Human rights advocates around the world reacted angrily to Tuesday's U.S. State Department determination that Israel is not violating humanitarian law—even as its forces annihilate Gaza and block aid from entering the embattled Palestinian enclave.
Last month, the Biden administration—which has
approved tens of billions of dollars in military aid for Israel and provided nearly unconditional diplomatic support since October 2023—sent a letter to the Israeli government threatening to cut off U.S. arms transfers if it failed to take "urgent and sustained actions" to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.
Asked during a Tuesday press conference if the Israeli government has met the letter's demands, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said that "we have not made an assessment that they are in violation of U.S. law."
"The overall humanitarian situation in Gaza continues to be unsatisfactory," Patel continued. "But in the context of the letter, it's not about whether we find something satisfactory or not; it's what are the actions that we're seeing."
"These actions that we have seen, we think that these are steps in the right direction," he added, citing the limited reopening of the Erez border crossing between Gaza and Israel. "We want to see more steps. We want to see these steps sustained over a significant period of time, and ultimately, we want to see these steps have a result on the situation."
Patel insisted that the Biden administration is "not giving Israel a pass."
However, humanitarian aid groups accuse Israel of causing "
apocalyptic" conditions in northern Gaza, where thousands of civilians including many women and children have been killed or wounded while others face imminent famine under a plan to starve out the population in order to ethnically cleanse the area.
On Tuesday, a coalition of eight international humanitarian groups including Oxfam International, CARE, Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, and others published a report titled
The Gaza Scorecard: Israel Fails to Comply With U.S. Humanitarian Access Demands in Gaza, which found that Israel has failed to fully comply with any of the 19 specific demands in the Biden administration's letter.
The scorecard noted:
The principals of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee
now assess that "the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine, and violence." The findings of this scorecard underscore Israel's failure to comply with U.S. demands and international obligations. Israel should be held accountable for the end result of failing to ensure the adequate provision of food, medical, and other supplies to reach people in need.
"While Israel manipulates the U.S. by allowing some aid trucks into other parts of Gaza in the days leading up to the deadline, the performative act did not bring any humanitarian aid to the besieged northern neighborhoods of Gaza," said Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). "Even more concerning, no forcibly displaced Palestinian from the northern neighborhoods of Gaza has been allowed to return home."
Indeed, the IDF
said it has "no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes."
At the same time, relief workers describe deadly dangers faced by Palestinians who try to flee besieged areas including the Jabalia refugee camp, site of some of the war's
worst massacres, including indiscriminate Israeli targeting of refugees without regard for age or gender.
The International Court of Justice in The Hague is in the lengthy process of
determining if Israel's atrocities amount to violations of the Genocide Convention. While it is weighing the evidence in the South Africa-led case, the ICJ has issued a series of provisional orders directing Israel to prevent genocidal acts, halt its assault on Rafah, and stop blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza. Critics accuse Israel of flouting all three orders.
"As a signatory to the Genocide Convention, the U.S. is obligated to prevent acts of genocide and to avoid complicity in them," DAWN stressed on Tuesday. "The U.S. should halt its military support for Israel to comply with its convention obligations and uphold international legal norms."
This is not the first time that the Biden administration has officially denied that Israel has violated humanitarian law during the Gaza war. In March, the State Department
accepted Israel's assertion that the country is using U.S.-supplied arms in compliance with international law, even as more than 100,000 Palestinians had been killed or wounded in Gaza up to that date. The casualty figure has since increased by about 50%.
Congressional progressives and human rights groups
pushed back on the Biden administration's claim. In April, a leaked memo revealed that officials at the United States Agency for International Development warned Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Israel was indeed breaking the law by blocking aid from entering Gaza. Another leaked State Department memo raised "serious concern" over Israeli noncompliance with humanitarian law and slammed Israel's claims of legal U.S. weapons use as "neither credible nor reliable."
Palestine advocates fear the Biden administration's refusal to suspend arms shipments to Israel—as experts argue is
required under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and Leahy Laws—will open the door for Republican President-elect Donald Trump to back Israeli crimes such as the annexation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank.
"By spending over a year ignoring U.S. law on supplying arms, the Biden administration has handed Trump an excuse to ignore any law he wants," Center for International Policy executive vice president Matt Duss
said Tuesday on social media. "And they will have nothing to say about it."
Duss called the Biden administration's new determination "predictable, pathetic, and blatantly illegal."
