D. Ray
2024-10-06 01:42:44 UTC
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Permalinkconcluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of
food and medicine into Gaza.
The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees
bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their
conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut
off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed
humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and
other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.
But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept
either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded
statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the
Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or
delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”
Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on
Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with
aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures,
bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely
turning away trucks full of food and medicine.
Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an
Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians
for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli
government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was
the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties
with Hamas.
Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population,
Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking
humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to
freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and
bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.
The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading
independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians
in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating.
Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death — likely a
significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of
immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy
became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.
The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S.
should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a
copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the
officials cited to back up their findings.
USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming
famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction,
and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It
also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis.
USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state,
is an independent agency responsible for international development and
disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver
enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian
population.
It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the
world.”
In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said
that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made
clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns
during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that
contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian
assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to
facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”
Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State
Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the
Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when
the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian
situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an
associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple
months tells you all that you need to know.”
The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden
administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the U.S.
ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s
war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense
Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the
Palestinians.
Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to
impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of
his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide
military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not
arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede U.S. provided or supported”
shipments of food and medicine.
Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli
public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when
Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli
government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the
past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.
In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about
instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to
four U.S. officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others
quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation
has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew
responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials,
who said the comments drew widespread consternation.
“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica.
“He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”
A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID
leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State
Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend
Israel,” said a third official.
“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to
increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic
efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of
hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end
to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.
The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered
widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters
reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands
at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department,
including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances
were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo, Lew’s cable and their
broad conclusions were also previously reported.
But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the
refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy —
along with Lew’s decision to undermine them — reveal new aspects of the
striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking
American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel
with arms over the objections of their own experts.
Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees
bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress,
resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant
evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a
statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other
outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.
“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”
The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome
that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a
person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when
experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.
“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the
Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington
was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”
While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on
American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has
shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says
has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational
capabilities during the ongoing war.”
The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a
baseline and significantly more during wartime — money the Israelis use to
buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch
have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that
money.
One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of
the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia
during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented.
But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it
out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis
to allow aid freely into Gaza.
In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the
National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to
vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report
its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not
facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the
government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.
Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with
Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.
In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the
administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”
“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international
standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to
desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is
undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has
repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”
As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other
supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according
to USAID’s memo.
The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by
imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond
to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for
passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those
submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli
government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or
cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.
Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli
government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it
imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter
Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by
ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian
groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID
and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that
is not true.
In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items
in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter
gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were
deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of
the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded
items like hygiene kits, the emails show.
In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported
incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli
airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the
IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli
government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.
USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to
prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18,
for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route
assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a
military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.
Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid
workers, killing two of them.
Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some
of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about
whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email
thread documenting the episode.
On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick,
a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described
as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other
partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was
about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.
Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need
to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off
bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from
American tax dollars.
The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick.
“I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.
But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the
relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and
agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The
principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses
that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s
acting legal adviser, wrote.
The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights
divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of
Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while
noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”
By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees
and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had
among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working
closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine
to the Palestinians.
“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related
to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the
ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an
official in the bureau wrote to the group.
It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s
subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for
clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”
Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed
the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day
between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the
administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking
points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed
to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials
responded to a request for comment.)
But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down,
according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff
meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There
will be other opportunities,” the person said.
The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.
Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.
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***@propublica.org.
<https://www.propublica.org/article/gaza-palestine-israel-blocked-humanitarian-aid-blinken>
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