“Biden’s approach to Rafah and Gaza aid is a ‘monument to American impotence”
Numerous leaks to the media about private discussions and frustrations over Israeli military behavior in Gaza should never have happened, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a congressional hearing earlier this week.
It is very unfortunate that this discussion leaked to the press when it was a private discussion between us and Israel,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday.
Leaks are an unfortunate part of the work we are all involved in. It’s really unfortunate, but it happens. But what is not a leak is the fact that we have been both publicly and privately aware of the fact that we have deep concerns about a major military operation in Rafah.
The congressional hearing highlighted a major debate about the relationship between the United States and Israel and the pressure tools available to the Biden administration regarding Israeli military operations in Gaza.
Analysts said that while the administration believes the erratic style of Israeli officials’ public and private messaging will lead to a reduction in harm to civilians in Gaza, Biden’s entire approach to the war has failed to leverage any substantive pressure on Israel.
At the same time, the administration has also made a futile attempt to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza, resulting from the Israeli war, without attempting to address Israel’s ban on humanitarian access to the besieged Strip.
Since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October, the Biden administration has thrown its full diplomatic weight behind Israel while also accelerating arms shipments to the country as it began preparing for a ground invasion of the Strip.
Over the past eight months, legal experts, rights groups, and Palestinians have criticized the Biden administration’s material support for the Israeli war effort.
Support continued to flow into Israel despite documented cases in which Israeli forces targeted schools and residential buildings and besieged hospitals. More than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed so far, most of them women and children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
On Thursday alone, fifteen Palestinian children were killed in Israeli raids.The administration’s State Department also lost several officials, all of whom resigned in protest against US support for Israel and its approach to the war.
In recent months, the administration has sent a public message that it opposes the Israeli invasion of Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Palestinians have taken refuge.
However, despite open American opposition, the Israeli army earlier this month launched an attack on Rafah – seizing the crossing with Egypt used to bring in aid – at a time when mediators were sitting in Cairo trying to reach a ceasefire.
The American response at that time was multi-level. On the one hand, the administration stopped one arms shipment to Israel, considering it a pressure tool to be used against Israel to stop the Rafah invasion. On the other hand, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that the Israeli operation was not the “all-out” invasion that Washington opposes.
With regard to Rafah, this is called saving face and giving the Israelis a carrot,” Adam Weinstein, deputy director of the Middle East Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Aside from Israel’s military operations in Gaza and its continued destruction of civilian lives, Israel has also managed to prevent humanitarian aid from entering the Strip with minimal American resistance.
Human rights groups and relief agencies alike said that throughout the war, Israel prevented trucks filled with humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.The United Nations World Food Program warned last week that “the threat of famine in Gaza was never looming.
Instead of pressuring Israel to allow more aid in, Washington focused its humanitarian efforts on two fronts. The first is to use airdrops of supplies into Gaza, a method that aid groups consider completely ineffective. Many Palestinians were also killed by airdrops, either as a result of being injured or dying as a result of trying to reach those drops.
The second was through the construction of a floating dock, which was promoted as a means of accelerating the provision of aid to the people of Gaza. This pier was finally completed last week at a cost of at least $320 million. As of Tuesday, the Pentagon said none of the aid unloaded at the dock had reached the broader Palestinian population in the area.
