WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden’s administration has concluded that Israel is not currently impeding assistance to Gaza and therefore is not violating U.S. law, the State Department said on Tuesday, even as Washington acknowledged the humanitarian situation remained dire in the Palestinian enclave.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in an Oct. 13 letter gave their Israeli counterparts a list of specific steps that Israel needed to do within 30 days to address the worsening situation in Gaza. Failure to do so may have possible consequences on U.S. military aid to Israel, they said in the letter.
On Tuesday, as the deadline mentioned in the letter expired, State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel repeatedly declined to say if the criteria had been fulfilled. But he told reporters that Israel had taken steps to address the demands and that Washington would continue to assess the situation.
“We’ve seen some progress being made. We would like to see some more changes happen. We believe that had it not been for U.S. intervention, these changes may not have ever taken place,” Patel said, adding that Washington would continue to assess Israel’s compliance with U.S. law.
Eight international aid groups, including Oxfam and Save the Children, said in a report that Israel had failed to meet the demands by the Tuesday deadline.
In a later statement on Tuesday, the Palestinian Hamas militant movement that rules Gaza criticized the Biden administration’s assertion that Israel had taken measures to improve the humanitarian situation in the enclave.
The assessment was “an affirmation of President Biden’s complete partnership in the brutal genocide against our people in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas said.
The group again accused Washington of providing political and military cover for Israel and protecting it from being held accountable.
Biden, whose term ends soon, has offered strong backing to Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel in October 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages.
More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since then. Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble where more than 2 million Gazans seek shelter as best they can.
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a Nov. 4 briefing that despite Israel’s measures to increase aid access the results on the ground in Gaza were not good enough.