QUESTION [Said Arikat]: Thank you. Thank you very much. Just how can one contact the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation? This seems to be the gripe, is the United Nations —

MS BRUCE: I don’t think anyone would appreciate if I gave out an email right here from the podium.

QUESTION: No, no. It’s —

MS BRUCE: I think there’s a thing called the internet —

QUESTION: Okay.

MS BRUCE: — and you can type them in, and you will get an email address.

QUESTION: Okay.

MS BRUCE: There’s a lot of you – I think most of you are reporters. I think a number of you understand research and the typing in of the interweb tubes, which will give you that information, sir.^[1]

I was going to get into the second part of this essay series by jumping into the funding schemes of the very-much failing Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the ways its leadership and governance includes US Marine and Army veterans, former World Food Programme chiefs and World Central Kitchen CEOs, policy makers at Facebook, and investment bankers. We’ll get there. As we will with how Jake Wood, GHF’s Executive Director, stepped down from his position on May 25, 2025, mere hours before the program’s slated launch in Gaza.

In his resignation statement, Wood noted, “I am proud of the work I oversaw, including developing a pragmatic plan that could feed hungry people, address security concerns about diversion, and complement the work of longstanding NGOs in Gaza.”^[2] Vignettes circulating globally, only hours after Wood reaffirmed us of their “pragmatic plan”: members of Tsav 9 blockading food parcels near the Karem Abu Salem crossing; an aerial view of the five-lane cattle corral (al-Alam, west of Rafah) with hundreds of forcibly starved Palestinians queued for rations;^[3] GHF staff opening fire at emaciated Palestinians who were forced to walk over 10 km to reach the distribution site; GHF launching tear gas and/or stun grenades at those waiting for “aid”; Israeli intelligence units kidnapping and disappearing several near Morag corridor; mothers seeking food for their families, recounting being treated like dogs while mocked, filmed, and shot at. All the while amidst this engineered starvation, Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the coordinating body of the IOF working with GHF, persistently spreading hasbara, including its citing the delivery of “over 1.3 million tons of food” since October 7, 2023.

Yes. Every detail of this is integral to the catastrophic failure of GHF and the unrelenting siege of Gaza, compounding the devastation of genocide. In this dizzying display of bureaucratic incompetence and complicity in expanding the IOF’s aims of total annihilation, I’m zooming out briefly, to not only consider the lies reinforced by US State Department Spokesperson Tammy Bruce (dear reader, you cannot “type in and get” GHF’s email through simple “interweb tubes” search), but that any news of a “60-day ceasefire” should not distract us from the bigger imperial ambitions at stake for the region.

What you “type in and get” when searching Steve Witkoff, US Special Envoy to the Middle East:

A New York real estate investor and lawyer with “no background in diplomacy,” nabbing more headlines, now, for purportedly helping broker the globe’s biggest “deal.”^[4] It would be easy to dismiss Witkoff as yet another one of the crooks in Trump’s cabinet; and we would be fools to believe, as Wikipedia cites, that Witkoff and Trump so casually “became friends at a New York City deli.” Apologies, but no amount of knishes or pastrami can cover up their decades of collusion.^[5]

During Witkoff’s time at Dreyer & Traub firm in the early 1980s, Trump was one of his clients, before Witkoff went on to co-found Stellar Management. In 1997, Witkoff left Stellar Management to found, chair, and act as CEO of the privately held Witkoff Group, headquartered in NYC. Steve’s two sons, Alex (Chief Executive Officer) and Zach (Executive Vice President, Development), and his wife Lauren (Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing) help lead the Group. As their latest website boasts: “Witkoff is one part developer. One part investor. One part landscape-changer.” From coast to coast, these developers have bastardized US cities in the image of venture capitalism’s insatiability. Witkoff Group is a behemoth, operating over 11 million square feet of commercial and retail real estate predominantly in NYC, Miami, and Los Angeles, including the Park Lane Hotel and Woolworth Building in Manhattan. But logging all of Witkoff Group’s land heists across this continent is map-making for another day.

