17 page note USAID reports have detailed instances of Israel deliberately interfering with humanitarian aid efforts, including killing aid workers, bombing hospitals, and preventing trucks carrying food and medicine from entering Gaza, where the United Nations has declared a “full-scale famine” in the northern region.
In April, USAID sent its findings to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and senior diplomats were informed of the State Department’s refugee office’s decision. U.S. law requires the government to suspend arms shipments to any country that denies U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Despite the memo and the list of evidence cited, Blinken rejected the assessment, ProPublica reported Tuesday.
In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, President Biden and his administration have consistently affirmed their commitment to a ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement in Gaza. However, since the Israeli government declared war on Hamas, the United States has delivered more than 50,000 tons of rockets, artillery, and other military equipment, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry last month.
ProPublica wrote that Blinken and the Biden administration did not accept the findings of the two highest-ranking US government officials on humanitarian aid. In Blinken’s statement to Congress on May 10, he said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or restricting in any way the transfer or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”
According to a copy of a cable between U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew and Blinken obtained by ProPublica, the ambassador expressed the need to trust the Israeli War Cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant, to handle humanitarian shipments to Palestinians in Gaza. Despite his assessment that “Israel will not arbitrarily block, restrict, or impede U.S.-supplied or -supported shipments of food and medicine,” Lew wrote that “other parts of the Israeli government have attempted to obstruct the movement of [humanitarian assistance.]”
A former civilian military adviser to the refugee office, who worked on various versions of Blinken’s statement to Congress, resigned over the conclusions of the final version. “There is abundant evidence that Israel is responsible for obstructing aid,” Stacey Gilbert said in a statement shortly after her departure. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.”
On the day Blinken sent his report to Congress, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) denounced the administration for choosing to “ignore the requirements” of the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20. “Whether Israel was involved or not, that does not mean they are not respecting those requirements.” At this moment “Compliance with international standards for facilitating the delivery of humanitarian assistance to desperate, hungry citizens may be debatable,” he wrote in a statement. “But what is undeniable – for those who do not look the other way – is that Yemen has repeatedly violated these standards over the past seven months.”
Among the evidence cited in the memo was a report that life-saving food was being stored less than 30 miles across the border at an Israeli port—enough flour to feed 1.5 Palestinians for five months. In February, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich issued a directive to block the delivery of flour to the main UN agency for the Palestinians, citing allegations that some of its employees were affiliated with Hamas.
According to the USAID memo, at least 930 trucks carrying food, medicine and other aid were held in Egypt awaiting Israeli approval until March. The memo to Blinken also cited several incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by airstrikes even after some had shared their locations and received approval from the Israeli Defense Forces. The Israeli government insisted that most of these violent incidents were unintended.
On April 1, seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) workers were killed in an Israeli airstrike while delivering aid to Gaza. The workers were travelling in two armoured vehicles bearing the charity’s logo in a conflict-free zone, WCK said in a statement following the deadly tragedy. The seven killed were from Australia, Poland, the UK and a dual national from the US, Canada and Palestine. “Despite coordinating their movements with the IDF, the convoy was struck as it left the Deir al-Balah warehouse, where the team was unloading over 100 tonnes of humanitarian food aid brought into Gaza by sea,” the statement said.
“This is not just an attack on WCK, it is an attack on the humanitarian organizations that show up in the worst situations where food is used as a weapon of war,” wrote WCK CEO Erin Gore.
