How weak humanitarian diplomacy abetted a cataclysm

On October 13, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent a letter to the Israeli government. In it, they expressed profound concern about the impediments Israel has placed on the flow of aid to Gaza in the course of Israeli military operations.

The letter explicitly noted that U.S. law requires the United States to suspend arms sales and security cooperation with governments that impede the delivery of U.S.-provided aid. And it gave Israel a 30-day deadline to take “urgent and sustained actions to reverse” Gaza’s spiraling humanitarian crisis, delineating a set of concrete measures it expected Israel to take, including drastically increasing the number of trucks that can enter Gaza, rescinding evacuation orders that have displaced millions, and halting pending legislation that would bar efforts by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (known as UNRWA) to help Palestinian civilians.

Israel failed to adequately respond to any one of those conditions by the letter’s deadline. When Refugees International and seven other prominent aid groups conducted a detailed analysis of 19 discrete actions the U.S. government had asked Israel to take, we found that Israel had demonstrated no meaningful action on 15 of them and had only partially addressed the remaining four. President Joe Biden’s administration, however, has refused to impose any consequences on Israel for this failure, arguing that half measures and vague promises constituted a sufficient response.

This may be the starkest example of the Biden administration’s appalling failure to hold Israel to account for flouting its humanitarian obligations in its war in Gaza. But it is hardly the only one. From the earliest days of the war, Biden and his top advisers have repeatedly called on Israel to protect humanitarian relief efforts—and then stood by as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government displaced nearly the whole population of Gaza, drove many Palestinians into starvation, blocked aid groups from accessing the strip, and killed humanitarian personnel. 

The results in Gaza speak for themselves: today, an estimated 50,000 children need treatment for malnutrition. Only four of the 19 bakeries supported by the World Food Program are operational, and just 17 of the 36 hospitals that Gaza had before the war are even partially functional. UNICEF estimates that 95 percent of Gaza’s schools have been damaged or destroyed, and over 1.9 million people—90 percent of Gaza’s population—remain forcibly displaced.

Faustian bargain

Neither the obstacles Israel put on aid delivery nor the demands in the letter that Blinken and Austin sent were substantively new. For over a year, Israel has exercised a near-absolute command over the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, controlling incoming aid shipments and aid organizations’ movements. The Israel Defense Forces have long been the greatest threat to aid workers’ safety there; more humanitarian personnel have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war than throughout the rest of the world combined. A litany of statements by U.S. senior officials over the past year have conveyed deep concern that the Israeli government is refusing to take numerous steps within its power to alleviate Gaza’s increasingly catastrophic conditions.
Both USAID and the U.S. State Department have explicitly said that Israel is obstructing humanitarian assistance.

As far back as February 2024, Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, publicly decried the bottlenecks that the Israeli government has created for the flow of aid and pleaded that aid workers “have to know they can do their jobs without being shot at and killed.” On October 9, 2024, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the Security Council that “actions by the Israeli government,” including the closure of border crossings and new bureaucratic restrictions on aid deliveries, were “intensifying [the] suffering in Gaza.” David Satterfield, who served as Biden’s humanitarian envoy on Gaza from October 2023 through April 2024, argued publicly after departing the role that Israel has ample means to alleviate Gazan civilians’ suffering but that “the will” to do so “has never been present.” And this past September, ProPublica reported that both USAID and the State Department’s refugee bureau had explicitly informed Blinken that Israel was deliberately obstructing U.S. humanitarian assistance.

The letter Blinken and Austin sent constituted a formal, if tacit, acknowledgment of Israel’s direct responsibility for the unconscionable conditions in Gaza. But Netanyahu seems to have assumed—correctly—that there would be no consequences if Israel did not bother to comply with the letter’s demands. In fact, since Blinken and Austin sent their letter, the humanitarian crisis has only worsened. Both the UN World Food Program and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s Famine Review Committee, the global body that issues famine projections, recently issued renewed warnings that Israel’s operations are driving northern Gaza toward imminent famine.

The failure of the United States’ diplomatic effort to improve Gaza’s humanitarian conditions is rooted in two fundamental flaws: first, commingling humanitarian diplomacy with cease-fire diplomacy even as cease-fire negotiations foundered; and second, an absence of political will at the highest levels of the administration to hold Israel accountable for its humanitarian obligations under U.S. and international law.

The U.S. strategy to link humanitarian aid and a cease-fire was a  mistake.

The first flaw was baked into U.S. strategy very early in the war. In remarks in November 2023, the senior Biden adviser Brett McGurk voiced the U.S. view: that securing a cease-fire was the main thing the U.S. government could do to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza—and, indeed, that the prospect of improved conditions might induce Hamas to make concessions. “The release of [a] large number of hostages would result in a significant pause in fighting … and a massive surge of humanitarian relief,” he suggested. This statement prompted an uproar from aid groups and legal scholars, who pointed out that conditioning access to humanitarian aid in this way blatantly violates the laws of war. The White House sought to partly walk back the comments, arguing in private conversations with aid group representatives that the administration was simply acknowledging a dynamic that already existed: both parties to the conflict were using humanitarian relief as a bargaining chip in larger negotiations.