As The New York Times (The New York War Crimes) reported, in 2018, Witkoff’s co-investor in a Manhattan hotel project, Tim Leissner, former chairman of Goldman Sachs Southeast Asia division, was indicted by the US Justice Department for conspiracy to launder money and co-conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, to launder billions of dollars embezzled from 1Malaysia Development for bribes to various Malaysian and Abu Dhabi officials (on May 20, 2025, Leissner was sentenced to two years in prison):

First, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund expanded its stake in the troubled hotel, Park Lane, which sits at the southern edge of Central Park. Then, in an even more crucial move, the Qatar Investment Authority last year dispatched $623 million as a leveraged buyout of Mr. Witkoff and his partners.

The transactions, involving two oil-rich sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East, are a hint of the enormous flow of dollars pouring into US real estate firms from entities associated with countries like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.^[6]

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Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company increased its stake in the Park Lane Hotel, in an effort to block the US federal government from seizing it, and soon after, Qatar Investment Authority stepped in, vis a vis their Central Acquisition Company, to buy out Witkoff’s share for $622.9 million. Undoubtedly, this is not Witkoff/Witkoff Group’s sole involvement with sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East. Steve Witkoff was also part of Trump’s April 2020 Great American Economic Revival Industry Group^[7], likely setting the stage for his position on November 9, 2024, as co-chair of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, and his appointment as US Special Envoy to the Middle East on November 12, 2024.

No background in diplomacy – just unabashed nepotism between billionaires.

The decades of, should we call it – friendship? Fraudulence-cum-fascism? between Trump and Witkoff appears in lockstep as genocidaires’ whistles grow louder to flatten all of Gaza:

[It is] driven by a conscious, strategic decision to “flatten the area,” to ensure that “the return of people to these spaces is not something that will happen…” A former senior security official in the Israeli military, who maintained contact with many commanders, confirmed that some commanders in the field have taken it upon themselves to order the destruction of as many buildings in Gaza as possible.^[8]

What certain outlets might deem non-operational destruction, we must name: scorched earth. The military directive in Gaza is to destroy for the sake of destroying; ritualized demolition to obliterate Palestinian horizons. We must see with precision clarity what this ruination begets (even despite thousands, millions of tonnes of unexploded ordnance across the land… phosphorus, poison plumes in the air, and toxic aquifers, waterways, and sea).

During the Nakba in 1948, the Irgun decimated al-Manshiyya, Sheik Muwwanis, much of Yafa, and Ajami – ruins upon which present-day “Tel Aviv” is constructed. This portion of the coastline was redeveloped in the image of the occupier – attracting transnational capital investment, Airbnb-ifying Palestinian ruins, and deceiving many into a ‘gentler, liberal’ occupation using myriad forms of -washing. History, an ongoing Nakba.

In 2014, it was reported that Steve Witkoff joined members of Zarasai Group and Extell Development to ‘tap the Israeli capital market for debt.’ The then-prospective bond offering (worth approx. $141.6 million), coupled with Lightstone Group’s 500 million shekel bond sale in Tel Aviv, raised 2.5 billion shekels that year, turning “the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange into a key financial center for real estate companies.” At the same time, Operation Protective Edge was underway, when over 2,000 Palestinians were slaughtered in Gaza by the IOF. Already more than seven years into the near-total blockade of Gaza – air, land and sea (ongoing and evermore brutal through today).

