WASHINGTON — U.S. diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem blocked the broad circulation of internal U.S. Agency for International Development cables in early 2024 warning that northern Gaza had become an “Apocalyptic Wasteland,” former officials said. The account, detailed in a Reuters investigation, suggests the messages were held back from wider interagency channels during debates over U.S. support for Israel and humanitarian access, Jan. 30, 2026.
Reuters reported that the February 2024 “Apocalyptic Wasteland” cable was based on U.N. fact-finding visits in January and February and described collapsing sanitation and health conditions, severe shortages of essentials such as food and safe drinking water, and human remains in streets. Reuters said it reviewed one cable and that former officials described four additional cables drafted in early 2024 that documented rapidly deteriorating conditions but were also blocked from wider distribution inside the U.S. government.
According to Reuters, then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked the “Apocalyptic Wasteland” cable and other messages because they believed the reporting lacked balance and repeated information already in public reporting. Reuters said Lew and Hallett did not respond to requests for comment.
Inside the “Apocalyptic Wasteland” warning
Former officials told Reuters that restricted access for U.S. officials made partner reporting unusually important. Reuters reported that the cable drew on a mission involving the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the U.N. Mine Action Service and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and that it cleared USAID’s West Bank and Gaza mission offices and the State Department’s Office of Palestinian Affairs before Hallett barred wider distribution.
Andrew Hall, then a crisis operations specialist for USAID, told Reuters that widely circulated cables can serve as an internal “acknowledgement” of conditions when firsthand access is scarce. Reuters also reported that USAID has had no staff inside Gaza since 2019, leaving much of its analysis dependent on U.N. agencies and aid organizations — a reality that former officials said made the “Apocalyptic Wasteland” language difficult to replace with other U.S. reporting streams.
Earlier famine alarms set the backdrop
Warnings about mass hunger had been building for months. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification assessment, released March 18, 2024, said famine was “imminent” in northern Gaza without a major change in access and hostilities. A separate FAO-WFP Hunger Hotspots report, released June 5, 2024, urged immediate action to prevent famine in Gaza and other crisis zones.
Washington also tried multiple delivery routes amid security and access constraints. But the U.S. aid pier was later dismantled after repeated disruptions, The Guardian reported, underscoring how difficult it was to move and distribute assistance at scale.
Reuters said the cable dispute unfolded as the administration implemented National Security Memorandum-20, a Biden directive requiring certain recipients of U.S. weapons to provide written assurances about compliance with international law and humanitarian access. The State Department later submitted an NSM-20 report to Congress describing how assurances are collected and assessed and saying the U.S. viewed the assurances it received as credible and reliable while continuing to monitor compliance.
Separately, a 2024 USAID inspector general advisory described the challenges of overseeing and delivering assistance in Gaza when access is limited — a constraint former officials say heightens the stakes of what gets shared, and what gets stopped, inside the U.S. government.
