FNZ drives deeper into loss
Financial statements filed to the Companies Office show a 2024 net loss of US$713.3 million ($1.19 billion) for the year to December 2024, a deterioration from a
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1News
4 hours ago
- 1News
Trump announces trade deal with Japan, lowers threatened tariff to 15%
President Donald Trump announced a trade framework with Japan on Tuesday, placing a 15% tax on goods imported from that nation. 'This Deal will create Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs — There has never been anything like it,' Trump posted on Truth Social, adding that the United States "will continue to always have a great relationship with the Country of Japan". The president said Japan would invest "at my direction" US$550 billion (NZ$914 billion) into the US and would "open" its economy to American autos and rice. The 15% tax on imported Japanese goods is a meaningful drop from the 25% rate that Trump, in a recent letter to Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, said would be levied starting August 1. Early Wednesday, Ishiba acknowledged the new trade agreement, saying it would benefit both sides and help them work together. With the announcement, Trump is seeking to tout his ability as a dealmaker — even as his tariffs, when initially announced in early April, led to a market panic and fears of slower growth that for the moment appear to have subsided. Key details remained unclear from his post, such as whether Japanese-built autos would face a higher 25% tariff that Trump imposed on the sector. ADVERTISEMENT But the framework fits a growing pattern for Trump, who is eager to portray the tariffs as win for the US. His administration says the revenues will help reduce the budget deficit and more factories will relocate to America to avoid the import taxes and cause trade imbalances to disappear. The wave of tariffs continues to be a source of uncertainty about whether it could lead to higher prices for consumers and businesses if companies simply pass along the costs. The problem was seen sharply Wednesday after General Motors reported a 35% drop in its net income during the second quarter as it warned that tariffs would hit its business in the months ahead, causing its stock to tumble. A staff member distributes an extra edition of the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reporting that President Donald Trump announced a trade framework with Japan (Source: Associated Press) As the August 1 deadline for the tariff rates in his letters to world leaders is approaching, Trump also announced a trade framework with the Philippines that would impose a tariff of 19% on its goods, while American-made products would face no import taxes. The president also reaffirmed his 19% tariffs on Indonesia. The US ran a US$69.4 billion (NZ$115 billion) trade imbalance on goods with Japan last year, according to the Census Bureau. America had a trade imbalance of US$17.9 billion (NZ$29 billion) with Indonesia and an imbalance of US$4.9 billion (NZ$8.1 billion) with the Philippines. Both nations are less affluent than the US and an imbalance means America imports more from those countries than it exports to them. The president is set to impose the broad tariffs listed in his recent letters to other world leaders on August 1, raising questions of whether there will be any breakthrough in talks with the European Union. At a Wednesday dinner, Trump said the EU would be in Washington on Thursday for trade talks. ADVERTISEMENT "We have Europe coming in tomorrow, the next day," Trump told guests. The President, earlier this month, sent a letter threatening the 27 member states in the EU with 30% taxes on their goods to be imposed starting on August 1. The Trump administration has a separate negotiating period with China that is currently set to run through August 12 as goods from that nation are taxed at an additional 30% baseline. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he would be in the Swedish capital of Stockholm next Monday and Tuesday to meet with his Chinese counterparts. Bessent said his goal is to shift the American economy away from consumption and to enable more consumer spending in the manufacturing-heavy Chinese economy. "President Trump is remaking the US into a manufacturing economy," Bessent said on the Fox Business Network show Mornings with Maria. "If we could do that together, we do more manufacturing, they do more consumption. That would be a home run for the global economy."
