The top US official working on the humanitarian situation in Gaza told aid organizations during a meeting in August that the US wouldn’t even consider suspending military aid to Israel over its blocking of food and medicine shipments, POLITICO reported on Wednesday.
The official, Lise Grande, who was appointed to the position in April, told over a dozen aid groups that the US could find other ways to pressure Israel but stressed that the US would not block or delay weapons shipments, which is the only real leverage the US has.
One aid official who attended the meeting said Grande described Israel as being in a “tight circle of very few allies” that the US would not oppose. Grande said the US would not “hold anything back that they want.”
During the meeting, aid officials detailed how Israel was blocking aid shipments into Gaza and said by doing so, it was violating international law. Another person who attended the meeting said Grad “was saying that the rules don’t apply to Israel.”
US government agencies had previously concluded Israel was deliberately blocking aid, which violates US foreign assistance laws, but Blinken overrode those concerns to ensure US weapons continued to flow to Israel.
The report from POLITICO comes after the Biden administration sent a letter to Israel giving them 30 days to allow more aid into Gaza. The letter implies failure to agree to the US demands could impact military aid but doesn’t say so explicitly, and the State Department has refused to say if there would be any consequences.
Israeli forces are currently attempting to carry out an ethnic cleansing plan in northern Gaza, known as the “general’s plan,” which calls for the evacuation of all Palestinian civilians north of the Netzarim Corridor, a strip of land controlled by the Israeli military. Anyone who stays behind will be exterminated, either by military action or a starvation blockade.
US military aid to Israel has helped slaughter over 42,000 Palestinians, according to the numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry. Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who have volunteered in Gaza recently estimated in an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris that over 118,00 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year, a toll that includes indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege, such as starvation and disease.
