On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, HBO host John Oliver pointed the finger at two culprits for hunger in Gaza, and neither one of them was Hamas. According to Oliver, it is the U.S. that is “being complicit” in Israel’s campaign to starve Gazans and is unwilling to do anything about it.
One way Israel and others have started replacing truck-delivered aid is through air drops, and Oliver is not a fan, “Yeah, air dropping aid in Gaza is a great way to deliver food, as long as you want it to arrive both ‘not enough’ and ‘in the ocean.’ And it's not just ineffective as a food-delivery system; it's dangerous and demeaning. If you order DoorDash, you don't want the app to tell you, "Your burrito is in the Hudson River. Go fetch."
Of course, wartime operations are not the same as your DoorDash delivery person throwing your burrito in the Hudson. Nevertheless, Oliver attacked Israel for shifting to such tactics, “And Israel's explanations for why they've shifted to this model just don't stand up. They've repeatedly claimed the U.N. is not distributing aid, though—as the U.N. points out—that's mainly because "Israel frequently denies or delays its requests to bring in convoys." They've also claimed U.N. aid was routinely getting stolen by Hamas, though two top Israeli military officials reportedly admitted there's no proof of that happening.”
Two can play this game. If Oliver wants to cite the Israeli military, we can cite the U.N. From May 19 through August 5, the U.N. claims it sent 2,610 trucks into Gaza, of which only 300 made it to their scheduled destination. The rest were intercepted “either peacefully by hungry people or forcefully by armed actors, during transit in Gaza.”
It provides no breakdown on who did the intercepting—armed gangs also have been known to loot aid trucks—but it would be naïve to think that Hamas was completely uninvolved. Hamas does still have to feed itself after all.
Still, Oliver would later lament the lack of U.S. pressure on Israel, “And the country best positioned to apply it is this one, the one that gave Israel nearly $18 billion in military aid during the first year of this war alone.”
Again, Oliver did not appreciate that wartime conditions make his analogies look silly, “Look, ‘Gaza is starving’ is a sentence that's objectively true. But it's also slightly misleading because it’s too passive. Gaza is being starved by Israel. And what's so frustrating is that most humanitarian disasters don't come with solutions as straightforward as this one. Hurricanes don't tend to have kill switches that you can flip. You can't stop a pandemic by simply hanging a ‘Do not infect’ sign on your door.”
Oliver then returned to pointing the finger at the U.S.:
But this famine truly does have an off button, as it's entirely man-made, and we need to fucking press it. As one expert on famines has said, if Netanyahu ‘decided tonight that every Palestinian child in Gaza should have breakfast tomorrow, it could undoubtedly be done.’ So, it's long past time for the U.S. to stop being complicit in this, because unless we actively stop him, Netanyahu seems more than willing to continue choking off aid to the point that what's getting through is—sometimes quite literally—a drop in the fucking ocean.
It could also end if the people who started the war would release their hostages and give up power, but Oliver wasn’t interested in any of that. Probably because it would make his DoorDash and hurricane analogies look stupid.
Here is a transcript for the August 3 show:
HBO Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
8/3/2025
11:08 PM ET
JOHN OLIVER: Yeah, air dropping aid in Gaza is a great way to deliver food, as long as you want it to arrive both "mot enough" and "in the ocean." And it's not just ineffective as a food-delivery system; it's dangerous and demeaning. If you order DoorDash, you don't want the app to tell you, "Your burrito is in the Hudson river. Go fetch."
And Israel's explanations for why they've shifted to this model just don't stand up. They've repeatedly claimed the U.N. is not distributing aid, though — as the U.N. points out — that's mainly because "Israel frequently denies or delays its requests to bring in convoys." They've also claimed U.N. aid was routinely getting stolen by Hamas, though two top Israeli military officials reportedly admitted there's no proof of that happening.
…
And that is the argument for sustained international pressure here. And the country best positioned to apply it is this one, the one that gave Israel nearly $18 billion in military aid during the first year of this war alone. Look, "Gaza is starving" is a sentence that's objectively true. But it's also slightly misleading because it’s too passive.
Gaza is being starved by Israel. And what's so frustrating is that most humanitarian disasters don't come with solutions as straightforward as this one. Hurricanes don't tend to have kill switches that you can flip. You can't stop a pandemic by simply hanging a "Do not infect" sign on your door.
But this famine truly does have an off button, as it's entirely man-made, and we need to fucking press it. As one expert on famines has said, if Netanyahu “decided tonight that every Palestinian child in Gaza should have breakfast tomorrow, it could undoubtedly be done.”
So, it's long past time for the U.S. to stop being complicit in this, because unless we actively stop him, Netanyahu seems more than willing to continue choking off aid to the point that what's getting through is — sometimes quite literally — a drop in the fucking ocean.
