USAID staffers in early 2024 drafted a warning to senior officials in the Biden administration that Israel’s attacks had turned northern Gaza into an “Apocalyptic Wasteland.” The internal memo laid out harrowing accounts by U.N. observers who described seeing a human femur and other bones in the streets, dead bodies abandoned in cars, and “catastrophic human needs, particularly for food and safe drinking water.” Reuters reports that the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew and his deputy blocked the memo from disseminating within the U.S. government because they believed it wasn’t balanced.