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LONDON: The US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation will “scale up” its sites in Gaza from four to 16, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has said.

In an interview with Fox News, Huckabee said: “The immediate plan is to scale up the number of sites up to 16 and begin to operate them as much as 24 hours a day.”

The GHF was conceived by Israelis, is operated by American contractors on the ground, and receives diplomatic and financial support from the US, The New York Times reported.

It currently operates four aid distribution sites, mostly in southern Gaza.

Huckabee and Steve Witkoff, the US’ special envoy to the Middle East, visited a GHF site in the enclave last week.

Huckabee’s comments are viewed as a response to mounting criticism of Israel’s war and humanitarian strategy for Gaza.

Aid groups have warned that the enclave is in the grip of a rapidly worsening hunger crisis, with Palestinians confronting famine levels of food insecurity.

The World Food Programme, a UN body, has said that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation, with one-third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row.”

Observers widely viewed the launch of the GHF as an Israeli attempt to supersede Gaza’s existing humanitarian network, which was largely run by the UN.

The foundation has been severely criticized by the UN and has faced a boycott, after UN officials said its methods violated humanitarian law.

Hundreds of Palestinians seeking food have been shot dead near GHF sites since the foundation began operations in May, health workers in the enclave have said.

Israeli forces are stationed close to the sites, and the country’s military said its troops had fired “warning shots” toward crowds of desperate Palestinians.

Huckabee said: “The president has been telling us he wants food into the hands of hungry people, but he wants it in a way that it doesn’t get into the hands of Hamas. That’s exactly what we did when we stood up GHF.”

He added that the foundation coordinated with the Israeli military but was not under its control, and that its results were “pretty phenomenal.” 

ALMATY: A popular Kazakh cleric opposed to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine said Thursday he was attempting to start a new church independent of Moscow, after the Russian Orthodox Church defrocked him over his criticism of the Kremlin.

The row has become another headache for Russia, which has already seen other former Soviet states cut ties with the Russian Orthodox church.

Vladimir Vorontsov, a former priest at the Moscow-governed Orthodox Church of Kazakhstan, was dismissed last year after describing the war in Ukraine as a fratricidal “sin” on social media. He also called for Kazakhstan to “fence itself off” from Russia.

Vorontsov said Thursday he was collecting signatures to start a new church outside of Moscow’s orbit which he would send to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the highest governing authority for the Orthodox Church outside of Moscow.

“I plan to send this letter next week,” he told AFP.

Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic of around 20 million, is a majority Muslim country but home to a sizeable Orthodox Christian minority — around three million people, most of them ethnic Russians.

The Orthodox Church in Kazakhstan, the country’s largest Christian church, is subordinate to the Russian Orthodox Church and its pro-Kremlin leader Patriarch Kirill.

The Kazakhstan branch of the Russian Orthodox Church said earlier this week that Vorontsov had been dismissed for “serious canonical crimes.”

It accused him of attempting to create an illegal, “schismatic” church to rival the Moscow-governed one.

“Any of his speeches on behalf of the Orthodox Church are illegal. He misleads people, cunningly posing as an Orthodox priest,” it said.

The Russian Orthodox Church has itself been in schism with the Patriarchate of Constantinople since 2018 over the latter’s decision to grant autonomy to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

Since Russia launched its Ukraine invasion, several former Soviet countries — including Lithuania and Estonia — have cut ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, officially known as the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Russian Orthodox Church last month reminded its subordinate members in Kazakhstan and Belarus to include “Russian Orthodox Church” or “Moscow Patriarchate” in their official titles.