US warns Israel of military aid cut if Palestinians inGaza don’t get more supplies

The United States has warned Israel to increase the flow of humanitarian supplies into the war-devastated Gaza Strip within the next 30 days or risk losing military aid, U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The warning came in a letter signed by the U.S. secretaries of defense and state that was sent Sunday to Israel’s defense minister and its minister of strategic affairs. It was confirmed Tuesday by State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller.

Miller said the amount of aid entering Gaza in September was the lowest it had been at any time since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that set off the Israeli invasion.

“What we have seen over the past few months is that the level of humanitarian assistance has not been sustained,” Miller told reporters in Washington. “In fact, it has fallen by over 50% from where it was at its peak.”

The warning came as the Israeli government told the Biden administration that it would not strike Iran’s nuclear enrichment and oil production sites when it responds to Tehran’s recent missile attack on Israel, officials said. That concession may reduce the immediate likelihood of an all-out war between the two adversaries.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said that Israel had agreed to focus its next attack on military targets in Iran. The Biden administration believes that if Israel were to hit oil or uranium enrichment sites, it could set off a dramatic escalation of Middle East hostilities at a time when Israel is already at war with Iran’s regional proxies, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Even if Israel spares Iranian nuclear and oil sites, it could still hit Iranian missile launchers, storage depots and factories that produce missiles and drones, as well as military bases and government buildings, according to two Israeli officials briefed on the planning process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss military matters.

While no final decision is believed to have been made, the Israeli retaliation for Iran’s missile barrage Oct. 1 could be large in scale — and possibly prompt Iran to continue the cycle of attacks. And officials said the Israeli pledge to avoid nuclear and oil sites, previously reported by The Washington Post, related only to its next attack against Iran, meaning that it could still hit more contentious targets in the future.

“We listen to the opinions of the United States, but we will make our final decisions based on our national interests,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement Tuesday.

As the Middle East waits anxiously for Israel’s expected strike, the deputy commander in chief of Iran’s Quds Force, Gen. Ali Fadavi, told reporters at the funeral Tuesday for a general slain in an earlier Israeli airstrike in Lebanon that Iran could “eliminate all Zionists” if it wanted to.

The acting leader of Hezbollah also issued threats, promising to inflict more damage on Israel, which has invaded southern Lebanon and pounded the country with airstrikes to stop the militants from launching rockets at it. In a televised address, the Hezbollah leader, Sheikh Naim Kassem, said that it would now strike deeper inside Israeli territory in a new stage of the war that he called “make the enemy feel pain.”

Kassem said that only a cease-fire would allow the approximately 60,000 Israelis displaced by Hezbollah rocket fire to return to their homes near the Lebanese border. If Israel keeps fighting, Hezbollah will, too, he said, and millions of Israelis “will be in danger, at any time, any hour, any day.”

About 1 million people in Lebanon, including at least 400,000 children, have been displaced by Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets, according to U.N. officials.

The American warning to Israel that it faces potential aid cuts came as U.S. and U.N. officials say that conditions in Gaza, where most of the population has been displaced and basic necessities are in short supply, have deteriorated still more in recent weeks. That is particularly the case in the territory’s north, as Israel has placed increasing restrictions on the delivery of international aid.

Miller would not specify the possible consequences for Israel if it did not allow more aid into the territory, but a copy of the letter, posted online by a reporter for Axios, clearly raised the possibility of a military aid suspension. U.S. law forbids military aid to any country found to be blocking the delivery of U.S.-provided humanitarian aid.

Israeli officials had no immediate comment on the letter. But the Israeli agency that oversees policy for the Palestinian territories, COGAT, said Monday that 30 aid trucks had passed a crossing point into northern Gaza.

“Israel is not preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, with an emphasis on food, into Gaza,” it said in a statement.

Even as the United States has pushed Israel to allow more food and other aid into Gaza, it has continued to send military supplies to Israel, most recently with an advanced air defense system and 100 U.S. troops to operate it.

Analysts were skeptical that the latest prodding by the Biden administration would have much of an influence on Israeli leaders.

“The Israelis will do enough to appear to be improving the humanitarian conditions, and the administration will play along regardless of how serious that effort is,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator for the United States who is now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“It strains the bounds of credulity to the breaking point to believe that the administration would act to restrict U.S. military aid to Israel as the Iran-Israel crisis heats up,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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