Biden to Continue Arming Israel Despite Insufficient Aid to Gaza

December 2024
By Michael T. Klare

The Biden administration signaled that it will not restrict U.S. arms transfers to Israel despite that country’s failure to permit increased deliveries of humanitarian aid to Gaza as top U.S. officials had demanded.

Although the situation in Gaza “is a very dire circumstance,” there will be no reduction in U.S. arms assistance to Israel, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel told a news briefing on Nov. 12.

But the United States will continue to press the Israelis to expedite the flow of humanitarian aid to the embattled enclave, Patel indicated. “[W]hat we need to see is we need to see these steps acted on,” he said. “We need to see them implemented.”

In a letter to senior Israeli officials on Oct. 14, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin complained of the sharply deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, where Israel has conducted a fierce retaliation since the Oct. 7, 2023, raid in which Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostage.

According to the letter, Israel had imposed severe restrictions on aid flows to Gaza, resulting in a 50 percent decline in deliveries over the preceding six months, drastically reducing food and medical supplies to the Palestinian civilian population.

To be assured of receiving U.S. military assistance, Israel would have to take immediate steps to eliminate those restrictions and allow more aid to reach Gaza, the letter said.

“To reverse the downward humanitarian trajectory [in Gaza] as consistent with its assurances to us, Israel must, starting now and within 30 days act on [a number of] concrete measures,” such as opening additional border crossings and lifting restrictions on aid convoys from southern to northern Gaza, Blinken and Austin wrote. A failure to do so, they indicated, could result in diminished U.S. arms aid to Israel as required by law.

Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act states that, “No assistance shall be furnished under this Act or the Arms Export Control Act to any country when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.” The president can waive this restriction if he determines that doing so would be in the national interest.

Any significant reduction in U.S. arms transfers to Israel, if sustained for any length of time, would have serious consequences for that country. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States is Israel’s leading arms supplier, accounting for 69 percent of its arms imports in 2023. These include many of the weapons used by the Israelis in their war against Hamas and Hezbollah.

Despite this dependency, Israel made no visible effort to comply with the requirements in the Blinken-Austin letter. Among the demands was a requirement for daily entry into Gaza of 350 trucks carrying humanitarian aid. In late October, an average of only 58 trucks were reported to be making the crossing.

A group of scientists from the UN-affiliated Famine Review Committee said on Nov. 8 that, with food supplies rapidly diminishing, “starvation, malnutrition, and excess mortality due to malnutrition and disease are rapidly increasing” and that a deadly famine was “imminent.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a vocal critic of Israeli tactics in its war against Hamas and of the Biden administration’s military support for Israel despite serious human rights concerns, proposed three resolutions to block continued arms transfers, but they were soundly defeated by the Senate on Nov. 20. Nevertheless, 17 Senate Democrats and two independents voted for at least one of the measures, a sign of growing party divisions over Israel’s handling of the war, now entering its 14th month.

Meanwhile, on Nov. 18, Politico reported that 20 White House staff members had written a letter to their superiors calling on President Joe Biden to follow through with the threat to close the arms spigot.