US Secretary of State Antony Blinken addresses a press conference in Tel Aviv on January 9, 2024, during his week-long trip aimed at calming tensions across the Middle East, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.
Alberto Pizzoli | AFP | Getty Images
The United States announced Tuesday that there will be no significant policy shift towards Israel, at the conclusion of a 30-day U.S. deadline for improvement in humanitarian aid delivery to Gaza.
“We, at this time, have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of the US law,” State Department principal deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said at a press briefing in Washington.
“We have seen some progress being made, we’d 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,” said Patel.
The demands and the deadline were laid out in a joint letter from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, delivered Oct. 13. If Israel wants to continue to qualify for foreign military financing under U.S. law, Blinken and Austin wrote, at least 350 trucks per day of aid must be allowed to enter the war-ravaged Gaza Strip.
The letter also called on Israel to provide heightened security for humanitarian sites, and an increase in the number of humanitarian pauses to its military operations.
One month later, a daily average of just over 30 trucks a day are being let into Gaza, according to Philippe Lazarini, commissioner general of the United Nations agency assisting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.
Palestinians, including children, wait to receive food distributed by an aid organization in Deir Al Balah, Gaza on November 10, 2024.
Ashraf Amra | Anadolu | Getty Images
Patel defended the decision not to change the U.S. posture towards Israel, which has come under intense scrutiny both at home and abroad.
“We want to see the totality of the humanitarian situation improve, and we think some of these steps will allow the conditions for that to continue to progress,” Patel said.
Meanwhile, international organizations continue to sound the alarm on the humanitarian toll of Israel’s war in Gaza. A consortium of humanitarian aid groups recently assessed that Israel has not made significant progress on any of the U.S. demands.
More than 43,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the conflict began in Oct. 2023, triggered by a surprise Hamas attack on Israel that claimed more than 1,000 lives.
The lion’s share of those killed in Gaza have been women and children who died in strikes on residential buildings, the United Nations Human Rights Office said in a release earlier this month.
Outgoing President Joe Biden has been steadfast in his support for Israel, which he reaffirmed to be “ironclad” following a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the Oval Office on Tuesday.