A group of 20 US members of Congress signed a letter urging the Biden administration to withhold offensive weaponry to Israel’s military over its failure to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza as its military continues its 14-month war in the enclave.
The effort from the lawmakers, led by Congressman Greg Casar, is in response to a letter sent by the Biden administration to the Israeli government warning Israel to increase humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza or risk a reassessment of US military support.
“We urge your Administration to adhere to and uphold US law by suspending offensive military transfers to Netanyahu and his government,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter sent on Tuesday.
“Failure to do so not only risks our leverage in ceasefire negotiations, it undermines our country’s own national security and weakens America’s commitment to human rights as a cornerstone of our foreign policy.”
The letter from the Biden administration sent in October came with a 30-day deadline for Israel to meet a certain set of requirements, such as allowing 350 aid trucks a day into Gaza, instituting humanitarian pauses across the strip to allow for humanitarian activities and ensuring there will be no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
The issue of contention with regards to US military assistance to Israel in this case centres around National Security Memorandum 20 (NSM-20), which was introduced by President Joe Biden in February this year.Â
The memorandum states that the US secretary of state must receive assurances that a foreign government will not arbitrarily deny the delivery of US humanitarian assistance in an area of armed conflict where the foreign government is using American-supplied weaponry.
Palestinians sue Blinken over continued US military aid to Israel despite rights abuses
Read More »
However, the 30-day deadline set in the letter passed and there was no US reassessment of military support. Washington eventually said it was satisfied with what Israel had done regarding the humanitarian situation.
That conclusion came even though aid deliveries to Gaza have fallen to record lows.
Earlier this month, the UN announced that it was suspending aid deliveries to Gaza via the Karem Shalom crossing, with aid workers saying that criminal armed gangs were looting the aid deliveries in plain sight of Israel’s military, which is supposed to provide safe passage for the aid.
The lawmakers noted that since the US determined that Israel had satisfied its requirements to mitigate the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which was exacerbated by Israel’s full-scale war on the strip, Israeli forces killed a worker with the international charity Save the Children, and also killed Mahmoud Almadhoun, who ran the Gaza Soup Kitchen that was providing meals to Palestinians in need.
Last week, a larger group of nearly 80 lawmakers wrote a different letter to the Biden administration, calling on it to provide a full assessment of how it concluded Israel met the humanitarian requirements in Gaza that allow the US to continue sending military aid to the country.
A group of Palestinians also filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, accusing him of not abiding by a different law – the Leahy Law – as Washington continues supplying Israel with weaponry despite a number of grave human rights abuses in Gaza.
