TEHRAN — The visit of US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy to Gaza, framed as a humanitarian mission, appears to be a calculated effort to whitewash a humanitarian catastrophe widely seen as fueled by American support for Israel’s ongoing war on the enclave.

Steve Witkoff, accompanied by US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Israeli military officials, toured a controversial aid distribution site in Gaza known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). It is a US- and Israel-backed initiative launched in late May, ostensibly to provide food packages to Palestinians.

While Washington and Tel Aviv portray GHF as a lifeline for civilians, the reality on the ground tells a far darker story. According to United Nations data, Israeli forces have shot and killed nearly 900 Palestinians near GHF distribution points. In addition, over 500 Gazans have been killed along UN aid convoy routes. Since Israel began its war on Gaza in October 2023, more than 160 Palestinians—over 90 of them children—have died from starvation.

The total Palestinian death toll from the war has now surpassed 60,300, as global outrage intensifies. Human rights organizations and international legal experts accuse Israel not only of committing genocide but also of deliberately using starvation as a weapon of war.

The United States, widely seen as enabling Israel’s campaign, is now pivoting to public relations efforts to deflect attention from its complicity. Witkoff’s trip appears to be part of this broader strategy—more about image management than addressing the root causes of Gaza’s devastation.

Human Rights Watch has described the GHF-run sites as “death traps” that have become the scenes of regular “bloodbaths.”

Former US State Department official Annelle Sheline, who resigned last year in protest of President Joe Biden’s Gaza policies, criticized the visit by Witkoff and Huckabee, calling it a "glorified photo-op meant to obscure the reality of a dire humanitarian crisis that America has helped to author."

A week ago, a retired US special forces officer who worked at GHF centers said he witnessed Israeli troops and US contractors shooting at crowds of Palestinians near the sites where he worked.

Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar, a special forces veteran of the US Army's Green Berets, told the BBC he had never seen such a level of "brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population—an unarmed, starving population" in his entire career.

Some Gazans who spoke to the BBC also questioned the motives behind Witkoff’s visit. " Louay Mahmoud, a resident of Gaza, said: "Steve Witkoff won't see the hunger, only the narrative Israel wants him to see. This visit is a hollow media stunt, not a humanitarian mission. He comes with no solutions, only talking points designed to polish the image of an administration complicit in our suffering." Amer Khayrat, a father of two from Gaza City, added: "What Gaza needs isn't another envoy with a press team. We need the siege lifted, the bombing stopped, and the blind American support for this war brought to an end."

The visit lays bare a grim truth: US foreign policy is not only enabling Israel's destruction of Gaza—it is actively participating in the erasure of an entire people. Washington’s unwavering support for Tel Aviv, despite mounting evidence of war crimes, reveals a deep moral bankruptcy. What Gaza needs is not manufactured gestures of goodwill from its oppressors, but international accountability and an end to the US-Israeli alliance that continues to fuel its suffering.