Q. & A.
How Former Biden Officials Defend Their Gaza Policy
The former President’s support for Israel abetted a humanitarian catastrophe. But Jacob Lew, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the country, still thinks that the Trump White House could learn from its predecessor.
By Isaac ChotinerAugust 26, 2025
Source photograph by Miriam Alster / AFP / Getty
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During the war in Gaza, there have been two major stages of aid delivery to Palestinians: the original effort led largely by the United Nations, which involved hundreds of facilities, and the current system run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American nonprofit set up with Israeli backing. Last March, after Israel ended a ceasefire with Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government imposed a near-total aid cutoff to the territory until well into May, at which point the G.H.F. took over. The U.N.’s food deliveries had not been able to meet the overwhelming need in Gaza, but at least they had taken place all over the territory. The G.H.F. opened only four sites. Hundreds of Palestinians have been shot amid the chaos there. Since July 1st, two hundred and four people have died of malnutrition. (The total Palestinian death toll for the war is now more than sixty-two thousand.) Even President Donald Trump acknowledged the starvation. In response, Netanyahu allowed more aid into the territory, and Mike Huckabee, Trump’s Ambassador to Israel, announced that the G.H.F. would create more aid-distribution sites. But Gazans continue to starve, and Netanyahu has said that he plans to expand the war and occupy Gaza City. In Israel, this has spurred protests against his government, and families of the remaining hostages held by Hamas—there are believed to be about twenty still alive—argue that he is continuing the war for political reasons.
In a recent piece in Foreign Affairs, titled “How to Stop a Humanitarian Catastrophe,” the former Biden Administration officials Jacob J. Lew and David Satterfield explain why they believe that the Trump Administration is failing where theirs succeeded. Lew became Ambassador to Israel less than a month after October 7th, and Satterfield was Biden’s special envoy for humanitarian issues in the region. In the piece, they write, “Although the results of our work never satisfied us, much less our critics, in reality the efforts we led in the Biden administration to keep Gaza open for humanitarian relief prevented famine. The fact remains that through the first year and a half of relentless war, Gazans did not face mass starvation because humanitarian assistance was reaching them.”
I recently spoke by phone with Lew, who served in the second Obama Administration as Treasury Secretary, and is currently a professor of international public affairs at Columbia University, about the piece, as well as the broader American-Israeli relationship. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed whether the Biden Administration was trying to keep Netanyahu in power, how much it shaped Israeli conduct, and what Lew learned on late-night phone calls with Israeli officials.
You write in the piece that the Biden Administration prevented mass starvation in Gaza while it remained in office. What did you do to prevent mass starvation?
From the very beginning of the war, President Biden was unequivocal in saying he had Israel’s back, and he would continue to support Israel and its legitimate effort to defeat Hamas. But there had to be a very serious effort to deal with the civilian issues of a war in Gaza. So we engaged literally every day and night on the questions of how you have an effective strategy of providing aid in a war zone. And we worked very hard to bring the attention of Israeli leaders to the urgency of opening aid crossings. So it was not a one-day event. Literally the entire time I was there, it was a very substantial part of the work that we were doing.
During your tenure, humanitarian groups, the United Nations, and even people in the Biden Administration were constantly saying that there was not enough aid getting into Gaza. The death toll climbed to more than forty-six thousand before you left office. I know you’re not saying that the aid-delivery system was sufficient, but how would you characterize it?
At every point, we said more needed to be done. I’m not saying that we achieved the goal of getting enough food in to meet all needs. But that’s a very, very different reality than mass malnutrition and famine. And every time there were reports of famine that were not accurate, it made it harder to do the job of getting more aid in. We were trying to make the critique in a balanced way to keep pressure on Hamas—and to not abandon Israel’s just effort to defeat an enemy that attacked it on October 7th, killing twelve hundred people—while still saying that you have an obligation every day, even if it’s at some risk, to keep the aid crossings open to Gaza. It was arduous work.
The risk of strengthening Hamas, if Hamas got hold of the fuel or the food, was a serious question. It wasn’t a made-up concern. We never saw it going directly from what the United States was providing. So I want to be clear on that. But they undoubtedly were trying to control the administration of aid because it was a way of holding on to governance.
But I just want to be clear: people were starving to death in 2024. I know mass starvation did not happen, but people were dying, correct?
