In February 2024, staff members of the US Agency for International Development filed an internal cable warning that northern Gaza had become an “apocalyptic wasteland” with severe shortages of food and medical aid as a result of Israel’s military offensive. UN fact-finding missions in January and February of that year had documented “gruesome” scenes — a human femur and other bones scattered in the streets, bodies left in vehicles, catastrophic shortages of food and clean water.

The cable never circulated widely within the US government. Reuters reported in early 2026, citing four former US officials, that US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew and his deputy Stephanie Hallett blocked its internal distribution, claiming the cable “lacked balance.”

The decision to suppress a humanitarian warning about conditions in Gaza — filed by US government staff on the ground — in order to protect the diplomatic framing of an ally is not a bureaucratic error. It is a choice. And it is a choice that was made while the conditions described in that cable were actively continuing: people starving, bodies in the streets, ambulances unable to reach the wounded.

The cable’s suppression meant that officials further up the policy chain — who might have acted on it, or been politically pressured to act on it — did not see it. It meant that the paper trail of US government awareness of famine-level conditions in Gaza was thinner than the reality on the ground. It meant that the argument “we didn’t know how bad it was” became more available to those who preferred not to know.

Ambassador Lew and Deputy Hallett have not publicly responded to the reporting. The Biden administration’s broader posture toward Gaza during that period — sustained weapons transfers, diplomatic shielding at the UN Security Council, resistance to conditioning aid — is the context in which a cable about an “apocalyptic wasteland” was deemed unbalanced.

The people described in that cable were starving while it was being edited. Some of them did not survive the editing process.