Perhaps all of this is to frame up some questions, rather than illuminate concrete outcomes of this “60-day ceasefire,” or whatever next draft is presented. After all, Point #12 of the “term sheet” (last updated May 29, 2025) dictates: “Envoy Presides: Special Envoy, Ambassador Steve Witkoff would come to the region to finalize the agreement. Steve Witkoff will preside over the negotiations.” What will he, and Witkoff Group, personally gain from this “initial truce” (as equally opaque and vapid as “humanitarian pause” (November 2024))? As initially circulated during the plan’s release:

There are a lot of reservations on this paper as a framework. There are a lot of loopholes. There are a lot of ambiguities… “Israel will never agree to end the war under this framework. The number of aid trucks are not mentioned. There are no specifics about where the Israeli forces will withdraw. All of these are problems that will probably impede this. Witkoff tried to accommodate "Israel" much more than what was in the earlier paper. It’s going to take some time before a deal gets approved by the movement.” …Israeli officials also boasted to YNet that, under the terms of the Witkoff paper, “Israel is not giving up its strategic achievements,” claiming that the framework will allow Israeli forces to remain entrenched along the Philadelphi Corridor along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.

In addition to obfuscating the terms of engagement, Witkoff and Co. are ostensibly saying – We’ll concede nothing, we will continue to appease the shareholders (and humanitarians, sans humanity), the bombs will keep dropping because that’s our bottom line – and, we will grab it all in our interests when ready.

Every time the IOF and its bedfellows commit the latest barbaric atrocity in Gaza without a total arms embargo, sanctions, divestment, cultural ostracism, and an abolition of the Zionist settler colonial regime, they are further emboldened to press on. And they will not cease until the entirety of Gaza is razed for the next luxury hotel, casino, or whatever the warmonger’s whim. If my reading here seems crass or fatalistic, you must know that I am neither; we – those of us wholly against this – can stop this genocide by blockading the boardroom… by occupying everything, everywhere… by remaining focused on and targeting with direct action the profiteers and leveraging economic power against itself – ultimately, and inshallah expediently, inducing an existential crisis to a regime hellbent on denial.

References:

^[1] US State Department Press Briefing, May 27, 2025, https://www.state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-may-27-2025/.

^[2] Sharon Zhang, “Head of US-Backed Gaza Aid Group Resigns, Citing “Humanitarian Principles,” May 27, 2025, https://truthout.org/articles/head-of-us-backed-gaza-aid-group-resigns-citing-humanitarian-principles/.

^[3] From the Nobel Peace Center: “SS and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) had adopted a general food plan for the camps. The prisoners were to be fed three times a day. The first was a type of coffee replacement, with no sugar. The second meal was to consist of a litre of soup with root vegetables and grains. And for the last meal of the day, the prisoners were to be served 300 grams of dark bread with either sausage, margarine, some cheese, or a spoonful of jam… In the last year of the war, the bread ration was down to 50 grams per day. “This meal plan probably never materialized, and should rather be viewed as a sort of “advertisement”, meant to hide how bad the conditions in the camps actually were. In general, the prisoners were barely fed any proteins or fats…”.

^[4] Not to be confused with the “Peace to Prosperity” or  “Riviera of the Middle East”  plans, nor the
“The Extraordinary Arab Summit on Developments in the Palestinian Cause.”

^[5] Real estate law, policy making, and money laundering aside, more cajoling: “Zach Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, [President] Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, has named his newborn son Don James as a tribute to Trump. “Congratulations to Zach and Sophi Witkoff on the birth of their son, Don James Witkoff (DJW), named after me (Thank you!),” Trump wrote… “It is an honor to name our son after the greatest president of all time,” Zach Witkoff posted on X.

^[6] Eric Lipton, “Trump’s Middle East Envoy Has Prior Ties to Oil-Rich Nations There,” November 25, 2024, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/25/us/politics/witkoff-trump-middle-east-envoy.html.

^[7] Of the the $349 billion Congress first allotted to help small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program: “A total of 11 businesses tied to New York real estate investor Steve Witkoff, a longtime friend of Trump’s who donated more than $1.2 million to committees supporting Trump between 2016 and 2020, appear in the data on canceled loans, initially approved for more than $2.8 million in April. Four other Witkoff-connected businesses were approved for loans that month, totaling more than $10.6 million, that have not been canceled” ().

^[8] Meron Rapoport and Oren Ziv, “‘Render it unusable’: Israel’s mission of total urban destruction,” May 15, 2025, +972 / Local Call, https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-total-urban-destruction/.