NZ Herald
13 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Embryo screening start-up Orchid Health raises ethical questions
Orchid, Siddiqui said in a tweet, is ushering in 'a generation that gets to be genetically blessed and avoid disease'. Right now, at US$2500 per embryo-screening on top of the average US$20,000 for a single cycle of IVF, Siddiqui's social network in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs is an ideal target market. These are the data-obsessed biohackers who buy smart rings and consume boutique services like annual full-body MRIs. They are comfortable with a brave new world of probabilistic, data-driven medical decision-making, and can afford the extra costs to give their children a genetic edge. Siddiqui, who intends to have four children using her own Orchid-screened embryos, advocates a bolder idea gaining ground in the tech world: that increasingly available and sophisticated fertility technologies will supplant sex as a preferred method of reproduction for everyone. SO INCREDIBLY PROUD to share 2 HUGE updates: 1) The first baby was born using @OrchidInc technology — and he's super cute 🥰 2) I tested my own embryos with Orchid — we got SO much information & l feel confident now 🚀 This is the future of how babies will be born! — Noor Siddiqui (@noor_siddiqui_) April 22, 2024 'Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies,' Siddiqui said in a video she shared on X. Soon, she suggests, it will be unremarkable for hopeful couples to choose their embryos by spreadsheet, as her current clients do, weighing, say, a propensity for heart disease that is 1.7 times the risk of the general population against a 2.7 score for schizophrenia. Zilis, the mother of four of Musk's at least 14 children, has been an Orchid client, according to two people close to the company, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. They said at least one of Musk and Zilis' offspring is an Orchid baby. Siddiqui declined to comment on that assertion, which was first reported by the Information, a tech industry news site, last summer. Musk and Zilis did not respond to requests for comment. Orchid represents a slice of a broader cultural movement in which powerful people in Washington and Silicon Valley are pushing the importance of producing offspring. Vice-President JD Vance, Musk and Siddiqui's early benefactor, the conservative billionaire investor Peter Thiel, have all repeatedly argued that falling birthrates threaten the future of industrialised nations and that people should have more children to counteract the decline – a viewpoint known as pronatalism. Julie Kang and Roshan George of San Francisco had Orchid undertake polygenic screening of 12 of their embryos; their baby, Astra Meridian, was born this spring. Photo / The Washington Post, Camille Cohen This growing movement, which is far from a monolith and has fierce debates within it, is giving a huge boost to a fertility industry already experiencing heightened demand. In February, the Trump White House issued an executive order pushing for expanded access to IVF. And while the loudest voices arguing that people should have more babies are on the right, there's broader political support for increasing access to fertility treatments: a new California law, set to go into effect next July, mandates that all large insurers cover IVF and other fertility services. In Silicon Valley, innovations that could make these services more affordable and accessible are coming, some of them backed by people concerned with population decline. Thiel has funded the egg-freezing robotics start-up TMRW, launched a US$200 million fund to bring fertility services to Asia and bankrolled a family planning app connected to a right-wing magazine. The investor, who is gay, has recently become a father to four children through IVF and surrogacy, according to people familiar with his family choices, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe personal relationships. Thiel declined, through a spokesperson, to comment. Siddiqui, who has already created 16 of her own embryos and plans to do more IVF rounds, says her company has an important role to play in advancing people's ability to have more children. She told the Post that being able to have a healthy child should be considered a basic human right, and she has hosted a podcast episode on Fighting the Fertility Crisis, a discussion about the causes of population decline. The extensive genetic screening Orchid provides, she said, can help more people have babies – by improving the IVF success rate and allaying parents' fears about future babies' health risks. 'I think everyone who wants to have a baby should be able to have one,' she said, adding that IVF and genetic testing should be made available and affordable for everyone. But Orchid doesn't just help people have children; it helps them shape their future children in dramatically new ways. And that has sparked controversy. Some critics see its polygenic scoring as veering towards a contemporary form of eugenics, enabling a world in which the rich leap even further ahead with super intelligence and superior health starting from birth. Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui says "everyone who wants to have a baby should be able to have one". Photo / Washington Post Musk, who has funded a population research institute at the University of Texas, wants to produce offspring with genes for superior intelligence, Zilis told one of Musk's biographers. The two people close to the company said Siddiqui has provided intelligence screenings in the past to couples on an ad hoc basis – including, one of them said, to Zilis and Musk. Orchid declined to comment on that and vociferously rejected any association with eugenics. Siddiqui said Orchid helps prospective parents who would otherwise fear having children because of potential genetic disorders. IVF was controversial when it began in the 1970s, she said; protesters showed up with 'pitchforks' at the offices of the scientists pioneering the breakthrough and tried 'to put them in jail' for playing God. If they had prevailed, she added, '12 million people wouldn't exist today'. Orchid screens for intellectual disability but does not provide intelligence predictions, Siddiqui said. A growing number of start-ups do, however. One of them is the Thiel-funded start-up Nucleus; another is Heliospect Genomics, the research arm of Herasight, an executive of which is a bioethicist who advocates 'liberal eugenics' – casting that term as applying not to governmental efforts to weed out undesirable births but instead to parents' use of emerging biological tools to enhance their children's prospects. Until last month, Orchid's website featured advice from that bioethicist, Jonathan Anomaly, on overcoming scepticism about its service. 