The US state department announced on Saturday that it would stop issuing visas to children from Gaza in desperate need of medical care following an online pressure campaign from Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer affiliated with Donald Trump, who identifies herself as “a proud Islamophobe”.
In a statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, the state department stated, “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.”
On the social network, Loomer had shared videos of badly injured Palestinian children and their family members arriving in Houston and San Francisco this month, alongside false claims that their shouts of joy were “jihadi chants” and that they were “doing the HAMAS terror whistle”.
Loomer also falsely claimed that she had “exclusively obtained” the two video clips she shared, one copied from a medical aid charity’s public Instagram account and the other from the Houston Chronicle’s YouTube channel.
After misrepresenting the children, including amputees arriving to get prosthetic legs, as “Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone”, Loomer questioned who at the US State Department under Marco Rubio signed off on the visas for Palestinians from a HAMAS hot zone.
Loomer further stated, “Is Rubio even aware of this?” She also wrote, “Why would anyone at the State Department give visas to individuals who live in Gaza, which is run by HAMAS?” falsely claiming that “95% of GAZANS voted for HAMAS”.
However, Hamas only garnered 44% 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.
Following the visa program halt, Loomer declared victory, asserting, “This is fantastic news. 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!”
In response to the halt on visas for wounded children, Paul Graham, co-founder of the Y Combinator startup incubator, tweeted, “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.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/16/gaza-children-visas-medical-care-laura-loomer
