SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
usaid
Outcry After Biden Admin Pushed for Retraction of Northern Gaza Famine Report
"It sure looks like USAID is allowing political considerations—the Biden administration's worry about funding Israel's starvation strategy—to interfere," said one human rights expert.
Dec 27, 2024
Veteran human rights expert Kenneth Roth said Thursday that the withdrawal of a report on imminent famine in northern Gaza negates "the whole point" of the office that produced the analysis: "to have a group of experts make assessments about imminent famine that are untainted by political considerations."
The decision by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) to retract its December 23 alert on the rapidly spiraling starvation crisis in the northern part of the besieged enclave came after the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, publicly criticized the report.
FEWS NET, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), said in its report that Israel's "near-total blockade of humanitarian and commercial food supplies" for nearly 80 days has made it "highly likely that the food consumption and acute malnutrition thresholds for famine... have now been surpassed in North Gaza Governorate."
The report referenced the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the United Nations-backed assessment that classifies famine as "phase 5" and declares famine in a region once more than 30% of children under age five are acutely malnourished, more than two people per 10,000 die each day from starvation, or once 20% of households face an extreme lack of food.
On Thursday, a note on the group's website said the "December 23 Alert is under further review and is expected to be re-released with updated data and analysis in January."
FEWS NET is hardly the first group to warn of impending famine in northern Gaza, where Israeli troops have been carrying out a ground offensive since early October and where nearly all humanitarian aid has been cut off for thousands of Palestinians who are trapped in the region.
Cindy McCain, executive director of the World Food Program, said the area was facing a "full-blown famine" in May, and independent United Nations experts made a similar assessment in July.
But the FEWS NET report drew criticism from Lew, who said the analysis relied on "outdated and inaccurate" data pertaining to how many people are currently in northern Gaza.
The report was based on a population of 65,000-75,000 people in northern Gaza, said Lew, but Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) "estimates the population in this area is between 5,000 and 9,000," said Lew, while the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) "estimates the population is between 10,000 and 15,000."
"At a time when inaccurate information is causing confusion and accusations, it is irresponsible to issue a report like this," said Lew.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations was among those who said Lew appeared to reject the report by boasting "about the fact that [northern Gaza] has been successfully ethnically cleansed of its native population."
Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said Lew's "quibbling over the number of people desperate for food seems a politicized diversion from the fact that the Israeli government is blocking virtually all food from getting in."
"The Biden administration seems to be closing its eyes to that reality, but putting its head in the sand won't feed anyone," he told the Associated Press.
The Biden White House has been a vehement supporter of Israel's bombardment of Gaza since October 2023, insisting that the country is only defending itself following a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel—even as the death toll has passed 45,000 and as numerous reports have shown that Israel is waging attacks that officials know will kill hundreds of civilians.
In October the administration said it was giving Israel a month to ensure sufficient humanitarian aid was getting to Palestinians and threatened to cut off military aid, but when the deadline passed, no changes to U.S. political and military support were made.
The U.S. is prohibited from supplying weapons to countries that are blocking U.S. humanitarian aid under its own laws, including Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act."
Roth suggested that by pushing for the retraction of the FEWS NET report, USAID was acting on its vested interest in denying that Israel is starving Palestinians.
"It sure looks like USAID is allowing political considerations—the Biden administration's worry about funding Israel's starvation strategy—to interfere" with the report, Roth told the AP.
Scott Paul, a senior manager at Oxfam America, told the outlet that Lew "leveraged his political power to undermine the work of this expert agency."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Veterans Group Calls for Grand Jury Probe of Blinken for Enabling Israel's Genocide
"Members of the Biden administration unwilling to rein in Israel and furthering its genocide in Gaza need to go to jail," said the human rights attorney representing Veterans for Peace.
Sep 30, 2024
An organization representing anti-war U.S. veterans urged the Justice Department on Monday to immediately impanel a grand jury to investigate—and, if necessary, indict—Secretary of State Antony Blinken for lying to Congress, unlawfully refusing to cut off American military aid to Israel, and "conspiring to cause genocide of Palestinians."
The call from Veterans for Peace (VFP) comes days after the investigative outlet ProPublicapublished a detailed account of how the U.S. State Department submitted a report to Congress that contradicted the findings of the department's own experts and those of other agencies.
The Blinken-led State Department's May report concluded that Israel was not "prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance," despite internal assessments from State Department experts and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) arguing that Israel had deliberately impeded American aid shipments to Gaza and that weapons transfers to the country should be cut off in line with Section 620I of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act.
In a letter addressed to the Justice Department's Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section and U.S. District Attorney Matthew Graves, VFP specifically cites ProPublica's reporting and states that "Blinken's failure to implement U.S. federal law and halt weapons shipments to Israel touches upon both domestic and international law."
"Secretary Blinken's lack of candor with the Congress to continue the provision of military aid to Israel meant concealing the existence of the USAID and State Department reports showing repeat violations of aid requirements," the new letter reads. "The concealed reports explicitly recommended the immediate cutoff of military aid to Israel. By allegedly lying to Congress, Secretary Blinken caused ongoing genocidal acts and war crimes against the Palestinians by continuing the supply of weapons and munitions to Israel."
"The Israeli military continues detonating massive bombs in southern Beirut—bombs they would not possess but for Antony Blinken's repeated violations of federal laws."