'We intentionally alter our environments, breed crops so that they're more nutritious and easier to harvest, and we've invented lightning rods and vaccines to make us less likely to die from natural disasters,' he wrote. 'I find the playing God objection a bit tiresome.' Orchid removed the page after the Post asked about it. Anomaly said he now prefers the term 'genetic enhancement' to 'eugenics'. Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Thiel's Founders Fund who has invested in Nucleus, made a similar argument. 'When you choose your married partner, you're using a form of eugenics,' he said. 'When your kids are older, you invest in tutors and great schools. What's the harm in using a tool that allows you to amplify that type of effect?' 'Russian roulette' or a jet to the future? In the United States, there are virtually no restrictions on the types of genetic predictions companies can offer, and no external vetting of their proprietary scoring methods. Orchid and a handful of other start-ups offering polygenic risk scores are barrelling forward in this largely unregulated milieu. The first Orchid baby was born in late 2023, and Orchid is now in 100 IVF clinics in the US – more than twice as many as a year ago. (The company won't say how many babies have been born using its service.) Nucleus launched its screenings, which test embryos for more than 900 heritable traits and conditions, last month. Yet several genetic scientists told the Post they doubt Orchid's core claim: that it can accurately sequence an entire human genome from just five cells collected from an early-stage embryo, enabling it to see many more single- and multiple-gene-derived disorders than other methods have. Experts have struggled to extract accurate genetic information from small embryonic samples, said Svetlana Yatsenko, a Stanford University pathology professor who specialises in clinical and research genetics. Genetic tests that use saliva or blood samples typically collect hundreds of thousands of cells. For its vastly smaller samples, Orchid uses a process called amplification, which creates copies of the DNA retrieved from the embryo. That process, Yatsenko said, can introduce major inaccuracies. 'You're making many, many mistakes in the amplification,' she said, rendering it problematic to declare any embryo free of a particular disease, or positive for one. 'It's basically Russian roulette.' George Church, a genomic sequencing pioneer at Harvard University and an Orchid investor, harbours no such doubts. Questioning the advancement that enables Orchid to sequence the full genome from such a small sample – enabling long-term health predictions and near-term defect detections in an embryo – is 'like asking how much faster is a jet than walking,' Church said. Relying on a small number of cells is not the technology's only shortcoming, other experts said. Numerous fertility doctors and scientists also told the Post they have serious reservations about screening embryos through polygenic risk scoring, the technique that allows Orchid and other companies to predict future disease by tying clusters of hundreds or even thousands of genes to disease outcomes and in some cases to other traits, such as intelligence and height. The vast majority of diseases that afflict humans are associated with many different genes rather than a single gene. These algorithmic scoring methods are increasingly accepted by scientific and medical experts because they have shown promise in predicting the occurrence in a general population of a growing number of common ailments, including coronary artery disease, type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease and breast cancer. Researchers and clinicians hope that such complex genetic predictions will come to significantly enhance the quality of medical care. But the genetic code reflects only propensities: much is still unknown about how constellations of genes and gene variants interact with an individual's environment and with one another to contribute to the likelihood of any individual getting a disease in life. And for traits such as intelligence, polygenic scoring has almost negligible predictive capacity – just a handful of IQ points. Critics say such scoring could compel couples who have struggled with fertility issues to discard perfectly good and hard-won embryos based on inaccurate or incomplete information. A 2024 paper raised concerns that the scores could encourage couples to unnecessarily incur the cost and physical burden of additional rounds of IVF. Or parents might select against an unwanted trait, such as schizophrenia, without understanding how they may be screening out desired traits associated with the same genes, such as creativity. 'Maybe we don't want to screen those people out of our society,' said Lior Pachter, a computational biologist specialising in genomics at the California Institute of Technology. Embryos are tested for viability in IVF labs. Photo / Getty Images In response to questions from The Post, an Orchid spokeswoman, Tara Harandi-Zadeh, said the company explicitly counsels patients not to throw away embryos. Company executives also downplayed the value of Orchid's polygenic scores, which one described in an interview as merely an 'add-on' benefit of the full-genome sequencing the company provides. The primary benefit of its service, she said, is the ability to detect many more single-gene-derived diseases and non-hereditary mutations than a standard genetic test conducted in an IVF clinic. 