A top Biden administration official told humanitarian aid groups that Israel is too close of an ally for the US to suspend arms over blocking food and medicine entering Gaza, POLITICO reported on Wednesday.
Lise Grande, the administration’s special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, reportedly told leaders of over a dozen aid organizations at an August 29 meeting that the US would resort to other tactics to make Israel allow aid into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, such as international pressure through the UN.
She repeatedly stressed that the Biden administration’s support for Israel was unchanged and that the administration would not halt weapons shipments.
According to detailed notes from the meeting and three anonymous attendees interviewed by POLITICO, Israel is part of a “tight circle of very few allies” that the administration won’t object to, nor will it “hold anything back that they want.”
“She was saying that the rules don’t apply to Israel,” one anonymous person who attended said. Another attendee said that they got the sense that the US can’t play “bad cop” with Israel.
Arms embargo letter
POLITICO’s report comes after top US government officials sent a letter to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer urging them to address the humanitarian aid situation in Gaza, which the US said had declined by as much as 50% over the past few months.
The US gave Israel 30 days to revise the situation before it will begin to restrict military aid.
However, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Wednesday that the government had seen immediate improvements after the letter was sent earlier this week. For example, the Jordanian military delivered 50 aid trucks on Tuesday after the IDF reopened the aid route to north Gaza on Sunday.
Miller noted that some changes would take longer to implement.
“Our hope is that Israel will take the steps that we outlined,” he said, adding that the government hoped that the threat would remain hypothetical and that there would be no further implications.
According to POLITICO, Grande told attendees that the administration believes Israeli intelligence reports that detailed Hamas’s frequent theft of humanitarian aid from civilians.
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