The US state department said it would stop issuing visas to children from Gaza in desperate need of medical care after an online pressure campaign led by Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer and “proud Islamophobe” close to Donald Trump.
“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” the state department said in a message posted on X, which Ms Loomer was banned from before it was purchased by Elon Musk.
In a pair of posts on the social network on Friday, she had shared video of badly injured Palestinian children and their family members arriving in Houston and San Francisco this month, along with false claims their shouts of joy were “jihadi chants” and that they were “doing the Hamas terror whistle”.
Ms Loomer falsely claimed she had “exclusively obtained” the two video clips she shared. One was copied from a medical aid charity’s public Instagram account and the other from the Houston Chronicle’s YouTube channel.
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After misrepresenting the children, including amputees arriving to get prosthetic legs, as “Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone”, she demanded to know “who at the US state department under @marcorubio signed off on the visas for Palestinians from a Hamas hot zone”.
“Why would anyone at the state department give visas to individuals who live in Gaza, which is run by Hamas?” Ms Loomer wrote, before falsely stating that “95 per cent of Gazans voted for Hamas”.
Hamas got 44 per cent of party list votes in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections across Gaza and the West Bank, and lost three of the five districts in Gaza to the secular Fatah party. There has been no election since.
After the visa programme was halted, Ms Loomer declared victory.
“This is fantastic news,” she wrote in response to the state department announcement. “Hopefully all Gazans will be added to President Trump’s travel ban. There are doctors in other countries. The US is not the world’s hospital!”
Republican congressman Randy Fine explicitly commended Ms Loomer after the change was announced, in a sign of her sway over some US policy.
“Massive credit needs to be given to @LauraLoomer for uncovering this and making me and other officials aware. Well done, Laura,” Mr Fine wrote on X.
The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, a US-based charity, called on the Trump administration to “reverse this dangerous and inhumane decision”.
Over the last 30 years the charity has evacuated thousands of Palestinian children to the US for medical care, it said in a statement.
“Medical evacuations are a lifeline for the children of Gaza who would otherwise face unimaginable suffering or death due to the collapse of medical infrastructure in Gaza.”
The Council on Islamic-American Relations said the block on visas was “the latest sign that the intentional cruelty of President Trump’s ‘Israel First’ administration knows no bounds”.
It said it was “deeply ironic” that the Trump administration was meanwhile “rolling out the red carpet for racists and indicted war criminals from the Israeli government”.
Paul Graham, co-founder of the Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator, wrote on X: “If Laura Loomer had been around in 1940, she’d have been trying to prevent Jewish refugees from entering the US. You know she would. And if Trump had been president then, she’d have succeeded.” – Guardian