'Hundreds of serious monogenic diseases – each with well-established genetic causes – can now be detected before implantation,' Harandi-Zadeh said in a statement. 'These aren't vague risks or statistical associations; they're clear, causal mutations that lead to profound outcomes: seizures, organ failure, inability to walk or speak, early death. These are missed without comprehensive whole genome embryo screening.' Orchid's marketing materials and Siddiqui's own descriptions have repeatedly showcased polygenic disease screening, however. 'The parents and their physician get much more information' from polygenic scoring, Siddiqui said in a 2023 video. 'They get information about neurodevelopmental disorders, birth defects, pediatric hereditary cancers, complex conditions, meaning conditions where it's not just a single gene, but dozens, hundreds, to millions of genes that contribute risk.' Three-month-old Astra Meridian plays at home with her parents, Julie Kang and Roshan George, who used Orchid for a full genome screening of 12 embryos and selected one that didn't have a hearing-loss gene they both carried. Photo / The Washington Post, Camille Cohen The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics calls the benefits of screening embryos for polygenic risks 'unproven' and warns that such tests 'should not be offered' by clinicians. A pioneer of polygenic risk scores, Harvard epidemiology professor Peter Kraft, has criticised Orchid, saying on X that 'the science doesn't add up' and that 'waving a magic wand and changing some of these variants at birth may not do anything at all'. Still, many of those same experts say the scientific evidence supporting the validity of polygenic scoring methods is only getting better and already making its way into clinical use for adults. Consumer attitudes are liable to change, too. Asparouhov, the investor, said he was still critical of embryo selection based on polygenic scores. 'Right now it's a false choice,' he said. 'But in the future, it's the trust fund.' 'A license to do things' The availability and power of consumer genetic tests have exploded in the past six to 10 years, powered by far cheaper human genome sequencing and large public and private biobanks that store genetic data from hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Researchers have used that data to explore connections between genes and population-wide disease outcomes, in what are known as genome-wide association studies, or GWAS. An influential 2018 paper in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Genetics showed that groups of genes could be analysed to identify people at significantly increased risk for five common ailments, including coronary artery disease, type 2 diabetes and breast cancer. That paper and others opened up the possibility for clinicians to give people specific medical advice and treatments based on their genetic propensity. Siddiqui founded Orchid the following year. She had moved to Silicon Valley from Northern Virginia after winning, in 2012, a $100,000 grant from Thiel for aspiring entrepreneurs willing to ditch college to pursue a business idea. Forgoing a university education was anathema to her Pakistani immigrant parents, she has said, so she applied in secret as a high school senior. Siddiqui's parents eventually came around, and she credits her mother with being the impetus for Orchid. When Siddiqui was a child, her mother developed retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease caused by a rare genetic mutation. Siddiqui became acutely aware that some people were 'genetically privileged' – while others were not, like her mum, who was functionally blind. 'For people who haven't had that type of tragedy hit them or their family, it's really hard for them to relate,' she said. In a later stint at Stanford, where she completed degrees in computer science, Siddiqui became fascinated by the way data science was transforming biology, creating new potential applications for reproduction. She also became steeped in a close-knit milieu of self-described builders who looked up to Thiel. Her husband is a cybersecurity entrepreneur she met while a Thiel fellow; a friend, Laura Deming, who was in Siddiqui's Thiel Fellowship class, has been working on age-reversing technologies since she was a teenager. One of Siddiqui's early investors, billionaire Brian Armstrong, the right-leaning CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, said he invested after seeing a tweet about a class she was teaching at Stanford, called 'Frontiers of Reproductive Technology'. He has tweeted that preimplantation genetic testing is part of a 'Gattaca stack' – a reference to a 1997 dystopian science fiction film – of emerging innovations that will 'accelerate civilisational progress'. Had she not come to Silicon Valley at an early age, Siddiqui said, she would never have had the confidence to start a company. 'Everyone here took me incredibly seriously as a 17-, 18-year-old, working on medical start-ups,' she said in an interview next to San Francisco's Ferry Building. 'It's just a place where everyone has a licence to do things.' Noor Siddiqui at 18 in her home in Clifton, Virginia, in 2012, after she won a Thiel Fellowship enabling her to pursue a project of her own design before going to college. Photo / The Washington Post, Ricky Carioti Securing early funding from Armstrong, ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, bitcoin and genetics entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, 23&me founder Anne Wojcicki, and others, Siddiqui got to work combing through scientific literature to build the company's proprietary polygenic scoring methods. In 2022, Orchid had what it describes as its big breakthrough: an innovation that enabled it to sequence all 3 billion base pairs of the human genome from as few as five embryonic cells. But the paper laying out that breakthrough, published last year in the peer-reviewed journal F&S Reports, is fundamentally flawed, according to Stanford's Yatsenko and Aleks Rajkovic, chief genomics officer at the University of California at San Francisco Health Center for Clinical Genetics and Genomics. It excluded results that didn't fit its thesis, Yatsenko said, and both scientists said that by using Orchid's own lab to check those results, its authors didn't adhere to ideal scientific practice. Orchid said that the paper's findings had been verified by independent labs and that there were 'zero discrepancies' in the results. Todd Lencz, the leader of a federally funded research project examining polygenic embryo screening, said the science isn't clear enough for use in a clinic. Subtle differences among different companies' algorithms 'can produce strikingly different results in clinical contexts,' said Lencz, a professor at Hofstra University's Zucker School of Medicine. 