Presented by International Monetary Fund
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s director stepped down a day before its controversial U.S.- and Israeli-backed aid plan began, followed swiftly by its chief operating officer. Now NGOs named in GHF’s proposal say they never agreed to participate.
Also in today’s edition: UNDP’s Achim Steiner on what’s next for development, and Palestine gets a flag at WHO.
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Jake Wood, executive director of the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, resigned Sunday, just a day before the group’s controversial aid rollout. He said it was “not possible” to implement the initiative “while also strictly adhering to humanitarian principles.” John Acree was named interim executive director.
The move — which was followed by the resignation of GHF chief operating officer David Burke — dealt a blow to a Trump-endorsed operation to bypass U.N. agencies and Palestinian authorities by rerouting aid through private contractors and Israeli-controlled sites. Still, the trucks moved forward as planned yesterday.
NGOs have sharply criticized the plan, citing violations of humanitarian neutrality and independence, my colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz writes. GHF’s security is being provided by a separate group led by a former senior CIA official. Wood, a former U.S. Marine, previously defended the approach, saying on CNN, “Israel controls access to Gaza. … We have no choice but to create a mechanism which operates in that construct and in that framing.”
Internal documents reveal Palestinians would need to show ID to access food at guarded distribution centers, and eventually live in secure compounds — plans that anticipated backlash and even comparisons to “concentration camps,” according to The Washington Post.
U.N. top relief official Tom Fletcher condemned the plan before the Security Council earlier this month, calling it “unacceptable” and a “fig leaf for further violence and displacement.” He warned: “It makes aid conditional on political and military aims. It makes starvation a bargaining chip.”
Devex obtained a letter from Wood to Israeli government body COGAT naming Save the Children, CARE International, Project HOPE, and the International Medical Corps, among others, as distribution partners. But some of those organizations have publicly denied involvement, with Save the Children stating unequivocally that “we have not agreed to support or collaborate with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.”
Read: Gaza aid plan under fire as NGOs deny involvement
Just weeks ago, Edesia was bracing to shut its doors. The Rhode Island nonprofit and its Georgia-based counterpart, Mana Nutrition, had warehouses full of ready-to-use therapeutic food, or RUTF, which is a lifesaving peanut paste — but no green light to ship. USAID, their main funder, had gone dark amid Trump’s foreign aid freeze, canceling and then reversing orders, leaving 400,000 boxes stalled and both factories in limbo.
“We were only running two lines for months, trying to make our current order from 2024 take as long as humanly possible to buy us time to get answers for what’s next,” says Edesia CEO Navyn Salem.
Then, out of nowhere, a short email landed. “I was texting Navyn and everyone else saying: Did you get this email?” says Mana CEO Mark Moore. “We were like, is this a mistake?”
It wasn’t. The U.S. government had amended the expiring contracts, allowing the nonprofits to fire up production again. “The minute [I heard the news] I was like, turn them on,” says Salem, referring to the factory’s eight production lines. The new orders will yield $50 million worth of RUTFs — about 1.4 million boxes — enough to feed more than a million children and keep both plants running for up to six months.
It’s a temporary fix. “This is a Band-Aid,” Moore says. “But it’s a great Band-Aid.”
Read: Aid factories reboot after US quietly amends food contracts
When Achim Steiner became administrator of the U.N. Development Programme in 2017, the agency was in transition — and as he prepares to leave after two terms, it’s entering another.
Around 100 UNDP programs have been hit by the Trump administration’s stop-work orders or cancellations. Steiner tells Devex Senior Reporter Adva Saldinger that the overall portfolio hasn’t been fundamentally altered — the U.S. contribution is limited — but the fallout is real: broken partnerships, disrupted HIV/AIDS supply chains, and halted work in crisis zones.
The cuts are part of what Steiner calls a “chronic erosion of the volume of finance” to development cooperation. Even with rising aid figures, “for much of the developing world, such as the African continent, it's either been a stagnant or even a declining amount of funding.” He adds: “We have faced already a financial phenomenon that is equivalent to defunding international cooperation.”
Criticism of multilateral aid is growing — often unfairly, Steiner argues. “The confidence that development works has been severely questioned and eroded ... very often for ideological reasons rather than for factual reasons.” Too often, aid bureaucracies focus on trimming overhead instead of boosting impact, he tells Adva in a special edition of the This week in global development podcast.
Ahead of the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, or FfD4, in Seville, Spain, Steiner sees a turning point: “We can either haggle over a chessboard where there is hardly anything left to haggle over” or rethink how to finance global challenges.
Read: UNDP's Achim Steiner on the ‘chronic erosion’ of development
+ Next month’s FfD4 in Seville isn’t just another summit — it’s where development’s financial future could be rewritten. Ahead of the talks, Devex Pro is hosting a special online event series to unpack what’s really at stake. First up: Tomorrow, Vera Songwe, Homi Kharas, and Rick Samans join Devex President Raj Kumar to dissect the outsized role multilateral development banks are being asked to play as bilateral aid erodes. Register now.
WHO member states appear to be making good use of a new electronic voting system at this year’s World Health Assembly, Devex Senior Reporter Jenny Lei Ravelo tells me.
Ninety-five out of 99 member states voted Monday in favor of a resolution allowing the Palestinian flag to be raised at WHO offices, overpowering Israel, which was against it and insisted on a vote, arguing that Palestine is not a full U.N. member state and raising its flag “sends a dangerous message that political symbolism can override legal standards.” But some argued a vote wasn’t necessary for this resolution, given that the black, red, white, and green flag has been up since 2015 at the U.N. headquarters in New York.
There were also other issues they couldn’t agree on, such as whether the World Health Organization should update its decades-old report on the health effects of nuclear war. Eighty-six member states out of 100 voted in favor of the resolution, which was spearheaded by several Pacific island states that argued their populations have suffered from decades of nuclear testing. Kiribati, a co-sponsor of the resolution, said 33 nuclear bombs were detonated on its islands between the 1950s and ’60s, leading to birth defects and cancer among its population.
But several countries, including those in Europe, said they could not support the resolution, arguing that the devastating consequences of nuclear war are already widely known — and that others are doing similar work, so there’s no need to put further pressure on WHO’s stretched resources.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said WHO will work in collaboration with other entities to avoid duplication in implementing the resolution.
Three new cases of mpox have been reported in Malawi, where U.S. aid cuts have negatively affected the response to the infectious disease. [The Guardian]
Less than 5% of cropland in Gaza is available for cultivation due to the destruction of agricultural infrastructure in the ongoing war, according to a U.N. geospatial assessment. [Al Jazeera]
The world’s 75 low-income countries face a record $22 billion in debt repayments to China, primarily from Belt and Road Initiative loans, which could strain government budgets for health, education, and climate mitigation. [Reuters]
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