The Israel Palestine war continues to roil the foreign aid sector, with Tunisian-Egyptian actor Hend Sabry announcing on X, formerly Twitter, Wednesday that she is resigning from her post as a goodwill ambassador for the World Food Programme.
“I reached out — in my capacity as Goodwill Ambassador — to make my voice heard at the highest level and to join my WFP colleagues in asking that the organization’s leadership use its weight, as it had successfully done previously, to strongly advocate and push for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Gaza Strip,” she wrote.
However, despite her faith that WFP would use its voice, Sabry wrote that “hunger and starvation have been used as weapons of war” and that the pause in fighting announced this week is “too little too late.”
WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain has been under increasing pressure from her own staff, some of whom wrote to the WFP ethics office over her participation in an awards ceremony honoring the people of Israel earlier this month, while failing to attend an event mourning Palestinian United Nations workers killed in the war.
McCain issued a statement, also on Wednesday, calling the “humanitarian pause” in Gaza an “important and welcome first step” but noting that “four days’ worth of aid will not make a meaningful difference in this ocean of need.”
“I call on leaders to use this pause as a pathway to de-escalation in an effort to end this horrific conflict,” McCain wrote.