'There's no gold-standard consensus about which method is best.' Orchid countered that slight differences in algorithms' results are no argument for preventing people from benefiting from the best scientific knowledge available. Another big issue facing Orchid and other start-ups is that polygenic scores can be up to half as accurate, according to some researchers, for some people with non-European ancestry. The primary pools of genetic data available to researchers come from European and American sources, especially the UK Biobank, a large database in the United Kingdom that includes the genetic data of a half-million people. Siddiqui told The Post that Orchid is well aware of the potential for bias, noting that she is South Asian and her husband has Middle Eastern ancestry. She said the company uses standard statistical methods to correct for limitations in the scores. In some circumstances, she said, Orchid does not offer any score. The data used to create risk scores draws on the genetics of people who are now adults and often elderly, and it's unclear how much the risks faced by people now in their 70s apply to babies being born today, said Patrick Turley, a statistical-genetics researcher at the University of Southern California. Environmental factors that affect the genes of present-day embryos in-vitro, such as microplastics and endocrine-disrupting chemicals, are different from environmental factors many years ago, he added. And lifestyle and behaviour, which also impact genes and life outcomes, are different today than for generations past. 'It's hard to make projections about how well [polygenic scores] are going to predict in the future when the world's a different place,' Turley said, while emphasising that genetic embryo selection could benefit certain couples, such as those who are carriers of rare diseases. Orchid said research has shown that genetic predispositions are 'remarkably stable' across decades. 'Genetic signal doesn't vanish just because the world changes,' spokeswoman Harandi-Zadeh said. Pachter, the Caltech computational biologist, has called Orchid's offerings 'amoral nonsense' and said conveying genetic information in numerical scores gives a certain 'class of people' the illusion of more control than they really have, and validates the feeling that 'one's own genome must be special'. Orchid rejected Pachter's criticism, too. 'It's easy to moralise from an ivory tower when your child isn't the one who might be born with a fatal disease,' Harandi-Zadeh said. 'This isn't about 'some illusion of control.' It's about giving families the ability to prevent real suffering based on the most accurate information modern science can provide.' Seeking 'peace of mind' Roshan George, a start-up executive in San Francisco, said that when he and his wife, Julie Kang, used Orchid last year, the company's genetic counsellors gave detailed explanations about the probabilities of different predictions, emphasising that 'nothing is 100 percent certain'. The couple sought out Orchid after learning, during a standard parental genetic screening process at their IVF clinic, that both were carriers of a rare genetic mutation that causes irreversible hearing loss soon after the child is born. Julie Kang and Roshan George with their 3-month-old baby, Astra Meridian, in their home in San Francisco in late May. Photo / The Washington Post, Camille Cohen The couple's main concern was whether they were passing the hearing loss variant on to their embryo. Though they probably could have found out by screening the embryos at an IVF clinic through standard processes, which amplify a snippet of the genome, George sought out full genome screening for 'a more complete picture' and 'peace of mind,' he said. George and Kang produced 12 embryos and used Orchid to screen all of them – a cost of $30,000 on top of IVF. Six were viable. Two had the hearing loss gene variant. Another two were carriers, which meant they could pass the gene on to their children but wouldn't be affected themselves. And two, called embryos JK3 and 6-JK in Orchid's report, were unaffected. The couple pored over their spreadsheets, debating which of the two to select. One embryo had a 1.5% lifetime risk of bipolar disorder, about half that of the general population. But its type 2 diabetes risk – 29% – was slightly above average, about 1.2 times that of a typical person. Another had a slightly higher risk of obesity. Given his and Kang's ethnicities – South and East Asian, respectively – George took the predictions with 'a grain of salt'. After weighing all the other factors, the polygenic scoring became 'the tiebreaker,' George said. Kang gave birth in March; so far, their daughter, Astra Meridian, has perfect hearing. Julie Kang and Roshan George play with their baby in their home in San Francisco. Photo / The Washington Post, Camille Cohen The family's experience is likely to be a window into the future, scientists said, in which an abundance of data offers families improved odds for healthy children and fraught reproductive choices. If families seek that information, the medical industry shouldn't be 'paternalistic' and deny them, UCSF's Rajkovic said, but companies have to be careful not to promise more certainty than science can deliver. Orchid's offerings are 'not ready for prime time,' according to Rajkovic. But the premise the company is pursuing – better odds for healthy babies – is 'commendable in terms of pushing the barriers,' he said. 'Because genetic disease can be devastating.' Nitasha Tiku contributed to this report.
