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In August, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Barham Salih met in Geneva with Johnnie Moore, the former executive chairman of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) whose militarised food distribution system was the scene of repeated deadly shootings last year. Despite both men posting about the meeting on social media, it garnered almost no public reaction.
At least 1,218 Palestinian civilians were killed near the US- and Israeli-backed GHF’s distribution sites in the Gaza Strip between the start of its operations in late May and 22 September 2025.
The meeting highlights the tightrope UNHCR is walking nearly two years into the second Trump presidency: The cash-strapped agency is trying to smooth relations with its largest donor, while the US administration – deeply hostile to core aspects of UNHCR’s mission – is increasingly leveraging funding to either break the UN system or bend it to its will to serve its vision of American interests.
Moore – a reverend and influential evangelical Christian leader in the US – is seen as a key conduit to US President Donald Trump on humanitarian issues. He could also face legally liability for alleged atrocity crimes committed at the GHF’s sites and for allegedly aiding Israeli genocide, according to international law experts. Salih, in office since January, is trying to navigate UNHCR through one of the most challenging periods in the agency’s 76-year history.
Salih posted a photo of the two men on his X account on 19 August saying it was good to meet with Moore to “discuss our shared commitment to refugees and the important role faith communities can play in supporting them”. Moore followed with his own post. “Principled pragmatism is far too rare in the UN system and when it shows up, we should work with it,” he wrote.
Humanitarians who spoke with The New Humanitarian offered a range of perspectives on the ethics of engaging with an actor whose operations have been implicated in some of the highest-profile atrocities and international crimes carried out in Gaza.
In response to questions from The New Humanitarian, Moore wrote in a statement: “Every civilian life lost in Gaza is a tragedy, and that grief is exactly why so many aid workers [at GHF sites], many of them Palestinian, risked so much to keep food reaching families, day after day.”
A UNHCR spokesperson said the meeting between Moore and Salih focused on “global displacement, shrinking humanitarian resources, and growing pressures on refugee protection”, adding that it was part of the High Commissioner’s regular engagement with “faith leaders from around the world as part of UNHCR's efforts to strengthen protection for refugees and advance solutions to displacement”. The spokesperson did not clarify who initiated the meeting.
Several aid workers and policy experts The New Humanitarian spoke to said they saw the meeting as part of routine, if sometimes ethically complex, humanitarian diplomacy: Aid agencies and organisations often meet with actors responsible for atrocities to negotiate access or otherwise try to advance their humanitarian missions, they said.
“You don’t sell your soul in these meetings, and you arrive with your own ideas on what is good to do, and what is not good to do,” said Peter Van der Auweraert, a former senior UN official. “I think that the basic philosophy is saying, ‘Okay, I think, even if it’s only going to be a millimetre in the right direction, I’m going to give it a shot.’”
Other aid workers and policy experts argued that Moore’s leadership of the GHF should make him persona non grata for the UN and other humanitarians.
“There’s kind of a normalisation of engagement with these actors [like Moore] who are co-opting and undermining the humanitarian system, which is furthering the destruction of the system.”
Several people who worked on the Gaza response, including some who dealt with survivors and casualties of GHF’s militarised distribution sites, expressed shock and disappointment at the decision to engage with Moore. “Has everyone lost their minds?” said one, who, like other sources still working on Gaza, asked to remain anonymous due to fears of retaliation against them or their organisations. Another described it as “dystopian” and “whitewashing”.
“There’s no necessity to engage with [Moore] in a way that engaging with a party to an armed conflict has a kind of necessity, even if they are unsavoury characters… [because] we need to access areas or need to engage in humanitarian diplomacy,” said Dustin Barter, a senior research fellow at the Humanitarian Policy Group with the think tank ODI Global.
“There’s kind of a normalisation of engagement with these actors [like Moore] who are co-opting and undermining the humanitarian system, which is furthering the destruction of the system,” he added.
Outcry as aid sector risks normalising the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
A secret meeting with the GHF has fuelled fears that the humanitarian system is being bent to serve the interests of the United States and Israel.
UNHCR’s difficult spot, Moore, and the GHF
In 2024, the year before Trump returned to office, the US donated over $2 billion to UNHCR, accounting for 40% of its overall budget. In 2025, that number was slashed to $867 million, forcing the agency to cut 5,000 jobs and scale back 185 field offices, with additional cuts planned for 2027.
Virtually all the UN’s humanitarian agencies are grappling with the effects of drastically reduced US funding. But UNHCR’s role leading international efforts to protect refugees places it in a particularly precarious position. The Trump administration has shut down asylum access at the US southern border, ended refugee resettlement for all except white South Africans, and is pushing for an overhaul of the global refugee and asylum protection system that would strip away many of its core tenets.
Several weeks before the meeting between Salih and Moore, Reuters reported that UNHCR was undertaking diplomatic efforts to try to avoid a complete split with the Trump administration. This came after Salih rejected the Trump administration’s recommendation for the agency’s deputy high commissioner role, appointing another US candidate instead.
Moore previously served as a faith adviser to Trump and has longstanding connections to many in the administration. A Christian Zionist, he has also expressed unflagging support for Israel, its current government, and the military campaign in Gaza. He was appointed executive chairman of the GHF shortly after it began operating at the end of May 2025.