I can tell you that we did not see evidence of mass starvation leading to death. We did see children, and some of them were children with diseases who are particularly susceptible, and it’s tragic. Any civilian, any child dying of malnutrition is tragic. So I’m in no way saying there weren’t problems. Until March of 2025, it wasn’t great, but people were surviving. And it was not an accident. It took constant engagement to keep that flow. I would never say there was no problem. I think the reports of famine were premature and exaggerated. Even in my last month, there was a report that I found extremely troubling where it said there was a serious risk of famine in the north, literally as we were working day and night to open the routes for food to get in to the people who were still in that very northern part of Gaza.
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It seems that part of what was going on with what you said were “premature” warnings of famine was that humanitarian groups would warn of famine and then once things got bad enough, Israel would increase the amount of aid coming in. Doesn’t what you are saying suggest that, too? You are saying you would pressure the Israelis and therefore they would open the tap a little bit more and things would get a little bit better. And that’s not happening as much in the Trump Administration, so the starvation has gotten worse.
Well, look, when I got to Israel in November of 2023, the country was shell-shocked. It was in a state of trauma from October 7th that any of us in New York on September 11th would understand in a very visceral way. So people were not making decisions based on long-term thinking. I would say that once we got into November, we had engagement with senior policymakers who understood that there was a need to address humanitarian concerns. The challenge was that it was a country that didn’t understand exactly the scope of the humanitarian needs, and there was a right-wing element of Netanyahu’s coalition government that was opposed and had other views that were threatening to bring down the coalition. How did you get decisions to be taken without causing the government to collapse? Now, people have asked, why did we care about that? Because you work with the government that you have. We don’t vote in the elections in other countries. We don’t choose the leaders.
But supporting the government in power is a little different than saying we’re going to help this government try to survive.
We didn’t do that, Isaac. We never took a position one way or another on what the government should be. There were people in the government who thought we wanted it to fall. There were people outside of the government who thought we weren’t doing enough. We work to make policy with the government that’s in place.
In the essay, you write, “Given the tensions within the government, it took active and consistent U.S. engagement to manage the internal Israeli political dynamics and maintain the adequate flow of assistance. The message to our interlocutors in the Israeli government was in essence, ‘If the politics are hard, blame the United States.’ Allowing Netanyahu to cite a need to satisfy U.S. demands was crucial then—and remains crucial today.” That makes it seem like you were trying to help the current government stay in power.
No, I think you’re missing the point. The point I’m making is if your goal is to keep humanitarian aid flowing and you see obstacles that have to be overcome, you have to be realistic about what it takes to achieve the goal that you have. Our goal was to get the aid in. We wanted Israel to prevail in the war. What we’re saying in the essay is realistically there were limitations on how decisions would be taken and the coalition was concerned about not falling. It was their concern, not ours. I take issue with the characterization of our position being that we were trying to defend the coalition when we were trying to solve the immediate, urgent issue, which was getting humanitarian assistance in.
So when you say that, “Allowing Netanyahu to cite a need to satisfy U.S. demands was crucial then—and remains crucial today,” what do you mean? Netanyahu doesn’t want to piss off the super far-right ministers in his government by having it seem that Israel is delivering aid. So you’re saying that allowing Netanyahu to cite the need to satisfy U.S. demands is crucial to him remaining in power, correct?
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You’re putting words in my mouth. I’m not going to let that happen. What I’m saying is in order to get a decision through his Cabinet, he needed to be armed with positions that he was able and willing to use. And what we would say is, “We need you to do this, and if that is a strategic concern then you do what we need.” I understand that you can see that as political cover, but it’s political cover to get a policy enacted, not to preserve a coalition. Our goal was to get aid in, and we were trying to help drive the decision-making process in a constructive way. I think that’s very different from taking political sides in a domestic context in another country.
If the goal was to get aid in, some people would say that keeping the current government afloat was a bad idea. Another possibility would have been to seriously threaten to stop arming them. How do you respond to that?
Look, I think President Biden was clear immediately after October 7th that he would support Israel in achieving the military objective of defeating Hamas. There was always a debate about what that meant, and we engaged diplomatically on the difference between defeating Hamas as a military and governing authority and eliminating the last Hamas fighter, which we didn’t believe at the beginning and I don’t believe today is possible. But our goal was to help Israel defend its people and its country. That was not something that we used as a general matter to say, If you don’t do other things we want, we’ll stop defending you. Part of it was that President Biden was so clear in his position that it wouldn’t have even been credible.
Well, Biden still had the power to do it. I’m not saying he was going to, but he could have, right?
