The US state department announced on Saturday that it would stop issuing visas to children from Gaza in desperate need of medical care after an online pressure campaign from Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer close to Donald Trump who has described herself as “a proud Islamophobe”.
“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 state department said in a message posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Loomer was banned from before it was purchased by Elon Musk.
In a pair of posts on the social network on Friday, Loomer had shared video of badly injured Palestinian children and their family members arriving in Houston and San Francisco this month, along with 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 was copied from a medical aid charity’s public Instagram account and the other was 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 demanded to know “who at the US State Department under @marcorubio signed off on the visas for Palestinians from a HAMAS hot zone”.
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“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 anyone at the State Department give visas to individuals who live in Gaza, which is run by HAMAS?” Loomer wrote, before falsely stating that “95% of GAZANS voted for HAMAS.”
In fact, Hamas got 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.
After the visa program was halted, Loomer declared victory. “This is fantastic news,” she wrote in response to the state department announcement. “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!”
“If Laura Loomer had been around in 1940, she’d have been trying to prevent Jewish refugees from entering the US,” Paul Graham, co-founder of the Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, wrote on X after the halt on visas for wounded children was announced. “You know she would. And if Trump had been president then, she’d have succeeded.”
