The US claims it is working “relentlessly” to get humanitarian aid into Gaza amid UN warnings that the territory’s 2.2 million people are “highly food insecure and at risk of famine”.
Antony Blinken, speaking at Davos this week, called the situation in Gaza “gut-wrenching”. But the US secretary of state was unable to secure any major new gains on increasing the amount of assistance entering the territory during his recent visit to Israel, even as leaders of international organizations advocate for urgent access.
United Nations special rapporteurs said this week that “every single person in Gaza is hungry” and that “Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people”. Israeli inspections have slowed the aid entering the territory, which is receiving just a tiny fraction of what experts say is needed.
After months of backroom advocacy with Israel to increase the flow of food and humanitarian items through the south of Gaza, the US is “focused on trying to see what we can do to increase the volume and the speed with which those trucks are getting in”, according to the White House spokesperson John Kirby.
Israel has allowed just under 8,500 trucks to enter Gaza through the two southern crossings over the past 85 days, according to the UN’s monitoring – an average of 100 trucks a day. Aid groups say 500 trucks a day are needed at minimum. “Everyone understands the need for inspections, but things like antibiotics or tent poles or sleeping bags with zippers are causing delay and rejection, and then the whole trucks – not just the items in question – are turned away,” Tom Hart, the CEO of the humanitarian group InterAction, said.
“We need approval and inspection processes for aid to be faster and more efficient and more predictable,” Ricardo Pires, a communications manager with Unicef, said.
The Biden administration credited its pressure on Israel for what has got into Gaza so far. “Despite the fact that what’s getting in isn’t sufficient to the needs right now, it is the United States that got anything in, in the first place,” Matt Miller, the state department spokesperson, has said.
Some aid groups see things differently. “We know that they are doing a lot behind the scenes, but at the moment we are not seeing the results of what they are doing in the access and distribution of assistance on the ground,” Hart said.
David Satterfield, the retired ambassador working as a state department humanitarian envoy focused on Gaza, has faced criticism for his effectiveness in the role. He joined Blinken on part of his recent Israel trip, though Satterfield had previously been on vacation and working remotely in Hawaii, where he owns property, over the holidays. “This was a long-planned vacation that was coordinated, and he immediately went back to Israel after that,” a state department spokesperson told the Guardian.
“People in Gaza risk dying of hunger just miles from trucks filled with food,” Cindy McCain, executive director of the WFP, said in a statement. “Every hour lost puts countless lives at risk. We can keep famine at bay but only if we can deliver sufficient supplies and have safe access to everyone in need, wherever they are.”
Some legislators have called on the Biden administration to do more, though a Senate vote which would require additional safeguards on aid to Israel only garnered 11 votes on Tuesday night, nowhere near the simple majority needed in the 100-person chamber to pass.
Senator Chris Van Hollen voted in favor of the resolution, which was introduced by Bernie Sanders, after visiting the Rafah crossing that borders Egypt earlier in the month. Van Hollen called the Israeli government’s delays in inspecting trucks “purely arbitrary” in an interview with the New Yorker.
An Israeli military spokesperson recently denied outright that there is hunger in Gaza, even as Human Rights Watch said last month that “the Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare”.
In the absence of a ceasefire, it’s not clear whether a large influx of humanitarian aid could even be distributed effectively. The issue is not just getting into Gaza, but the safety and logistics once inside the territory. Electricity and communications blackouts, along with Israeli bombardments, make distribution dangerous and at times impossible. It’s likely in part for these reasons that the heads of the World Food Programme and Unicef, both of which were appointed to those roles by Joe Biden, have called for a ceasefire.
But experts say that the US is more focused on the humanitarian crisis than the underlying political and military roots of the conflict. “They are in the weeds on humanitarian access issues, which is still uncomfortable for the Israelis, but far preferable to questions of ceasefire and future political arrangements, and it allows Israel to nickel-and-dime the US to death on the minutiae,” Daniel Levy, president of the US/Middle East Project, says.
Tania Hary, executive director of the Israeli non-profit Gisha focused on movement and access for Palestinians, says that Israel is facing more pressure to let more goods into Gaza in part because of South Africa’s international court of justice case at the Hague. But she added, “I don’t think that they’re doing enough or that they’re moving fast enough, and they’re not even skimming the surface of their obligations to Gaza residents.”
The US has found some creative pathways in its humanitarian efforts, including getting Israel to reopen the Kerem Shalom crossing on the southern Israel-Gaza border in mid-December. But in Hary’s assessment, those actions remain wholly insufficient. “We’re never going to see these needs being addressed without there being a ceasefire, and the US is of course not calling for that. So whatever it is trying to do on access for aid is undermined by support for the continued military operation,” she said.
Kirby, the White House spokesperson, acknowledged that “a big hindrance” to getting more humanitarian items into Gaza “is the fighting itself”.
Though the US Senate failed to pass the measure to condition military aid to Israel based on the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, advocates say there are other means available to the US within that law. For example, it contains a clause that bars security assistance when the recipient country “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance”, a point that a consortium of NGOs highlighted in a recent letter to the US defense secretary.
“Israel as the occupying power and a side to the hostilities has obligations, not just to facilitate entry of goods but even to supply them,” Hary says. “And almost no one is talking about Israel supplying the food that Gaza needs, but that is its obligation.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