Right, but when he was Vice-President, Joe Biden was famous for saying great powers can’t bluff. It was something that is deep inside him—his commitment to supporting Israel in a legitimate, just fight was clear, and that had to coexist with pressing them on these humanitarian issues.
This is a war that a former defense minister to Netanyahu has referred to as ethnic cleansing. Whether you agree with this characterization or not, there is a certain point at which the U.S. could choose to stop helping Israel. Your answer is almost tautological, right? Biden wasn’t going to do this, so he couldn’t do this.
Isaac, I think you have to put things in the perspective of the time frame. We’re talking about late 2023, early 2024, up until 2025. We engaged with Israel on military tactics in a very direct way. Take the decision to proceed in Rafah in May of 2024. [More than one million Palestinians, many of whom had congregated in Rafah in the first months of the war, fled the city during the offensive.] The Israeli military plan that was originally designed and the one that was executed were very different. If you look at the way they fought in Rafah, the reason we didn’t criticize it is that they took the advice that we had given them and they modified their military plans to be consistent with targeted intelligence-driven attacks. So we were engaging not just on humanitarian assistance; we were engaging on the conduct of the war. I’m not saying that everything went the way we would’ve advised, and I’m not saying we didn’t call them in the middle of the night many times saying, What on earth happened just now?
When you would call them in the middle of the night and say, “What on earth happened?,” what was usually the answer?
The general pattern was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate, and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet. We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places.
Sorry, what did you just say?
In many cases, the original number of casualties—
No, I meant the thing about who the children were.
They were often the children of the fighters themselves.
And therefore what follows from that?
What follows is that whether or not it was a legitimate military target flows from the population that’s there.
Hold on, Mr. Secretary. That’s not, in fact, correct, right? Whether it’s a legitimate target has to do with all kinds of things like proportionality. It doesn’t matter if the kids are the kids of—
If you’re in a command-and-control center, that’s different than if it’s a school that’s emptied out and innocent civilians are taking shelter there. If you’re the commander of a Hamas unit and you bring your family to a military site, that’s different. I’m not saying everything fits into that, and I’m not saying it’s not a tragedy.
It may shine a very poor light on Hamas, but who the kids are does not make a difference in terms of international law.
It is not the simple question that it originally appears to be when the initial report makes it sound like the target was just an empty school that families took cover in. In some cases, I’m not aware of the full explanations, because when I left we were still asking questions to get more detail, and saying to them that they have to be able to explain these things. And I’m not going to say that none of them fall outside of the bounds of things where there should be disciplinary action against some of the officers involved. I don’t know the answer to that.
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You have been saying today that the war against Hamas is justified, and you say in the piece that the “military mission” is defeating Hamas. But when I read the more liberal press in Israel, or stories such as the giant investigation published in the New York Times a few weeks ago, it seems like the purpose of the war is to keep Benjamin Netanyahu in power. And so it feels like there’s a disconnect between more liberal Americans like those in your Administration who supported the war and who will say it needs to continue to get the hostages back and to defeat Hamas, and liberal Israelis who are saying that Netanyahu doesn’t care about defeating Hamas or the hostages at all. How do you think about that dissonance?
I think the temptation to see things as explained by only one cause can lead to misunderstanding the complexity of what’s going on. There were many moments when it was a legitimate point that there were still military objectives against Hamas. We never said, for example, that Rafah was not a serious military objective.
Was the larger problem that the American government was operating from the assumption that Netanyahu cared about getting hostages back? The hostage families broadly don’t seem to think that he does. Netanyahu goes on the same right-wing television channel in Israel on which hostage families are regularly mocked.
I’m not going to try to explain what’s in either the mind or heart of Netanyahu. What I can tell you is that as a matter of American policy, the hostages were very much at the top of our list of priorities. I’ve gotten to know many, many of the hostage families, and I understand that they have a right to be critical of anyone that they criticize.
I’m trying to ask a larger question about whether, fundamentally, Netanyahu and his government wanted to end the war and bring the hostages back. And it seems to me that the assumption from most liberal Israelis is that they do not. It felt like the Biden Administration was pushing for something that the Israeli government did not, in fact, want.
Again, it’s more complicated than that. I’m not going to question that there was a political dimension to all of this. The reality at the time of all the negotiations was there were always two parties to a negotiation. Hamas was not willing to make the moves that it had to make in order to free hostages, and in order to end the war. It wasn’t just one side. But I thought that a lot of this stuff needed a little bit more top-down explanation to the Israeli people to build the case for why we have to do hard things to save the hostages. So I’m not defending the way everything was done, I hope.
In the essay, you write about Trump proposing a Gaza without Gazans: “Netanyahu seemed startled by Trump’s comments. He avoided embracing or rejecting the goal, instead hailing the president’s ‘bold vision’ on Gaza. Yet it quickly became clear that Trump’s remark had delighted Israelis on the far right.” You seem to want to draw a contrast between Netanyahu and the far right, but now Netanyahu has embraced the plan. He said it’s a wonderful plan and a “revolutionary” plan. And there have even been reports from the Wall Street Journal and others that Israel has been talking to South Sudan and other countries about moving Gazans out of Gaza. So how big is the gap between Netanyahu and the far right?
What we said in the piece was that at the time they were fringe views and that the statements that President Trump made when Netanyahu visited opened the gates for it to go from being a fringe view to something that is widely discussed, if not widely held. I don’t know the answer to the question. I read the article in the Wall Street Journal, and we made clear our views that it is not something that’s a morally or legally acceptable approach. I think the problem is that the politics are different here and in Israel. When President Trump opened that door at the press conference, he’s fully capable of closing it again, and in Israel it changed the environment of the discussion. And I hope it’s still a fringe view, but I worry about that. We made it clear that things like that couldn’t even be discussed.
In the essay, you write a lot about the shared values of America and Israel. But today you have talked about pushing them to deliver aid, and you’ve talked about the fact that once Trump came into office and that push wasn’t there, the humanitarian situation got worse. Why was there a need to push so hard? Why do they need to be pushed to not ethnically cleanse Gaza? Why do they need to be pushed to have their military act in an honorable way? If they are our shared ally and our great friend, why aren’t they doing these things on their own?
The environment in October and November of 2023 was how do you sustain an enemy that just slaughtered twelve hundred of your citizens? You had to create a way for the aid to get in without it having the effect of making your enemy succeed. It is pretty unusual.
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Well, this situation exists partly because Israel controlled access to Gaza, right?
It’s partially because of the geography of Gaza also and the history. It wasn’t that everyone we spoke to said, “We’re not going to allow food in.” But there had to be a means of getting the food in without accomplishing the mission of undermining the war effort. And the mood of the country was traumatized, with political threats to leave the coalition. That’s a hard set of circumstances.
But the reason that food stopped entering Gaza in March was not that it was too hard to do. As you acknowledge in the piece, when the pressure stopped, the food stopped.
As we say in the piece, turning food on and off cannot be used as a lever of coercion.
Why was it even on the table as a lever of coercion? That’s what I’m trying to understand.
Look, it was hard, and there were moments when the inability to solve either logistical or strategic or military challenges seemed paralyzing. But the answer to that is you keep going at it, and you work to overcome the obstacles.
When you talk about shared values, we were able to engage and have a conversation where we talk about issues the way we’re talking about them right now. And I never had an Israeli general dismiss what we said as being inconsistent with their values.
We are effectively helping to pay his salary, so I would hope not.
Yeah. But they’re the ones who have to make the decision. Are they going to send a thousand more people in greater harm’s way? And the answer is with the engagement we had, they rethought their military strategy in a significant battle like Rafah. Now when I hear the Prime Minister get up and say, “They said we couldn’t [invade Rafah without massive civilian casualties] and we did,” it makes my blood boil because they did not do it the same way. They did it in an entirely different way.
Reading your piece, I was shocked to learn that the Biden Administration’s floating aid pier was an Israeli idea. This was the floating pier that Biden talked about in the State of the Union, and was operational in the spring of 2024 briefly before stormy weather made it inoperable. It was embarrassing, and people made fun of the Administration for it. Now it seems like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was also an Israeli idea. Both of them have been P.R. disasters, and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been a humanitarian disaster. The Israeli-American dynamic just seems very strange.
When the decision on the pier was made, it was supposed to work in a better way. It wasn’t supposed to get ripped apart by waves in the Mediterranean. So the things that were ridiculed were something that turned out to be something we’re going to have to deal with when we try to use that technology in another place. I never saw a risk assessment that predicted it was going to have such a difficult engineering challenge. With that said, almost half a million meals came across it and it became a very important diplomatic moment. I think diplomatically it accomplished quite a lot. It fed a lot of people. [The total aid delivered by the pier in its nearly three weeks of operation added up to approximately six hundred truckloads—about the same amount that entered Gaza on an average day prior to the war.] I’m not happy that the pictures are of waves knocking down a U.S. floating pier. But that’s not on the government of Israel. ♦
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Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.
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