NZ Herald
17 hours ago
- NZ Herald
According to UN data, hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza have been shot dead while seeking food
In recent weeks, it has emerged as a final sticking point in negotiations over a ceasefire, placing the Israeli- and United States-backed GHF squarely in the crosshairs of the latest talks. Hamas is demanding a return to the United Nations-co-ordinated system of aid delivery that operated in Gaza for decades. Israel charges that Hamas has corrupted that system. It wants to maintain strict controls on assistance to Gazans, using the newly created GHF as the primary mechanism for food distribution. Critics, including the UN and most of the international humanitarian aid community, say the GHF is designed to further Israeli war aims by selectively and inadequately providing assistance, and by forcing Gazans to put their lives in danger for a box of provisions. In a statement released yesterday, 21 European countries and others including New Zealand, Canada, and Australia issued a joint statement saying that 'the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths'. It condemned 'the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food'. 'The Israeli Government's aid delivery model,' it said, 'is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity.' Like much of what happens inside Gaza, where Israel has banned international reporters except on brief tours led by the Israel Defence Forces, the origins and operations of the GHF remain obscure. Even more opaque is its funding. The foundation says it received about US$100 million in start-up money from a government it has declined to identify. In late June, the Trump Administration said it would supply US$30m to GHF operations. A major donation initially expected from the United Arab Emirates, according to internal planning documents seen by the Washington Post, has not materialised. The Government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has been deeply involved in the aid programme, has publicly denied paying for it. But behind the foundation, which is a registered non-profit, is a web of interconnected US and Israeli individuals, and private US companies - including some that hope to eventually make money on the relief effort, according to public and private documents reviewed by the Washington Post and interviews with more than a dozen US and Israeli government officials, business representatives and others involved, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Among those positioned to profit from GHF-linked contracts are a Chicago-based private equity firm, McNally Capital, whose subsidiary Orbis Operations helped set up the foundation; and Safe Reach Solutions, the primary contractor overseeing GHF operations inside Gaza, which was created late last year for that purpose. SRS is owned by a Wyoming-based trust whose beneficiary is McNally Capital. Boston Consulting Group was also engaged in the effort to stand up the GHF, on what it has said was a pro bono basis. In March, it signed a two-month contract for more than US$1m with McNally to continue assisting SRS, with later extensions in May, an arrangement first reported by the Financial Times. BCG later withdrew from the project amid controversy, and a BCG spokeswoman, Nidhi Sinha, said no payment was accepted. The GHF has continued to deliver food to hungry Gazans: since late May, according to the foundation's count, more than 80 million meals in boxes that are calibrated to feed 5.5 people for 3.5 days. Dwindling resources have limited the number of trucks available to bring food into the enclave to about 70 to 80 per day, compared with early plans for more than 300, according to people familiar with GHF operations. Construction of additional distribution sites has also been indefinitely put off because of a lack of financing, ongoing Israeli military operations, and the need to remove unexploded ordnance throughout Gaza. Money problems, and the unknown outcome of ceasefire negotiations, have also put on hold GHF plans for a more holistic - and controversial - proposal to relocate Gazans, summarised in a 19-page slide deck distributed at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv in January, several people said. In addition to the food distribution, the slides included plans for GHF construction of large-scale residential compounds inside and potentially outside Gaza where 'the population' could reside while the enclave was 'demilitarised and rebuilt'. The slide deck suggested that approach would allow the GHF to gain trust with Gazans - a currency that could be leveraged to 'facilitate President Trump's vision' for the battle-scarred enclave. Bodies of Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike on civilians waiting for aid in the western part of Rafah on July 19. Photo / Getty Images Aid 'in a non-UN way' The GHF concept was born as part of a larger effort by a group of Israeli military officials, Israeli businesspeople and foreign partners to support Israel's war effort and plan for Gaza's future. They began meeting shortly after the conflict began with Hamas' October 7, 2023, surprise attack in southern Israel, which killed about 1200 people and saw at least 250 hostages taken back to Gaza. As Israel responded to the attack, pounding Gaza with airstrikes and ground troops, it cut off the daily assistance that the 365sqkm enclave had depended on for decades. Netanyahu's Government - long distrustful of the UN, which co-ordinated deliveries of food, fuel and medical supplies - justified the blockade by claiming that Hamas controlled and profited from the aid distribution. Under pressure from the Biden Administration and humanitarian organisations that said depriving non-combatants of food was a potential war crime, Israel eventually allowed limited relief to resume. But the Israelis kept a tight hold on the spigot of assistance, generating friction between Netanyahu and the US Government, Israel's main source of weaponry and diplomatic backing. 