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Six Months Into His Presidency, Trump Has Created a Global Humanitarian Catastrophe
The question now facing other world leaders is stark: will they continue to capitulate to Trump’s unilateralism, or will they stand up and defend multilateralism and international solidarity?
Jul 18, 2025
As the UN’s independent expert on poverty, I am no stranger to harrowing statistics. But few numbers have shaken me like those emerging in the wake of the Trump administration’s suspension of U.S. foreign aid. According to new estimates published in The Lancet, these funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths by 2030, a third of them young children.
These deaths will not be the result of droughts, earthquakes, pandemics, or war. They will be the direct consequence of a single, lethal decision made by one of the wealthiest men to ever walk this planet.
On his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump handed a death sentence to millions of people. Hours after taking office on January 20, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14169, ordering a pause on billions of dollars of foreign aid under the guise of a “90-day review” to ensure aid was aligned with his “America First” approach.
Six months later, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dissolved, and the entirety of America’s global humanitarian aid workforce will be terminated over the summer. The findings of the “review” have not been published.
What was billed as a temporary policy reassessment has transformed over the first half of 2025 into a full-blown humanitarian emergency.
Until the U.S. State Department releases a full assessment report, one can only conclude that the decisions to suspend foreign aid and subsequently dismantle USAID were made in an environment of zero transparency, zero accountability, and with no clear justification for a decision that will ultimately cost millions of lives.
What was billed as a temporary policy reassessment has transformed over the first half of 2025 into a full-blown humanitarian emergency. Estimates put the death toll since the aid freeze was announced at nearly 350,000 people—more than 200,000 of them children. All of these deaths were entirely preventable.
USAID and additional cuts to the UN and its agencies mean the UN faces the gravest threat to its existence in its 80-year history. UNFPA, the UN's reproductive health agency, estimates 32 million people will lose access to its services. UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, warns that 12.8 million displaced people are at risk of losing life-saving health interventions. The International Organization for Migration projects 10 million migrants and internally displaced people will miss out on emergency assistance.
The retreat may feel politically convenient, but the consequences will not stay confined to distant borders.
We are numbed by numbers. “One death is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” the saying goes. But these are our fellow humans—right now—suffering and dying. Children refused food. Refugees denied life-saving care after fleeing the horrors of war. Mothers bleeding to death during childbirth. All because the United States, once the backbone of the global humanitarian system, has suddenly turned off the tap.
America has abandoned the fight against poverty. But what does it mean to put America first while letting children elsewhere starve to death? The retreat may feel politically convenient, but the consequences will not stay confined to distant borders. When food systems collapse, migration spikes. When vaccines are cut off, disease spreads. When aid disappears, conflict grows. There is no version of global instability in which the U.S. remains unscathed.
No other country is stepping in to fill the void left by the United States. On the contrary, many are following suit, redirecting money once earmarked for life-saving development programmes—initiatives that ultimately build a safer, more stable world–towards defense spending.
These decisions are not just budgetary shifts; they represent a fundamental threat to multilateralism and the international rules-based order that has kept the world from the brink of world war for well over half a century.
The question now facing other world leaders is stark: will they continue to capitulate to Trump’s unilateralism, or will they stand up and defend multilateralism and international solidarity, including financial support, as our only safeguard against chaos, endless conflict, and unnecessary human suffering?
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Death, Lost Limbs, and Starvation: Gaza Children Suffer Unimaginably as World Continues to 'Look Away'
More than 17,000 children have been reported killed over the past 20 months of bombardment by Israel. But that figure only scratches the surface of the suffering being inflicted.
Jul 16, 2025
Several new reports from the United Nations have once again highlighted the horrific toll Israel's genocidal military onslaught has taken on the children of Gaza.
More than 17,000 children have been reported killed over the past 20 months. But that figure only scratches the surface of the suffering being inflicted.
Reports released this week detailed overwhelming malnourishment among children due to Israel's blockade of food entering the strip. Meanwhile, children losing limbs from war wounds is a daily occurrence.
As The Guardian's editorial board wrote yesterday, "a classroom-worth of children have been killed each day since the war began." Over just the past week, there have been multiple horrific massacres in which children were killed.
On Sunday, six children were killed by an Israeli drone strike while waiting to collect water, deaths Israel attributed to a "technical error." The Thursday before that, another 10 children were killed by an airstrike as they lined up outside a hospital waiting for nutritional supplements and treatment.
As The Guardian noted, these children were in such positions as a result of Israel's deliberate strangulation of their access to the resources needed to live:
Those six thirsty children should not have needed to queue for water due to what the UN calls a human-made drought. Human Rights Watch believes that thousands of Palestinians have died due to Israel's deliberate pattern of actions to deprive them of water, which it alleges amounts to the crime against humanity of extermination as well as acts of genocide.
Those 10 hungry children should not have required nutritional supplements, but Israel continues to choke off aid and civilians are starving.
On Tuesday, UNRWA reported that 1 in 10 of the children screened in its clinics suffer from acute malnutrition.
"Our health teams are confirming that malnutrition rates are increasing in Gaza, especially since the siege was tightened more than four months ago on the second of March," UNRWA's director of communications, Juliette Touma, told reporters in Geneva via a video link from Amman, Jordan.
"One nurse that we spoke to told us that in the past, he only saw these cases of malnutrition in textbooks and documentaries," Touma said. "Medicine, nutrition supplies, hygiene material, fuel are all rapidly running out."
