LEILA FADEL, HOST:
We have some exclusive reporting now from NPR. Our reporters have been speaking to more than two dozen former senior Biden administration officials. All were directly involved in shaping U.S. policy towards Israel's war in Gaza.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
This comes as Israel's war against Hamas nears the two-year mark. There is now a humanitarian crisis for the 2 million Palestinians living there. We wanted to learn more about what role the U.S., as Israel's strongest ally, may have had in trying to get aid into Gaza to alleviate that crisis.
FADEL: NPR's Kat Lonsdorf was one of the reporters working on this, and she joins me now. Good morning, Kat.
KAT LONSDORF, BYLINE: Good morning.
FADEL: OK, so the reporting really took you all behind the scenes for some dramatic months in the Biden administration and in this war. Tell us more about who you talked to and what you heard.
LONSDORF: Yeah. I did this reporting with our colleagues, Fatma Tanis and Tom Bowman, and the people we talked to were senior officials across the administration. Many of them requested anonymity in order to speak candidly with us about sensitive internal discussions. And what they described was a sometimes contentious atmosphere within the administration, about the decisions being made. And now many are grappling with this idea of did the U.S. do enough. Some people we talked to said the Biden administration prevented famine from occurring in Gaza, which has been declared since President Trump took office. One senior former official told us, quote, "nobody can say we did enough. You can say we made a difference. It could have been worse." But others argued that's not the standard by which to measure success here.
FADEL: So it sounds like there was debate within the administration about how U.S. policy was shaped on getting food into Gaza. How did that play out?
LONSDORF: Well, the people we talked to described strong, sometimes bitter arguments about how far the U.S. was willing or able to go to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. You know, some believed the U.S. needed to use all of its leverage to push Israel to let more aid in, including possibly withholding U.S. weapons. And others believed in giving Israel space to conduct its war with Hamas, especially in the early days when the trauma of the October 7 attacks on Israel was still very fresh. There was also a lot of frustration with Israel within the administration when it came to how much humanitarian aid it was allowing into Gaza, with heated arguments between senior U.S. officials and their Israeli counterparts.
You know, very senior Biden officials, including the president himself, would spend hours on the phone with Israel pushing on specific aid details - the number of trucks getting in on one day or a crossing being opened, for example. And officials told us that this meant that the U.S. was often bogged down, sometimes losing the bigger picture. Here's Elisa Ewers, a former U.S. official involved in the early planning. Here's what she told us.
ELISA EWERS: The situation on the ground was so dire that you were always playing catch-up. You were always trying to get ahead of the problem when, in fact, you were very far behind.
FADEL: OK. So, Kat that was then. What's happening now with U.S. policy and the humanitarian situation in Gaza?
LONSDORF: Well, now the U.S. under the Trump administration largely seems to be allowing Israel to do what it wants. Aid groups on the ground told us that the U.S. is no longer exerting the same kind of consistent, round-the-clock pressure on Israel to allow more aid into Gaza as it did under the Biden administration. A White House official told NPR that Trump, quote, "wants to ensure the people of Gaza are fed." But, you know, regardless of the administration, one former senior U.S. official told us that they thought the tragedy of Gaza has fundamentally compromised American global standing. They said, quote, "it's a stain which everyone in the world sees, even if we don't."
FADEL: That's NPR's Kat Lonsdorf. Thank you, Kat.
LONSDORF: Thank you.
FADEL: To read more of the team's reporting, go to npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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