Key Points
- The US government has concluded Israel is not currently impeding assistance to Gaza.
- A 30-day deadline for Israel to improve aid to the region set by the US in October passed on Tuesday.
- Aid groups said Israel failed to meet the US demands and took actions to “dramatically” worsen the situation.
United States President Joe Biden’s administration has concluded that Israel is not impeding assistance to Gaza and therefore not violating US law, but his government has acknowledged the humanitarian situation remains dire in the Palestinian enclave.
The conclusion comes as a 30-day deadline given to Israel by the US to address the in Gaza comes to an end.
On 13 October, US secretary of state Antony Blinken and defence secretary Lloyd Austin handed Israel a list of specific steps to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza or face cuts to US military assistance.
The deadline comes just days after the independent Famine Review Committee, which reviews findings by the internationally recognised standard known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), said there is a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas” of northern Gaza as Israel pursues a military offensive against Hamas militants there.
COGAT, the Israeli military agency that deals with Palestinian civilian affairs, published on Saturday a list of Israel’s humanitarian efforts over the past six months, “highlighting recent initiatives and detailing plans to sustain support for Gaza as winter approaches”.
The Israeli agency said that “all projections by the IPC have proven incorrect and inconsistent with the situation on the ground” and that Israel’s military “operates and will continue to operate in accordance with international law to facilitate and ease the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza.”
The amount of aid entering Gaza has plummeted to its lowest level in a year, according to United Nations data, and the UN has accused Israel of hindering and blocking attempts to deliver aid, particularly to Gaza’s north.
Louise Wateridge, senior emergency officer for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, told a Geneva press briefing that aid trucks into the Gaza Strip had fallen in October and that no food was allowed to enter northern Gaza for an entire month.
“The people here need everything. They need more. It’s not enough,” she said.
Asked what she expected the US to do about the deadline, she said: “Anything that happens now is already too late. Thousands and thousands of people have been killed senselessly. They have been killed because there is lack of aid, because the bombs have continued and because we have not been able to even reach them under the rubble.”
US findings
Speaking on Tuesday (local time), US State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel repeatedly declined to say if the specific criteria the US had asked of Israel were fulfilled. Instead, he told reporters that Israel has taken steps to address the demands and that the US would continue to assess the situation.
“We’ve seen some progress being made. We would like to see some more changes happen. We believe that had it not been for US intervention, these changes may not have ever taken place,” Patel said.
Patel said Israel had taken some steps, including reopening the Erez crossing, waiving certain customs requirements and opening additional delivery routes within Gaza.
For more than a month, Israeli forces have been pushing deeper into north Gaza, surrounding hospitals and shelters and displacing new waves of people in an operation they say is designed to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping.
International aid groups said Israel had failed to meet the series of US demands intended to improve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza by the Tuesday deadline.
“Israel not only failed to meet the US criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the
situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza,” a group of eight aid groups including Oxfam, Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council said in 19-page report.
Patel, fielding repeated questions from reporters in the briefing, declined to explain why Washington chose to make the assessment based on Israel’s measures to address the problems instead of actual results on the ground, which US officials have repeatedly said would be their measuring stick.
Biden, whose term ends soon, has offered strong backing to Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel last October, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to the Israeli government.
More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year, according to the health ministry in Gaza and the enclave has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble where more than 2 million Gazans seek shelter as best they can.