In a post on UNRWA's blog, Touma wrote:
There are very little therapeutic supplies to treat children with malnutrition as basics are scarce in Gaza. The Israeli authorities have imposed a tight siege blocking the entry of food, medicines, medical and nutritional supplies and hygiene material includ[ing] soap. While the siege is sometimes eased, UNRWA (the largest humanitarian organisation in Gaza) has not been allowed to bring in humanitarian assistance since 2 March.
She said that UNRWA has more than 6,000 aid trucks waiting for the "green light" from Israeli authorities, who continue to block them.
"Why should babies die of malnutrition in the 21st century, especially when it's totally preventable?" she asked.
Another report from the U.N.-sponsored Global Protection Cluster found that in addition to the 17,000 children reported dead, more than 40,000 have war-related disabilities. A quarter of those require acute or ongoing rehabilitation.
It found that on average, "10 children per day lose one or both of their legs" as a result of ongoing attacks by Israeli forces.
In December, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reported that "Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world—many losing limbs and undergoing surgeries without even anesthesia."
This is due in part to the war's effects on Gaza's hospitals, just 47% of which remain partially functional due to destruction by the Israeli military and supply shortages caused by the blockade.
"Gaza’s shattered health system is overwhelmed—and aid is being blocked by the government of Israel. The world cannot continue to look away," said UNRWA in a post Tuesday.
With the backing of the United States, Israel has banned UNRWA staff from entering the Gaza Strip since March, citing uncorroborated accusations that 19 out of UNRWA's approximately 13,000 staff in Gaza took part in Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel.
Since then, aid infrastructure in the strip has been largely demolished, with most of it now directed by the U.S.-Israeli-administered Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. More than 870 people have been killed in massacres at these aid sites.
"The U.N., including UNRWA and partners, must be allowed to do their work and bring in humanitarian assistance at scale, including for children, said Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA commissioner-general. "Any additional delay to a cease-fire now will cause more deaths."
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Denials Can’t Cloud the Truth That Google Is Complicit in the Gaza Genocide
Google and Sergey Brin know their company’s technology is not neutral—it is a pillar of Israel’s machinery of destruction.
Jul 16, 2025
Sergey Brin, the billionaire cofounder of Google, recently accused the United Nations of being “transparently antisemitic” because, in its exhaustively researched report, it rightly pointed out Google's complicity in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the escalating settler violence in the West Bank.
Brin's denial of the genocide in Gaza is not only morally blind but extremely dangerous. It distracts from the real tragedy unfolding in Gaza and, by resorting to tiresome tropes, attempts to silence legitimate criticism with accusations of antisemitism.
Brin insists that calling this genocide offends Jews who have survived history’s worst crimes. But what exactly does he call it? What name does he give to the burial of entire families beneath their homes, to the deliberate starvation and dispossession of millions? A people’s past suffering does not grant them exclusive rights to define atrocity, or to deny it when others endure it. Israel, through decades of occupation and violence, has forfeited any claim to moral authority. In fact, numerous Jewish organizations and voices around the world have strongly opposed Israel’s actions in Gaza precisely because they recognize the moral imperative to speak out against atrocities, regardless of who commits them.
According to the U.N. Genocide Convention, genocide is “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” What has unfolded in Gaza meets that definition with chilling precision. Over 55,000 Palestinians are already counted among the dead—but who is left to count the bodies buried under pulverized neighborhoods, or to record the names of entire families erased in a single airstrike? This is the largest population of pediatric amputees and orphaned children in living memory.
If Google were serious about accountability, it would immediately terminate Project Nimbus and all other contracts that fuel military violence and human rights abuses.
Yet from his billionaire’s perch, Mr. Brin shrugs this catastrophe away, drawing facile parallels to his own family’s past suffering. Why is it so often those who should understand the price of dehumanization who are quickest to deny it when others are targeted? What does Brin need to see before he calls it genocide? More corpses? More pulverized infrastructure? Must every child be starved or buried under rubble before the truth becomes undeniable?
The U.N. report unequivocally lays out Google’s complicity. Through its involvement in Project Nimbus—a $1.2 billion contract awarded by Israel to Google and Amazon—the company has played an active and central role in supporting the genocide in Gaza. The project empowered the Israeli military with advanced cloud computing and artificial intelligence capabilities—tools essential for processing vast amounts of data, coordinating attacks, and executing precision strikes on densely populated civilian areas. Google is providing Israel with the instruments of genocide.
Internal documents obtained by The Washington Post confirm that Google staff directly assisted Israel’s Ministry of Defense and military after the October attacks, deliberately discarding ethical commitments that had previously restricted the company from weaponizing its AI technologies. Even more troubling, Google suppressed internal dissent by terminating employees who raised principled objections. A company that silences its workforce while publicly claiming innocence is not only duplicitous and greedy, it is also an integral part of the genocidal machinery, which Israel has refined with chilling expertise.
Brin and Google aren’t alone in this grim enterprise. The U.N. report names other corporate giants profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza. Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries have filled their ledgers by providing bombs, drones, and fighter jets that obliterate homes and hospitals. Amazon, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard have supplied surveillance tools and cloud infrastructure to track, monitor, and repress Palestinians. Even banks and insurers have invested in settlement expansion, cementing apartheid as a lucrative business model. Together, these companies have woven an economy where genocide becomes just another line item on quarterly reports, with U.S. taxpayers footing much of the bill.
Google and Sergey Brin know their company’s technology is not neutral—it is a pillar of Israel’s machinery of destruction. Denial or deflection is morally indefensible and only paves the way for more killing. If Google were serious about accountability, it would immediately terminate Project Nimbus and all other contracts that fuel military violence and human rights abuses. But we all know that will never happen. The profits are simply too good, and the cost—thousands of Palestinian lives—too little.
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