WASHINGTON (AP) — Midway through the Biden administration’s 30-day ultimatum to Israel to increase humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip or risk possible restrictions on U.S. military funding, Israel is falling far short of expectations, according to a report Associated Press review of UN and Israeli data shows.
Israel also missed several other deadlines and demands outlined in an Oct. 13 letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The mid-November deadline – after the US election – could serve as the final test of President Joe Biden’s willingness to check a close ally who has ignored repeated US appeals to protect Palestinian civilians during the war against Hamas.
In their letter, Blinken and Austin called for improvements to the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza and said Israel must allow at least 350 trucks a day carrying urgently needed food and other aid. According to the latest UN figures, an average of only 71 trucks per day entered the Gaza Strip by the end of October.
Blinken said the State Department and Pentagon were closely monitoring Israel’s response to the letter and also spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top adviser on Friday.
“There has been progress, but it is not enough, and we are working every day to ensure that Israel does what it needs to do to ensure that this assistance reaches the people who need it in Gaza,” Blinken said Thursday reporters.
“It is not enough to bring trucks into Gaza. It is important that what they bring can be effectively distributed in Gaza,” he added.
The letter from Blinken and Austin marked one of the toughest stances the Biden administration has taken in a year of appeals and warnings for Israel to reduce harm to Palestinian civilians.
Support for Israel is a key concern for many Republican voters and some Democrats. That makes any decision by the Biden administration to restrict military funding hard given the tight presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Especially in the hard-hit north of the Gaza Strip, an escalated Israeli military operation and restrictions on aid deliveries have meant that food and other aid supplies have stopped reaching the populated areas since mid-October, aid organizations say. This could set the stage for famine in the coming weeks or months, international observers say.
Leaders of 15 U.N. and humanitarian groups, including the World Food Program and the World Health Organization, warned Friday that “the situation in northern Gaza is apocalyptic.”
And despite U.S. objections, Israeli lawmakers this week effectively voted to ban the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. Governments around the world, the United Nations and aid groups say closing UNRWA would devastate aid networks struggling to deliver food and other supplies to people in Gaza.
“Disastrous,” Amber Alayyan, medical program manager for Gaza at Doctors Without Borders, said of the move.
Humanitarian officials are deeply skeptical that Israel will significantly increase aid to Gaza civilians despite the U.S. warning — or that the Biden administration will do anything if it does not.
At this point in the war, “none of that happened,” said Scott Paul, deputy director of the humanitarian organization Oxfam.
“We were told time and time again” by Biden administration officials that there were procedures in place to assess the situation on the ground “in Gaza” and that some steps had been taken to implement U.S. law, and time and time again this was not the case the case has happened,” said Paul.
Before the war, an average of 500 trucks brought relief supplies to the area every day. Aid groups say that is the minimum needed for Gaza’s 2.3 million people, most of whom have been forced from their homes, often multiple times since then.
There has never been a month since the beginning of the conflict in which Israel has come close to this number. According to the Israeli government, the number peaked in April at 225 trucks per day.
As Blinken and Austin sent their letter this month, concerns grew that aid restrictions were leaving civilians hungry. The number of aid trucks that Israel has allowed into the Gaza Strip has fallen sharply since last spring and summer, averaging just 13 per day in early October, according to UN figures.
By the end of the month, it rose to an average of 71 trucks per day, according to UN figures.
Once supplies arrive in Gaza, groups still face obstacles in distributing aid to warehouses and then to people in need, organizations and the State Department said this week. These include leisurely Israeli processing, Israeli supply restrictions, lawlessness and other obstacles, aid groups said.
Data from COGAT, the Israeli military agency responsible for humanitarian assistance in Gaza, shows aid fell to below a third of its level in September and August. In September, 87,446 tons of aid arrived in the Gaza Strip. 26,399 tons arrived in October.
Elad Goren, a senior COGAT official, said last week that delivery and distribution of aid in the north was mainly narrow to Gaza City.
Asked why aid was not being delivered to other parts of the north – such as Jabaliya, an overcrowded urban refugee camp where Israel is conducting an offensive – he said the population there was being evacuated and those who remained had ” received “sufficient help” from the past few months.
In other areas such as Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya, Goren falsely claimed that there was “no population left.”
COGAT declined to comment on the standard in the US letter. It said it was following government instructions on aid to Gaza. Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon blamed Hamas for the looting of aid supplies.
Oxfam’s Paul said that no aid at all was reaching the populated areas of northern Gaza and only compact amounts were reaching Gaza City.
“There is no way” Israel has made any progress in providing humanitarian aid to hundreds of thousands of people, particularly in northern Gaza, since the US ultimatum, said Alayyan of Doctors Without Borders.
The Israeli government appeared to miss another deadline set in Austin and Blinken’s letter. It called on Israel to establish a high-level channel for US officials to raise concerns about reported harm to Palestinian civilians and to hold an initial meeting by the end of October.
As of the last day of the month, no such channel, which the United States had repeatedly called for during the war, had been established.
The United States is by far the largest donor of arms and other military aid to Israel, including nearly $18 billion during the war in Gaza, according to a study for Brown University’s Costs of War project.
The Biden administration halted a planned shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel last spring, citing concerns about civilians in an Israeli offensive.
In a formal review in May, the government concluded that Israel’s exploit of U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law, but said wartime conditions prevented officials from confidently determining this in certain attacks.
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AP writers Matthew Lee in Washington, Julia Frankel in Jerusalem and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed.
