an element of truth baked in, but then the story is made up from there. And so the actual fact is, at the GHF, we have not had a single person shot at our distribution sites at all. In fact, there have only been two moments of violence in our distribution sites. The first one was when Hamas threw two grenades at our American workers that thank God recovered. And the second one was something that we disclosed. We’re talking today, this is about a little over a week ago, we had Hamas instigators manage to get in one of our distribution sites and provoke basically a stampede where there were a number of casualties in a portion of the distribution site. But even in this case, it was Hamas that got in with weapons and provoked this violence. And we were the ones who disclosed it. It didn’t come from the Gaza Health Ministry or any of these things. It came from us when we had an incident at one of our sites because we have eyes on our sites, we publicly disclosed it.

Nina Shea:

So I don’t understand. I though that was being linked—

Johnnie Moore:

So this thousand person number, is a sham number.

Nina Shea:

Oh, that maybe a sham number. But say that there are hundreds. Where is that happening if it’s not happening at your sites? They said as they were seeking food that was being distributed. So where is that happening?

Johnnie Moore:

It has happened in various places. So one time it happened in proximity to a site sort of in the center of Gaza. Another time it happened in a WFP site. Just as WFP trucks were going into Gaza in the north of the Gaza Strip, and at least—

Nina Shea:

That’s the World Food Program.

Johnnie Moore:

The World Food Program. And the World Food Program, by the way, they speak out of both sides of their mouth. They tell the press that there’s no diversion of their aid whatsoever. And then simultaneously, if you go to their X account, they have a statement saying at a certain point in June, on one day, of their 44 trucks that they sent into the Gaza Strip, only nine of them made it to their ultimate destination. So they’re telling all these stories. There have been a few incidents that took place within a kilometer or two kilometers from our distribution sites. Of course, it’s a war zone. We can’t control what happens outside of our distribution sites. But for the press to accuse the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation of being responsible for something totally out of our control outside of our distribution sites, and by the way, they never do that with the United Nations, you’ll not see a single report accusing the United Nations of anything when a hundred people die seeking their flour.

Nina Shea:

I read about fences going up, separating the military, the Israeli military from the distribution lines, I guess for lack of a better term, I guess it’s not really a line but group. What are those fences about? Is this protocol or is this something you’re trying to invent as you go along to ensure security, to keep a distance, to keep the IDF from feeling threatened that they’re not advancing towards them?

Johnnie Moore:

I mean, the IDF has an incredibly difficult job here because this is while they are engaged. The difference, this is sort of beyond the GHF mission, just to feed people. But just to answer your question, in this war, you have a professional military and you have a terrorist group. A professional military that as best as we can tell, abides by all the laws of war laws of armed conflict, all of these things, they investigate things. They handle themselves very, in our experience, they handle themselves very professionally on everything. And then we have a terrorist group that dresses as civilians. They abide by no rules of armed conflict. In fact, they intentionally defy them.

Nina Shea.

It’s asymmetrical.

Johnnie Moore:

It’s totally. So you have an asymmetrical terrorist organization and you have a professional military, and they’re colliding. We’ve asked the IDF, as a professional military, that they as humanitarian actors have to feed these people. Okay, these people need food and we’re there to give them food, and they have a very difficult job, which is to create a humanitarian corridor that allows people to access our food. Meanwhile, there are all these crazy things that happen in this environment. So for instance, we have very specific channels where we communicate to the people of Gaza in Arabic on the ground. So we say when we’re open, when we’re closed, we give specific instructions. But Hamas will spoof that. So Hamas will tell, they will use disinformation to tell people to go to the wrong place at the wrong time, and then they’ll have bused agitators in to try to create some kind of incident. So as the IDF creates this humanitarian corridor, it’s happening in this very, very complex environment, and it’s a war zone, and they’re going to be tragedies in it.

Nina Shea:

Well, it is a war zone. It’s a battle zone. It’s an incredible challenge to distribute anything to civilians. And I’m just wondering what your thoughts are for going forward. Is there improvement that could be implemented? Are there, what about the neighboring countries, the Arab countries, Turkey, which was one time giving aid to Gaza. Can they be enlisted in some way? Are they willing to do that?

Johnnie Moore:

Our position is to work with anybody, any good faith actor that we can in order to get more food to the people. Gaza, I mean, this is the profane thing about all of this, because we have the United Nations whose job is actually to do these things, and they will not coordinate with us. I mean, every single day, one of us contacts, I wrote the secretary general a month and a half ago right after our local aid workers were killed. And I asked him to condemn this in order to keep our aid workers safe. The secretary general, aside from never sending me a letter back, never answering my letter, refused to meet with me. He delegated the meeting to the head of OCHA who was literally, I have the email, he was too busy. His schedule was too demanding to meet with me. So he delegated it down to someone else. I mean, this is the situation we’re in. So we have all these humanitarian actors that allege that they care about these people, but they’re literally letting food rot, not outside of the Gaza Strip. It’s already staged in the Gaza Strip. Okay. They can distribute.

It’s a lie that the UN is not authorized to bring food. The UN is currently authorized not only to bring food in the Gaza Strip, they can bring as much food and as much of anything they want to bring in the Gaza Strip. But they’re not doing it because they say they can’t do it safely. And we’re saying to them, the one thing we do is get massive quantities of food into the Gaza Strip and do it and do it safely. So we’re willing to work with any good faith actor to help these people. We sincerely, sincerely care about these people.

