The U.S. State Department announced Saturday that it will no longer issue visas to children from Gaza in need of urgent medical care, following an online pressure campaign led by Laura Loomer, a far-right activist with close ties to Donald Trump.
“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,” the department said in a statement on X.
The move came just a day after Loomer posted videos of severely injured Palestinian children and their families arriving in Houston and San Francisco for treatment. She falsely described their celebrations as “jihadi chants” and claimed they were performing “the HAMAS terror whistle.”
Loomer also misleadingly claimed she had “exclusively obtained” the footage though one clip came from a medical charity’s Instagram account and the other from the Houston Chronicle’s YouTube channel.
She went further, labeling the children including amputees seeking prosthetic legs as “Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone.” In her posts, Loomer demanded to know “who at the US State Department under @marcorubio signed off on the visas.”
The abrupt halt to Gaza medical visas has drawn sharp criticism from humanitarian advocates, who argue the U.S. is punishing vulnerable children based on disinformation spread online.
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