'There was a need to get humanitarian aid into Gaza,' an Israeli familiar with the group's efforts said, but it needed to be done 'in a non-UN way'. In January 2024, the fledgling Gaza aid working group sought advice from Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret, CIA veteran and undersecretary of defence for intelligence during the Obama Administration. Vickers was on the board of Orbis Operations, a consulting company based in McLean, Virginia, that was founded by former national security, military, and intelligence specialists and which McNally purchased in 2021. Vickers told the planners, 'I'm not the guy, but I know the guy who can talk to you', according to a person familiar with the approach. The man they wanted, Vickers said, was then-Orbis vice-president Philip Reilly, a former senior CIA operations officer with extensive experience in private security operations. Reilly quickly gained the trust of the IDF and the Gaza planning group, and spent much of 2024 immersing himself in the details of the Gaza conflict. Neither Vickers nor Reilly responded to queries about their involvement in the Gaza initiative. The Biden Administration was well aware that the Israeli Government and private-sector Israelis and Americans were working with the Government on a plan to impose a new aid delivery system. While some in the Administration were supportive, most were sceptical. But they did not directly interfere in the project. 'They were all talking - they being the Israeli Government, the prime minister's office, the IDF - sort of throwing spaghetti against the wall to find some magic formula to take the responsibility off their shoulders' to care for Gaza's civilians, a former Biden official involved in Israel policy said. Ambitions and incorporations By the northern autumn, the outline of a plan was laid out in a lengthy feasibility study compiled by Silat Technologies, an Orbis subsidiary, envisioning the creation of a non-profit entity, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, 'to safely deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza'. Planning documents distributed over the next several months said that the foundation's leadership should include respected humanitarian figures such as David Beasley, former head of the World Food Programme, and Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister who now runs an institute to advise change-making political leaders. Although the UN and major non-governmental aid organisations already operating in Gaza were described as an integral part, their proposed role was unclear. An elaborate social media presence and public relations programme would include outreach to select journalists to promote a positive image of the GHF. The foundation would hire a 'prime' contractor to organise and supervise construction of the sites and the aid operation inside Gaza. That firm would then subcontract a private security company - ideally US-based - to be the boots and guns on the ground, guarding the aid as it was transported to distribution sites and protecting the sites themselves. The private companies lined up to service the planned foundation also included BCG, where both Reilly and Vickers were senior advisers. BCG, which later said its initial services were offered pro bono, projected US$2b in initial operating costs for the GHF. On November 21, a new limited liability company, Safe Reach Solutions, was registered in Jackson, Wyoming, and placed in a trust administered by a local company, Two Ocean Trust. While no information in the registration documents indicated what the new company did, who ran it or whom it employed, the beneficiary of the trust and any money it made, according to three people familiar with the arrangement, was McNally Capital, the private equity firm that owns Orbis. SRS, with Reilly as its chief executive, would later become the primary GHF contractor. Spokespeople for Two Ocean Trust and SRS declined to comment. In a statement to the Washington Post, McNally Capital said it 'did not invest in SRS or actively manage the company', but said it has an 'economic interest' in the firm. 'Given our long-established relationship with Phil Reilly … our strong belief in the importance of humanitarian aid, and the US Government's appeal for innovative solutions,' the statement said, McNally was 'pleased to have supported the establishment of SRS as an important step toward meeting the full scope of humanitarian need in Gaza'. Founded in 2008 by Ward McNally, of the Rand McNally publishing family, the firm specialises in the acquisition of aerospace, defence, and technology companies. 'Obviously, McNally is a business. They're in the business of making money,' a person familiar with the financial aspects of the project said. But 'I think it's very ambiguous whether this ends up being profitable'. A checkpoint test run As the new year approached, progress toward the food aid programme planning was interrupted by the prospect of a Gaza ceasefire and partial hostage release. Israel had agreed to move its troops out of portions of Gaza at least temporarily - allowing citizens to return to what remained of their homes in the largely destroyed northern portion of the enclave. But Israeli officials insisted on a vehicle checkpoint - run by non-IDF security - on the Netzarim Corridor, a dividing line between northern and southern Gaza, to ensure weapons were not carried back to areas the IDF said it had earlier cleared of Hamas militants. With nine days' notice, US and Arab mediators turned to the newly created SRS to organise the checkpoint. Reilly subcontracted UG Solutions, a small security firm based in North Carolina, to staff the ground operation. Headed by former Green Beret Jameson Govoni, UG had previously worked in Ukraine and Haiti, among other hot spots, and could move quickly because it had few of the classified contracts with the US or other governments that proved to be complications for bigger security companies. The ceasefire mediators - the US and Qatar - administered payments to SRS, the prime contractor, according to people familiar with the operation. The ceasefire began on January 19, the day before Donald Trump's second-term inauguration. Although the truce lasted only until mid-March, when Israel launched another ground invasion of northern Gaza, the checkpoint was deemed a success, with no major incidents reported. The Netzarim operation came to be considered a test run for the food distribution operation, and SRS and UG were well positioned to take it over for GHF. On February 2, the foundation was registered as a humanitarian non-profit in Switzerland and Delaware. The Netanyahu Government had every reason to believe that Trump would support the initiative. He vowed to quickly end the war and proposed that the US 'take over' and 'own' Gaza, developing it as a high-end Mediterranean resort. Food distribution by the GHF, planning documents indicated, was just the first step in a larger redevelopment plan. Palestinians line up to receive a hot meal at a distribution point in the Al-Rimal neighbourhood in Gaza City on May 21. Photo / AFP A rocky launch When the ceasefire collapsed on March 18 and the IDF resumed ground operations and airstrikes, Israel again stopped all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. As the days and weeks ticked on, thousands