Nina Shea:

Could you distribute their aid?

Johnnie Moore:

If they were willing to do that, we could absolutely distribute their aid. We could distribute not only their food aid, we could distribute all of their aid. And we even say to them, Nina, if there’s something that we do that you don’t like, okay, we’ll change it. Let’s sit down. Let’s not confuse decision-making and problem-solving. Let’s make a decision to help these people and we’ll adjust here. We’ll adjust there in order to help these people. But what they say to us is, they say, well, you don’t abide by humanitarian principles. And they’re for them, humanity, impartiality, independence, and neutrality. We abide by all of those principles, but they say no. The one you don’t abide by is neutrality because you communicate with the IDF. And yet the definition of neutrality is that your humanitarian assistance isn’t able to be diverted by an armed actor.

Nina Shea:

Exactly.

Johnnie Moore:

Every ounce of humanitarian assistance that has gone into the Gaza Strip from the United Nations has been able to be diverted not only by an armed actor, by a globally designated terrorist organization.

Nina Shea:

A lot of people on the outside think that the UN has its own teams of internationally trained professionals who march into these war zones and do this, but they don’t. They rely on the local powers. And I’ve seen that personally in Iraq.

Johnnie Moore:

And they’re all, the whole thing is political. I’ve become much more cynical through this, and you’ve known me a long time. I err on the optimist aside sometime to learn later, but I’ve become much more cynical over the course of this because I’ve just come to the conclusion that these people, many of them in suits and ties in Geneva and New York City, hosting conferences all around the world, collecting piles of cash from countries in order to help people.

Nina Shea:

They have a stake.

Johnnie Moore:

They’re just politicians. They’re just politicians. They’re not humanitarians.

Nina Shea:

Right. What about Hamas demanding that the Red Crescent, the Palestinian Red Crescent, do the food distribution? What about that idea? Do you know anything about their operations?

Johnnie Moore:

I’m skeptical of anything Hamas demands. And I think the international community is obligated to take control of this problem because the fact is, at the beginning, I don’t know where things eventually stood, but at the beginning of the ceasefire negotiations on the first night of the ceasefire negotiations, we were told, again, I wasn’t at the ceasefire negotiations, but we were told that Hamas’ number one demand was that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation be shut down. Now that should just tell you all you need to know. I’m not surprised by that from Hamas. I am surprised that a United Nations that’s funded by the United States and Europe, all our taxpayer money, everything else would have the exact same position as Hamas. The United Nations has basically become the press secretary for Hamas.

Nina Shea:

It seems that way. Now, our Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, is off this week to negotiate the truce. Further, one of his demands, or one of his talking points, I guess is, on this creating a humanitarian corridor. What can you tell us about that and that idea and what it means exactly?

Johnnie Moore:

We support surging humanitarian aid for the Palestinians in Gaza. They need the food. It has to happen. They need help, but it can’t happen in a way that prolongs the conflict and allows a globally designated terrorist organization to decide who gets helped and who doesn’t. Because a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is not a ceasefire between Hamas and the people of Gaza. And for sure, if they have control over the humanitarian assistance, they’re going to use it for nefarious purposes. We have to flood the zone with help—a hundred percent flood the zone with help. And also, I mean, GHF is no threat to these other aid organizations. We’re not there to replace anyone. We’re there to subsidize and collaborate and work together. What we have demonstrated though, Nina, is that it was a false choice that the international aid community was making. They believed that the cost of doing business was that 30 percent, 40 percent, sometimes 50, 60, 70 percent of your aid was going to be diverted out of your control, used for other nefarious purposes. GHF taking sometimes, say a Silicon Valley approach, a first principles approach, like what is the one problem to solve? We have to stop the diversion of aid. And not only have we stopped the diversion of aid, we’ve proven that that was a false choice. It can be done better. And by the way, everything we do is more cost effective than everything the United Nations does.

Nina Shea:

Last question. Do you think that Hamas believes that whoever controls the distribution of aid gets control of Gaza in the future because it’s unclear what’s going to happen a day or year from now in Gaza? Is that what the stakes are? Is it, in other words, giving Hamas this what it wants on aid? Distribution gives power, empowers Hamas again to be in control of Gaza.

Johnnie Moore:

I mean, the interesting thing about us is that our folks on the ground interact with Gazans every day. And the people that we’re interacting with every day, they feel freer. And in fact, when we started operating, one of the most common questions we received, we received it again and again and again, is the food really free? Because they were not used to that.

Nina Shea:

That says a lot.

Johnnie Moore:

And by the way, there still are these markets in Gaza, and for sure some of our food is ending up in these local markets. But the price of commodities have gone through the floor because Hamas was not only diverting food, they were also controlling the supply of food in the Gaza Strip. So our mission is not a political mission, it’s not a military mission. It’s none of these things. Our mission is just to feed people. But the people that we interact with every day, they feel freer by the fact that they’re getting this food and with no strings attached whatsoever.

Nina Shea:

Well, that ends our conversation. I want to thank you, Johnnie, for sharing your insights and your experience with us. It’s very helpful. The headline news just does not give us the whole news, and I wish you every good thing and safety in your future endeavors.

Johnnie Moore:

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thanks for having me.