Opinion

What Biden must do to help Gaza now

The outgoing administration has one last chance to do the right thing

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Stacy Gilbert
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What Biden must do to help Gaza now

Stacy Gilbert
last update on

On 13 October, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent an extraordinary letter to their Israeli counterparts. It outlined how Israel is impeding humanitarian assistance in Gaza and demanded that the country take concrete steps to alleviate the crisis in 30 days or risk losing US military aid.

The deadline has passed, and much has changed since that letter was sent: Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States; Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, one of the letter’s recipients, has been sacked; and Israel’s parliament has passed two laws to stop the essential work of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza and the West Bank.

What has not changed is that the Israeli government continues to arbitrarily impede lifesaving aid from reaching Palestinians in desperate need and uses US weapons to cause indiscriminate death and destruction across Gaza. But in the final weeks of his term, US President Joe Biden has a unique opportunity to rectify this. Instead of continuing to defend Israel’s execution of the war, his administration should simply acknowledge the facts: Israel continues to block humanitarian assistance and, therefore, according to US law, cannot receive US weapons.

Despite repeatedly claiming otherwise, Israeli authorities have hindered every aspect of the complex humanitarian mission in Gaza since the war began more than a year ago. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has documented clear signs of this: trucks stuck at the border; limited crossing points and ports; restricted operating times; delayed authorisation for truck drivers, medical staff, and aid workers; and a confounding array of bureaucratic impediments, such as the ever-changing list of items Israel considers potential weapons, from flashlights to surgical scissors.

Meanwhile, nearly the entire population of Gaza has been forcibly displaced. Every quantifiable indicator of health, nutrition, water, sanitation, shelter, protection, and access to aid has plummeted below what is usually seen in conflicts. And aid organisations are at the mercy of Israel’s haphazard system, whereby they must notify the Israeli military of their locations to avoid being targeted in a military operation. The result is that more than 300 aid workers have been killed—the highest number ever recorded in a single crisis.

On Tuesday, eight humanitarian organisations with operations in Gaza released a scorecard grading Israel’s compliance with the changes requested in the 13 October letter. They concluded that Israel not only failed to meet almost all the requirements in the letter but also took additional actions that dramatically worsened the humanitarian situation, particularly in northern Gaza.

Halting the delivery of US weapons to Israel now may be overturned by the next administration, but it would be a brave return to US law, however brief

Take, for example, the oft-discussed metric of the number of trucks allowed to enter Gaza. The letter required that Israel allow a minimum of 350 trucks to enter Gaza daily, but the scorecard found that in the 30 days since then, only an average of 42 trucks had entered each day. On some days, that number was as low as six trucks. Even State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said that from 1-9 November, Israel allowed only 404 trucks total into Gaza over the whole nine-day period.

A manufactured apocolypse

As a result, conditions in Gaza are even worse today than when Blinken and Austin sent their letter. In the last 30 days, around 1,400 people there have been killed, including in a 29 October air strike on a five-story residential building in Beit Lahia that killed at least 90 people—20 of whom were children. This brings the death toll in Gaza to more than 43,600, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, though local authorities believe the actual number is likely much higher.

Last week, the Israeli military announced that displaced civilians in northern Gaza—which is being destroyed and depopulated under conditions that top UN officials recently described as "apocalyptic"—would not be allowed to return to their homes, in flagrant disregard for international humanitarian law.

Read more: Gaza is a manufactured apocalypse

Furthermore, on 8 November, an international group of food security experts issued an alert that all of Gaza faces acute food insecurity and that there is a "strong likelihood that famine is imminent" for the estimated 75,000 to 90,000 people stuck in northern Gaza.

To be clear, Israel is not responsible for all the challenges of delivering aid. Both Hamas and the Israel Defence Forces have killed civilians in Gaza and destroyed basic infrastructure in the region. In addition, more than 1.8 million people in Gaza face "extremely critical" levels of hunger, and starvation has led desperate Palestinians to loot aid convoys.

But when lifesaving relief needs to be flooding into every area of Gaza, Israel controls the spigot, turning it on and off seemingly at random.

A simple test of whether humanitarian assistance is being arbitrarily impeded is to ask how Israel would act if its own citizens were in need: Would there be limitations on the amount of food or the number of trucks, drivers, doctors, and aid workers allowed inside the country? Would entire containers of relief goods be impounded for containing scissors? Would schools sheltering displaced Israeli families be bombed to kill suspected enemies?

I resigned from the State Department after it skirted a US law that requires halting assistance to a country that blocks humanitarian aid

Why I resigned

Since early on in this conflict, the US State Department has had all the information it needs to accurately determine if Israel has been obstructing humanitarian assistance, but it has chosen to prioritise unconditional support of Israel over US law. In May, the State and Defence departments submitted a report to Congress that concluded that Israel was not blocking humanitarian assistance. However, aid organisations and experts in the State Department's refugee bureau and the United States Agency for International Development had been reporting otherwise for months.

I know this because, as the senior civil-military advisor in the refugee bureau, I was one of the subject matter experts working on that report until my colleagues and I were removed from it so it could be edited at a higher level. The report's final determination was made to skirt Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, a law that requires halting assistance to a country that blocks US humanitarian aid. I told State Department leadership that the demonstrably false report would haunt us, and I resigned.

Now, in the waning weeks before the inauguration of a new president, the Biden administration has this last chance to do the right thing. The task is straightforward: Look at the facts and make an honest determination about whether the Israeli government's actions have helped or hurt the people of Gaza.

Halting the delivery of US weapons to Israel now may be cynically considered an insignificant step that could be overturned by the next administration, but it would be a brave return to US law and humanitarian principles, however brief.

It's never too late to obey the law.

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