of tonnes of food and goods piled up in warehouses outside its borders; WFP and other humanitarian actors began to tally reports of starvation inside. By early May, Israel was under mounting international pressure to end its aid blockade, and Trump was looking for progress on his promise to end the war as he prepared for a trip to the Gulf. At a May 9 news conference in Tel Aviv, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee claimed the GHF as a Trump 'initiative'. US representatives, including Aryeh Lightstone, an official who now works with Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff and formerly served as an aide to David Friedman when he was US ambassador to Israel, courted UN and humanitarian partners to sign on to the plan. But opposition to the plan had grown. The UN and most aid partners refused, publicly denouncing the proposal as immoral and designed to further Israel's war plans against Hamas by 'militarising' assistance to more than a million civilians corralled into ever-shrinking 'safe zones' demarcated by the IDF in southern Gaza. Neither Beasley nor Blair agreed to sign on. On May 22, newly named GHF executive director Jake Wood, a US Marine veteran and co-founding board chair of Team Rubicon, a humanitarian organisation that operated in disaster zones, released a letter he had sent to COGAT, the Israeli Government co-ordinator for Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Its purpose, he wrote, was to confirm 'our understandings of agreements' - including an understanding that aid agencies would also be permitted to distribute food and medical assistance under 'existing' humanitarian mechanisms, outside the GHF programme. 'GHF acknowledges that we do not possess the technical capacity or field infrastructure to manage such distributions independently,' he wrote, suggesting that the new aid mechanism should complement, but not replace, Gaza's existing aid sector. The night before the scheduled May 26 launch, Wood unsuccessfully sought to persuade the IDF to delay the start date by at least a week amid unanswered questions about funding, the participation of other agencies and the nearby positioning of Israeli troops. Wood resigned, and the next day, UG contractors accompanied the first convoys of GHF food into Gaza. Some of the plans, he said in a statement, were not consistent with 'humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence'. David Burke, a fellow Marine veteran and former Team Rubicon colleague who had been named GHF chief operating officer, also resigned. Burke and Wood did not respond to inquiries from the Washington Post. The GHF promoted John Acree, a former official with the US Agency for International Development originally named head of the GHF operations inside Gaza, to interim executive director of the foundation. The opening of the sites brought new problems, with tens of thousands of despairing Gazans surging towards promised food. In the first week of GHF's operations, witnesses said that Israeli troops shot in the direction of Palestinians queuing outside the fenced distribution sites at least three times. UG contractors voiced concerns about the rules of engagement of nearby IDF troops and the safety of the Palestinians, according to several people familiar with the site operations. Paid Palestinian volunteers working at the GHF sites were receiving death threats from Hamas for participating in the Israeli-backed plan. Volunteers were afraid to travel back to their families at night, but the financial planners had not budgeted to provide them with housing, running water or other supplies to stay on-site, one person said. 'There were number crunchers at every stage, asking why do we have to do this stuff,' said another person familiar with the conversations between BCG financial consultants and SRS planners. Contractors purchased some provisions for the workers out of their own pockets, the person said. The limited number of trucks that passed through the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza each day to the sites after Israeli inspection meant that supplies ran out too early, leaving thousands empty-handed, angry, and disbelieving there was no more food to be had. On May 30, BCG abruptly withdrew from the project. Amid what several people familiar with the situation said was internal criticism of perceived anti-Palestinian initiatives, the company said that members of its team had undertaken 'unauthorised' efforts on post-war planning. Two senior partners, it said in a statement, had been 'exited ... from the firm' and BCG 'has not and will not be paid for any of their work.' The end game Despite ongoing problems and frequent reports of gunfire nearby, the GHF food programme achieved a rhythm of sorts after a few weeks. News releases provided a daily accounting of tens of thousands of boxes of pasta, lentils, cooking oil and other commodities it distributed. But the killing of civilians in the vicinity of GHF sites has continued. Last month, eight Palestinian volunteers were shot and killed, allegedly by Hamas, aboard a bus returning them to GHF sites after visiting their families. Early this month, this IDF said 'terrorists' had tossed grenades into a distribution site, injuring two American contractors. Then came the deaths in last Wednesday's stampede. 'We came to Gaza to help feed people, not to fight a narrative war,' GHF spokesman Chapin Fay told reporters hours after the stampede deaths, publicly accusing Hamas of causing the carnage by showing up at the site with guns. Aid organisations said it was the predicted result of Israeli militarisation of what should be a neutral endeavour. On Sunday local time, at least 79 Palestinians were killed when food-seeking crowds mobbed a UN aid convoy in the northern part of the enclave and were fired on by Israeli troops, according to Gaza health authorities and witnesses. The IDF said it was 'aware of the claim' and that details of the event were 'being examined'. Acree, the GHF interim executive director, repeated appeals to the UN and other aid organisations to co-operate with the foundation. 'The demand for food is relentless, and so is our commitment,' he said in a statement. 'We're adjusting our operations in real time to keep people safe and informed, and we stand ready to partner with other organisations to scale up and deliver more meals to the people of Gaza.' GHF contracts expire at the end of August, unless a ceasefire comes first. If and when the fighting stops, it remains unclear how much aid will be allowed into Gaza and who will distribute it. Since late June, Trump has said repeatedly that negotiations were going well and that a truce was imminent.
