U.S. warns Israel it may withhold arms unless Gaza aid starts flowing

The Biden administration intensified pressure on Israel this week to improve dire conditions for civilians in the Gaza Strip, as top officials warned they would resort to punitive measures, potentially including a suspension of military aid, if humanitarian aid flows are not increased within a month.

In a Sunday letter to senior Israeli officials, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded urgent steps to ensure noncombatants have access to food and other necessities, blaming actions by the Israeli government and lawlessness in Gaza for a recent deterioration of conditions there.

Absent a change, they cautioned, the administration would be obliged to take steps laid out in laws and policies linking the facilitation of humanitarian aid during wartime and the compliance with laws of war, including the protection of civilians, to the provision of U.S. arms and military assistance. The letter, which became public Tuesday, gives the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu one month to comply, which would delay any action until after the U.S. presidential election.

While the letter from Austin and Blinken, addressed to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, does not explicitly reference a possible suspension of arms transfers, it represents an implicit warning that the United States could curtail or halt those shipments if Israel does not ensure that desperate Gazans can access food, medicine and other necessities.

Their missive underscores the extreme friction surrounding America’s ties with the Jewish state, a relationship characterized by close coordination amid the Israeli military’s ongoing war against Hamas, the Iranian-backed militant group whose fighters attacked the country on Oct. 7, 2023, but also intense strains over Israel’s conduct of that fight.

It comes at a moment of heightened fear in Washington about mounting instability across the Middle East, as Israel expands a new campaign against the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Pentagon deploys U.S. troops and air defense equipment to Israel amid the country’s heightened tensions with regional power Tehran.

“We’re looking to see concrete measures taken to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which we know continues to be an issue,” the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary, Sabrina Singh, told reporters. “We want to see … that they’re considering civilians in the battle space, and that’s what we’ve said from the beginning.”

The United States is by far Israel’s largest external backer, providing the country $3.8 billion a year in military aid. An Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive communications between the two governments, said the correspondence is being “thoroughly reviewed.”

“Israel takes this matter seriously,” the official said, “and intends to address the concerns raised in this letter with our American counterparts.”

Critics of President Joe Biden’s handling of the conflict in Gaza – where more than 40,000 people have died in the past year of conflict, according to local health authorities – have blamed him for not effectively leveraging American support to persuade Israel to comply with U.S. demands for an end to the violence in Gaza and a steady flow of food and other aid supplies.

Since the war began, Biden has halted only one shipment of U.S. weapons bound for Israel. In May, the president decided to continue the flow of arms despite an administration review that found Israel had contributed significantly to the insufficient flow of aid to Palestinian civilians.

The letter follows a similar message Blinken sent the Israeli government in April, which officials said resulted in a temporary improvement in aid flows into the battered enclave. But the picture in Gaza has darkened once more in recent weeks, as Israeli officials have returned to areas where they cite the resilience of Hamas, particularly in the battle-ravaged northern areas.

According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), no food has entered northern Gaza since early October, increasing the risk of famine amid what it has described as an Israeli “siege” of the area. Residents who have been displaced multiple times have fled parts of northern Gaza once more in the past week amid a renewed Israeli offensive in the area.

The Israeli military office that oversees aid distribution in Gaza, COGAT, has denied that Israel has halted the entry or coordination of aid in northern Gaza. Israeli officials have acknowledged shortfalls in the delivery of aid since the beginning of the conflict but primarily blame Hamas and criminal gangs for the problems.

Biden made his displeasure with the situation in northern Gaza known to Netanyahu when the two leaders spoke last week, noting “the imperative to restore access to the north, including by reinvigorating the corridor from Jordan immediately,” according to the White House.

The war has emerged as a major political liability for Biden, whose Democratic Party is now split over U.S. support to Israel. It remains unclear how the war will impact the chances of Biden’s vice president, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, when she faces off with former president Donald Trump in November’s election.

Trump’s Republican Party has been seeking to capitalize on Harris’s vulnerability with Arab and Muslim voters due to the bloodshed in Gaza.

