Joe Conway (Independent)

The latest figures, as of early July, show 743 people have been killed and 4,891 injured while waiting to get fed in Gaza by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, GHF. That foundation, which was founded only last year, is an elusive enough entity. The headquarters were incorporated at an address in Delaware, just two weeks after President Trump took office. When the premises were visited by journalists to search them out, what they found there was a registration agency. The foundation did not physically or legally exist at the address. Despite all that, the US State Department is giving $30 million to the foundation as of today. The GHF is led by executive chairman and evangelical Johnnie Moore who said the following:

We do not want anybody to die. We are feeding people in the middle of a war. But it is a war of disinformation too, and all too often, the United Nations and other organisations are spreading a war of disinformation about our foundation.

Johnnie Moore, for those who do not know, is a protégé of the televangelist Jerry Falwell Snr., a major figure in the religious right of the 1970s. Falwell brought Moore into his Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, in the early 2000s, when he was just 20 years of age. Moore set about organising student convocations and ended up being the gatekeeper to all Republican politicians and anybody who wanted access to President Trump.

Moore espouses what he calls religious Zionism, which is at the basis of this movement. It adheres to the belief that the restoration of Israel-Palestine to the Jewish people must precede the second coming of the Messiah. The technical term they have for this is premillennial dispensationalism. To them, history is split into distinct eras, and they believe that much suffering will take place before the millennium.

I will have to cut this a little bit short. Not surprisingly, Johnnie Moore is very close to Trump and is co-chair of Trump’s advisory group. The relief work, if it was to be done by evangelicals, would easily have been done by established groups such as the World Action Foundation and Samaritan’s Purse. It is important that Members of the House are aware - and that it be in the record of the House - that this dubious type of organisation is being used. Many people are dying because of ill-trained security and Israeli forces who are taking them out, as they say, because they are simply looking to be fed.