By Sally Lockwood, Sky correspondent
We’ve seen this many times before.
Highly anticipated talks and meetings with America, Israel’s closest ally and the one country with the power to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to change course, then nothing changes.
We need to give Steve Witkoff time to report his assessments back to the White House before we can give a complete verdict on this visit but what we’ve seen and heard so far has offered little hope.
The pressure on Donald Trump to stop the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is mounting after a small but vocal contingent of his base expressed outrage.
Even one of his biggest supporters in Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has referred to it as a genocide.
It was little coincidence that Witkoff was dispatched to the region for the first time in three months to speak to people on both sides and “learn the truth”, to quote US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who accompanied him to an aid site in Gaza.
The pair spent five hours in Gaza speaking to people at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation centre and it’s understood saw nothing of the large crowd of Palestinians gathering a mile away waiting for food.
Their sanitised tour of Gaza also did not include a visit to a hospital where medics are receiving casualties by the dozen from deadly incidents at aid sites, and where they’re treating children for malnutrition and hunger.
