The US State Department announced on Saturday that it would cease to deliver visas to Gaza children in a desperate need for medical care after an online pressure campaign of Laura Loomer, an far -right influencer close to Donald Trump who described himself as “a proud Islamophobic”.
“All visitors’ visas for Gaza people are stopped while we carry out a complete and in-depth examination of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of humanitarian medical visas in recent days,” said the State Department in a message published on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which was prohibited before it was purchased by Elon Musk.
On Friday, in a pair of messages on the social network, Loomer had shared a video of seriously injured Palestinian children and their family members arriving in Houston and San Francisco this month, as well as false claims that their cries of joy were “jihadist songs” and that they “made the terrorist clearer of Hamas”.
Loomer also claimed that she had “exclusively obtained” the two video clips she had shared. One was copied from the public Instagram account of a medical charity and the other came from the Houston Chronicle Youtube channel.
After having distorted children, including amputees that arrive to obtain prosthetic legs, because “Islamic invaders of an Islamic terrorist area”, Loomer asked “who to the American State Department under @marcorubio signed the visas for Palestinians in a hot area of Hamas”.
“Is Rubio even aware of this?” Loomer wrote, in reference to the Secretary of State who was at the time in Alaska meeting Vladimir Putin.
“Why would someone in the State Department give visas to people who live in Gaza, who is led by Hamas?” Loomer wrote, before wrongly declaring that “95% of the Gazans voted for Hamas”.
In fact, Hamas obtained 44% of the votes from the part of the parties in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections in Gaza and in the West Bank, and lost three of the five Gaza districts to the Fatah Secular Party.
After stopping the Visa program, Loomer declared the victory. “This is a fantastic news,” she wrote in response to the announcement of the State Department. “I hope all the Gazans will be added to President Trump’s travel ban. There are doctors in other countries. The United States is not the world hospital!”
“If Laura Loopomer was there in 1940, she would have tried to prevent Jewish refugees from entering the United States,” wrote Paul Graham, co-founder of Silicon Valley’s startup incubator, Y Combinator, wrote on X after the visas for injured children. “You know she would do it. And if Trump had been president then she would have succeeded.”