The letter also points to the role of U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew in ensuring the continued flow of American arms to Israel even as human rights organizations accumulated overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces were using the weapons to commit horrific war crimes in Gaza. According to ProPublica, Lew "sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel's war cabinet... should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians" and "recommended continuing to provide military assistance."
"The alleged wrongdoing of Secretary of State Blinken of lying to Congress, supported by what looks like willful provision of inaccurate information from Ambassador Lew, combined to save Israel from interruption of U.S. provision of weapons and munitions," VFP argued in its letter. "Thus Israel was able to continue to perpetrate war crimes and genocidal acts."
The group wrote that Blinken and Lew "appear to have violated the objectives of U.S. foreign policy against fomenting war, against allowing war crimes, and against the commission of human rights violations," which "enabled Israel to breach the Genocide Convention and the orders of the International Court of Justice."
Terry Lodge, VFP's human rights counsel, said in a statement Monday that "the Israeli military continues detonating massive bombs in southern Beirut—bombs they would not possess but for Antony Blinken's repeated violations of federal laws aimed at halting human rights and war crimes violations."
"Members of the Biden administration unwilling to rein in Israel and furthering its genocide in Gaza need to go to jail," Lodge added.
VFP's letter came days after the U.S. and Israel reached a deal for an additional $8.7 billion in American military support, even as the Israeli military continues to obstruct aid deliveries in Gaza, bombard the enclave's starving population, and expand the assault on Lebanon.
In an appearance on MSNBC last week, USAID Administrator Samantha Power brushed off host Andrea Mitchell's question about ProPublica's reporting, downplaying her agency's assessment of Israel's aid obstructions as "a report from months ago."
ProPublica reported last week that USAID sent Blinken "a detailed 17-page memo" that "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."
Susan Schnall, VFP's president, said Monday that U.S. military aid to Israel amounts to "a theft from millions of Americans who have none of the health insurance every Israeli enjoys; from millions of Americans living in horrific housing while Israel builds thousands of upscale homes on land stolen from Palestinians; from millions of young Americans can't afford college because America's top priorities are weapons and death, not human needs."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Rank Dishonesty': Internal Docs Detail How Blinken Rejected Calls to Cut Off US Arms to Israel
"The Biden administration is not only complicit in genocide. It's knowingly complicit," said one analyst.
Sep 24, 2024
When the U.S. State Department, headed by Antony Blinken, told Congress earlier this year that "we do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance," it was directly contradicting the internal findings of its own experts and those of USAID.
Blinken's decision to publicly reject conclusions by other U.S. officials despite the compelling evidence they marshaled highlighted "a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel," ProPublicareported Tuesday in a detailed story examining internal communications and other private documents.
Under U.S. law—specifically Section 620I of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act—the federal government is barred from approving arms transfers to any country that "prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance."
Blinken's official denial that Israel is restricting the flow of U.S. humanitarian aid allows the Biden administration to maintain that its weapons transfers are lawful.
ProPublica obtained emails showing that, prior to Blinken's statement to Congress denying that Israel was impeding the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid, the head of the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration had "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."
USAID, headed by the prominent liberal interventionist Samantha Power—who authored a book on American leaders' failure to act in the face of genocide—separately concluded in both a report and a 17-page memo to Blinken that Israel deliberately restricted U.S. humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza, which is now facing famine, the reemergence of polio, and other crises.
"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," ProPublica reported Tuesday. "The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel's behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country."
USAID sent its memo to Blinken less than a month before the U.S. State Department told Congress that, contrary to the findings of administration experts as well as scores of outside groups, the Israeli military was not restricting U.S. humanitarian aid.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote that the new ProPublica reporting underscores that "the Biden administration is not only complicit in genocide. It's knowingly complicit."
Filmmaker Alex Gibney accused Blinken of "rank dishonesty on Gaza."
"Providing more offensive weapons to continue this disastrous war would be immoral. It would also be illegal."
ProPublica's reporting also details the role Jack Lew, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, played in ensuring that U.S. weapons continued to flow to the Israeli military. In March, the investigative outlet noted, 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."
While Lew conceded that "other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement" of humanitarian assistance, he argued that on the whole "Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede" aid provided or backed by the U.S.
That statement, according to United Nations figures and assessments by aid organizations on the ground, has proven to be false.
Last week, a coalition of humanitarian groups estimated that Israel's siege is blocking 83% of food aid from reaching the Gaza Strip, where most of the population is hungry and at growing risk of starvation.
An update released Monday by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) notes that 46% of "humanitarian movements have been either denied or impeded in August, making it the most challenging month for humanitarian access since January 2024."
Meanwhile, U.S. arms are still flowing to the Israeli military as it continues to assail Gaza and expand its attacks on Lebanon.
Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department announced the approval of $165 million in weapons sales to Israel, a decision that came less than 30 days after the Biden administration signed off on a sprawling $20 billion sale of U.S. arms.
The latter transfer is the target of a resolution of disapproval announced last week by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said in a floor speech that Israel's restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza amount to a "clear violation of U.S. and international law."
"Providing more offensive weapons to continue this disastrous war would be immoral. It would also be illegal," Sanders said. "The sales would reward Netanyahu's extremist government even as it flouts U.S. policy goals at every turn and drags the United States closer to a regional war."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular