“A Final, Deadly Exclamation Point”: Biden Backs Down on 30-Day Israel Arms Ultimatum

On October 13, the Biden administration sent a strongly worded letter to Israel with a simple message: Allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza within 30 days, or we may pull away our military support.

At the time, Israel was in the early stages of its siege on northern Gaza, where thousands of civilians had been sheltering. The leaked letter, written by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and addressed to Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, outlined a list of concrete demands intended to ensure the flow of supplies into Gaza to address starvation, the lack of medical resources, and avoid the forced displacement of Palestinians out of northern Gaza.

When the deadline arrived 30 days later, on Tuesday, November 12, a group of humanitarian organizations published a report finding that Israel has failed to deliver on most, if not all, of the criteria outlined by the U.S in the October letter. In response, the U.S. said it will continue providing arms to Israel.

We at this time have not made assessments that the Israelis are in violation of U.S. law," State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters at a briefing on Tuesday. We are going to continue to assess their compliance with U.S. law. We've seen some progress being made, we'd like to see more changes happen."

For humanitarian aid groups who are doing work on the ground in Gaza, the State Department's position couldn't be further from reality.

A group of eight humanitarian organizations released a report Tuesday that tracked each of the letter's demands and how Israel is failing on all but several of them. The Gaza Scorecard" showed that within the past 30 days, Israel has failed to open any new border crossings into Gaza; only 42 trucks have been allowed per day, well short of the U.S. benchmark of 350 trucks; the Israeli military killed four aid workers; the military bombed a polio vaccine clinic during a humanitarian pause; about 80 percent of Gaza remains under evacuation orders, continuing the displacement of Palestinians; and aid groups have been prevented from entering northern Gaza where the Israeli military continues its siege.

How much more evidence does the U.S. government need?"

How much more evidence does the U.S. government need to respect its own laws and humanitarian standards?" Joseph Belliveau, executive director of MedGlobal, one of the groups behind the report, told The Intercept. It should end all military support today." This is only the latest instance of Israel crossing Biden's red lines with impunity.

MedGlobal has around 300 aid workers in Gaza, who are helping set up clinics, running surgery wards within hospitals, and providing other medical support, said Belliveau, who previously was director of Doctors Without Borders-Canada. He said their workers have reported high levels of malnutrition and the spread of preventable diseases, such as the measles, as well as respiratory tract infections among their patients in Gaza. Their medical workers conduct surgeries daily on civilians, mostly women and children, he said, who are wounded by Israeli attacks. Furthermore, four MedGlobal workers have been arrested by the Israeli military and remained in custody with no explanation.

How many ways can you die right now in Gaza?" Belliveau said. You can be hit by an airstrike, you can be targeted by snipers, you can die from disease, you can die from famine and malnutrition. And at the same time, not only are Palestinians exposed to all those risks in an extreme way, but the humanitarian and medical personnel that would be needed to even come close to trying to respond to this level of humanitarian need are almost completely shut out."

Scott Paul, director of peace and security at Oxfam America, which also helped compile the report, said that the Biden administration's decision to continue military support to Israel has put a final, deadly exclamation point on its policy of disregard for US law and the lives of Palestinians."

Now, as communities in North Gaza are erased and starved to death, Israel will receive a steady stream of US weapons with a newly furnished seal of approval," Paul said. We provided sound humanitarian evidence and it was ignored. This is an unsurprising but still disgraceful decision."

Related The State Department Says Israel Isn't Blocking Aid. Videos Show the Opposite.

This isn't the first time the Biden administration had threatened to use U.S. law to cut military support to Israel. In March, Israel signed on to a memo, known as NSM-20," which required the State and Defense departments to obtain credible assurances that Israel was not using U.S. weapons to violate international law. The administration has also pointed to the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S. assistance to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights."

However, in May, amid mounting evidence of Israel's attempts to block humanitarian aid into Gaza, the State Department released a report saying that it had deep concerns" about Israel, but that it had been following the law. The flow of arms continued.

Read our complete coverage

During the Tuesday press briefing, Patel said the State Department would continue to assess whether Israel is violating international law and would be consulting with aid groups and the United Nations to make those estimations. However, when reporters asked whether the State Department had seen the report from aid organizations, he declined to comment on the findings. Furthermore, figures from the U.N. bolster the report's findings, showing that October showed the lowest number of aid crossings into Gaza.

When we're talking about specific metrics or specific actions on the ground, the hope is that operational changes made on the ground would make it possible for an additional increase in humanitarian aid and trucks to get into places where it needs to go," Patel said, repeating the idea that the Israeli government has made progress" with measures such as waiving customs fees and allowing the Jordanian Armed Forces into Gaza to deliver aid.

Related Organizing Aid to Gaza Led Me to a Harsh Truth: Biden Is on Board for Ethnic Cleansing

The humanitarians groups' report credits the partial implementation of those measures but says obstacles remain: Some aid groups are charged fees to cross into Gaza, which is being unevenly enforced. Overall, the report found that Israel only partially or inconsistently met four of the 19 demands laid out in the October letter from Blinken and Austin, and had not met the remaining 15 demands at all.

Belliveau said MedGlobal has been in contact with senators and the Biden administration over the past year, pushing for application of the Leahy Law to no success. He said with the transition to a Donald Trump presidency, he sees an opening for his group to make another concerted effort to get the U.S. to comply with its own laws, but has little hope in the president-elect's desire to deliver.

Individually, we get a lot of sympathy for our position and a lot of recognition that laws are being violated and that these are not the standards that Americans want to uphold - and then in the public arena, we just continue to hear platitudes coming from the government and we continue to see the the actions that give no evidence that there's been any kind of restraints or pull back in terms of support to the regime that's committing these crimes," he said.

As the deadline passed on Tuesday, an Israeli strike hit a house in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing 32 people, including 13 children. Last week, the Israeli government announced that it is nearing the complete evacuation" of northern Gaza, and residents would not be allowed to return. Israeli Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen said when that evacuation takes place, humanitarian aid would no longer arrive in northern Gaza, since there are no more civilians left."

The post A Final, Deadly Exclamation Point": Biden Backs Down on 30-Day Israel Arms Ultimatum appeared first on The Intercept.