Biden Backs Down on 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 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.

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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.”

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.