At the time, Israel had imposed a total siege on Gaza since March 2025, leading to a starvation crisis. When the GHF began distributing food on 27 May, Palestinians were directed towards its four militarised distribution hubs, where Israeli forces repeatedly opened fire on crowds seeking aid, and armed contractors hired by GHF were also accused of doing so, according to UN experts and other reports. In addition to the more than 1,200 people killed near the sites, thousands more were wounded.
The killings of aid seekers around GHF distribution sites have been cited by UN experts and rights groups in their assessments of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. In September 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The GHF shut its distribution sites after Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire agreement last October and announced it was closing down the following month.
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“In terms of international law, this person, Johnnie Moore, is directly responsible for atrocities,” said Shahd Hammouri, an expert in international law at the University of Kent in the UK. “UN officials meeting with him is indeed very, very worrying, as well as in contradiction to the UN Charter and the purposes of the UN, whereby the United Nations seeks to build peace and security rather than support infrastructure that goes against it.”
Eight months after the GHF shut down, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported that its clinics in Gaza were still treating people who had suffered grievous injuries sustained at the militarised hubs, which MSF described as “sites of orchestrated killing”.
In response to MSF’s extensive documentation of the killings, Moore has said the medical NGO was “compromised by Hamas”. He levelled similar accusations at UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the UN as a whole, and most NGOs working in Gaza.
In his statement to The New Humanitarian, Moore defended the GHF’s track record. “When Gaza’s need was greatest, [the GHF] placed nearly 200 million meals directly into civilians’ hands while other aid operations were routinely overrun, looted or diverted to Hamas and other armed groups,” he wrote.
Regarding the meeting with Salih, he said: “Over decades of sensitive diplomatic work, I’ve supported the international system even while sometimes criticising it, and I’ll sit down with anyone, whatever our differences, because desperate people can’t wait for the rest of us to agree.”
Asked whether UNHCR had concerns about meeting Moore given his work with GHF, as well as his public statements about the UN, the agency spokesperson said: “UNHCR is a non-political humanitarian organisation and we engage with a diverse range of actors to advocate for the refugees under our mandate”.
Normalisation or necessity
The divided humanitarian response to the meeting between Salih and Moore reflects long-running ethical debates in the sector. “These arguments are perennial,” said Barter, from ODI.
For him, there is a “distinct difference” between negotiations over humanitarian access and meeting someone who led what the UN and many others involved in providing aid to Gaza have described as an unlawful, deadly project cloaked in humanitarian language.
A year ago, there was intense scrutiny of the GHF and the violence it created, Barter noted. “But then 12 months later, engaging with such actors kind of becomes part and parcel, and it gets normalised,” he said.
In the bigger picture, the Salih-Moore meeting is part of a “clear erosion of humanitarian principles and values, which is happening very quickly”, Barter added. “There’s a full-frontal attack, particularly emanating from the US.”
Others The New Humanitarian spoke to took a different view and likened the meeting to UN agencies engaging with representatives of the Taliban in Afghanistan or with the Houthis in Yemen.
From this perspective, talking to almost anyone on any side of a given conflict or crisis should be on the table. What is important is that the aim of engagement is to improve humanitarian outcomes for affected people and that agencies – in the actions that follow from that engagement – stick to humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence.
“You can talk to the devil if it’s necessary,” said Vincent Cochetel, a former senior UNHCR official. “The question is, what do you have in mind.”
“I don’t think it’s legitimising what [Moore] has done. I think it’s part of cultivating relationships on both sides of the aisle in the US,” Cochetel, who represented UNHCR in Washington for several years, said of the meeting.
“The fundamental question for me always was, if I don’t meet, is that going to cause harm to the mission that I am supposed to be working for?” said Van der Auweraert, whose most recent posting was with the UN’s migration agency, IOM, in South Sudan.
“I’m here to try to provide assistance to as many people as I can. Does that involve meeting with people that – in the context of South Sudan – I knew had committed, certainly, international crimes, or were involved in… things that are not really even close to good governance? The answer is yes,” he added.
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The dependency challenge
Given the context of US aid cuts – and how dependent the UN system overall is on US funding – the question in this case is: To what extent is engaging with someone like Moore necessary for UNHCR to be able to continue to carry out its humanitarian mission, and can it placate the Trump administration while also sticking to humanitarian principles?
“I can understand people are afraid… whether it’s for their own jobs or for their institution as a whole – but the US really needs to be treated for what it is, and it’s a nefarious, bad-faith actor,” said Barter.
The Trump administration has “demonstrated that it really does want to try and break UNHCR, if UNHCR doesn’t do what it wants”, said Anjali Dayal, an expert on the UN and associate professor of international politics at Fordham University in the US.
This, she added, is part of a broader US strategy “to break the existing consensus around things like equality, inclusion, and human rights at the United Nations, and to make the instruments fit for the purposes of US foreign policy”.
“In reality, we have accepted for far too long a huge dependency on the US funding,” said Cochetel.
What remains to be seen is whether Salih’s attempts to appeal to the Trump administration, alongside his wider outreach efforts – including the meeting with Moore – will succeed in brokering a smoother relationship, and at what cost.
“If the cost is to be silent on what’s going on in the US in terms of asylum, that’s problematic. But it’s already the case – UNHCR is not very vocal about what’s happening today,” Cochetel said. “The question is whether the new management of UNHCR has defined red lines, and what are they?”
Edited by Eric Reidy.