In their letter, Austin and Blinken laid out specific criteria the Biden administration would like to see within the next month, including ensuring the entry of at least 350 aid trucks a day into Gaza; putting in place humanitarian pauses to enable aid delivery; lifting evacuation orders when they are no longer needed; enabling aid shipments from Jordan; and halting the isolation of northern Gaza.

The letter, which circulated on social media, also said Israel “must … act” on the measures that it lists within the 30-day deadline to avoid “implications for U.S. policy.” It called on Netanyahu to “ensure” that a measure before the Knesset which would ban all government contact with UNRWA – the main U.N. agency providing humanitarian assistance in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – “does not come to pass.” The letter referenced widespread reports of abuses in Israeli prisons, where thousands of Palestinians have been detained since Oct. 7. Ongoing denial of access to them by the International Committee of the Red Cross, it suggested, is a violation of international law.

News of Blinken and Austin’s letter emerged just hours after the Pentagon confirmed the arrival of American troops and equipment in Israel that are part of a new deployment of one of its most advanced missile defense systems there. Approximately 100 troops are eventually expected to be positioned in Israel to operate the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system.

The system is intended to bolster Israel’s already robust air-defense network as the country prepares to conduct a counterstrike following Iran’s ballistic missile barrage on Israel this month. The Biden administration has urged Israel to conduct only a limited response to avoid further deterioration of regional security. Netanyahu informed Biden in a recent call that his country would limit its retaliatory action against Iran, in line with U.S. appeals, to military rather than energy or nuclear sites.

While Biden administration officials Tuesday made clear their frustration with the humanitarian situation in Gaza as well as the heavy civilian death toll of Israel’s recent operations in Lebanon, they repeatedly avoided, under questioning from reporters, making explicit threats about cutting off the flow of U.S. military aid, saying instead that they hoped Israeli leaders would make the changes demanded in the letter.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that the level of humanitarian aid is half of what it was at its peak. But he declined to detail what will happen if Israel does not comply with the U.S. requests.

“Ultimately, what we want to see here is results,” he told reporters. “Our hope is that Israel will make the changes that we have outlined and that we have recommended, and that the result of those changes will be a dramatic increase in humanitarian assistance.”

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the letter “was not meant as a threat.”

“The letter was simply meant to reiterate the sense of urgency we feel and the seriousness with which we feel it about the need for an increase, a dramatic increase in humanitarian assistance,” he said in a phone briefing with reporters. “That’s what you can do with your ally. And it’s not the first time we’ve, we’ve communicated that to Israel. But hopefully we won’t have to communicate it again.”

Asked why the Biden administration did not simply cut off aid to Israel immediately, given Netanyahu’s repeated defiance about the concerns about the civilian toll, Miller said it was “appropriate to give them some time to work through the different issues and find ways to get the level of trucks, get the level of food, water, medicine, back up to acceptable levels.”

U.S. officials said they believe giving Israel 30 days to comply with the demands – vs. forcing a faster schedule – was reasonable, given the complexity of the response required and the schedule of U.S. weapons deliveries.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who’s now with the International Crisis Group, said relevant U.S. laws include the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act. The Arms Export Control Act says the executive branch can only transfer arms to nations that use those weapons consistent with the laws of war and the U.N. Charter, and the Foreign Assistance Act bars U.S. military aid from going to nations that restrict the delivery of U.S. humanitarian aid.

“What we see here is the culmination of frustration across the administration with the way Israel has conducted its military campaign in Gaza” and its actions related to other actors in the region, Finucane said.

The administration’s reluctance to confirm that it would restrict arms shipments fueled immediate doubts about the seriousness of the warning from Blinken and Austin.

Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and a former senior Biden administration official, said he expected that Netanyahu, who has repeatedly defied U.S. requests in the conduct of his war, would be skeptical that Biden had put “real teeth” behind this warning.

“If it is truly different this time – and I hope it is – the White House will need to make that much more explicit,” Konyndyk said. “Otherwise, this will have no more effect than all the warnings he has previously ignored.”