But the fact is that the Biden administration adopted an aid-for-hostages logic itself in its negotiation efforts. Administration officials argued in public and in private discussions with aid groups that the best way to increase aid flows was to secure a cease-fire—and that their efforts toward a cease-fire therefore effectively functioned as the main component of their humanitarian diplomacy. A prolonged cease-fire certainly would have enabled a dramatic expansion of humanitarian-aid efforts. But the real-world effect of staking so much on that prospect was a lost year in which the United States deferred pressuring Israel to alleviate Gaza’s suffering as long as there was some hope of a cease-fire. Israel remained mostly free to impede the delivery of aid to Gaza, provided it could string along the Biden administration in protracted cease-fire negotiations.

Pressure salve

The two goals of easing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and accomplishing a cease-fire should never have been so closely coupled in the first place. International law is unambiguous that humanitarian relief cannot be denied to put pressure on a civilian population. Doing so constitutes collective punishment and a clear war crime. Legally, a warring party is obliged to facilitate and protect relief efforts for civilians irrespective of the status of any cease-fire negotiations, and neither Hamas nor Israel has the right to use the welfare of Palestinian civilians in Gaza as a negotiating chip.

Beyond the legal dimension, linking humanitarian aid and a cease-fire was a strategic mistake. By now, it is clear that Israel’s practice of limiting relief in Gaza did not soften Hamas’s negotiating posture; if anything, it emboldened the group by delegitimizing Israel on the world stage. And securing a cease-fire required an unattainable level of diplomatic alignment between Hamas, over which the United States has little influence, and Israel, whose warfighting strategy the United States has been reluctant to dictate. Pairing the two tracks yoked humanitarian relief to the far thornier matter of aligning both parties to the conflict on the terms of a cease-fire.

Gazans’ unconscionable suffering will be an indelible stain on Biden’s legacy.

It did not have to be this way. Israel retains control over the bulk of humanitarian relief operations in Gaza and could do far more to enable the flow of aid, irrespective of Hamas’s posture. The U.S. government should have used its substantial leverage with the Israeli government to pursue humanitarian diplomacy on its own terms, holding Israel accountable for its obstructionism. The full tragedy of the Biden administration’s unwillingness to deploy its leverage with Israel can be understood by contemplating the substantial effect it did have during a brief period in which it used some of that leverage.

The most significant improvements to Israel’s policies on humanitarian access followed a ramp-up of U.S. pressure during the early months of this year, and the progress collapsed after that pressure receded. In February, Biden issued a national security memorandum requiring Blinken to assess whether Israel was violating U.S. law by obstructing aid to Gaza and report his findings to Congress in May. Aid flows into Gaza had hit a low point, and the Famine Review Committee issued its first warning of an imminent famine in Gaza, making Blinken’s scrutiny more urgent.

Then, on April 1, an Israeli airstrike killed four World Central Kitchen staff. On a tense call with Netanyahu immediately following the killings, Biden issued an ultimatum that Israel must facilitate more aid to Gaza and institute fresh measures to protect humanitarian personnel. The very next day, the Israeli government made concessions that it had previously resisted: it agreed to open a new border crossing to allow aid into northern Gaza, it let aid transit through the Israeli port of Ashdod, and it agreed to establish a new aid corridor to Gaza from Jordan. These concessions had a rapid effect. In April, more aid flowed into Gaza than in any other month in the course of war. Refugee International’s interviews with both Palestinians and representatives from other aid groups suggested that these changes meaningfully improved conditions and held off the projected onset of famine.

But this progress was short-lived. On May 10, Blinken reported to the U.S. Congress that Israel was complying with the conditions of Biden’s February memo and was not blocking aid to Gaza. As that scrutiny lifted, the Israel Defense Forces unleashed its devastating offensive in Rafah, which was by then sheltering half of Gaza’s population. Despite U.S. warnings that any Rafah operation must safeguard humanitarian operations and protect displaced Palestinians, the ensuing operation did neither. Roughly a million Palestinians were displaced again with little notice and no support. Israel closed the Rafah border crossing and rendered the Kerem Shalom crossing virtually inaccessible to aid groups, choking off Gaza’s principal aid pipelines. It also forced aid agencies to evacuate Rafah, which had become the principal logistics and personnel hub for aid operations across the entirety of Gaza.

The Rafah offensive marked a blow from which the humanitarian effort to help suffering Gazans never recovered. Rather than threatening to withdraw military support from Israel, as it did after the World Central Kitchen strike, the Biden administration declined to put muscle behind its warnings. The White House pivoted back toward a focus on securing a cease-fire, and humanitarian priorities faded into the background. There would not be another major U.S. push on humanitarian conditions in Gaza until the October letter.

The lost year

A tragic irony is that in 2018, a host of future Biden officials—including his eventual national security adviser, secretary of state, director of national intelligence, UN ambassador, and USAID administrator—wrote an open letter arguing that to compel a recalcitrant U.S. ally to adhere to its humanitarian obligations, the United States must be ready to suspend military support. The offending party in that case was Saudi Arabia. The letter criticized President Donald Trump’s “blank check” support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen, which was fueling a humanitarian catastrophe; in language that eerily anticipated their own future posture toward Israel, the writers condemned “the folly of unconditional support.” The U.S. attempt to use the promise of future military assistance as “leverage to push the [Saudi] coalition to abide by international humanitarian law,” they wrote, had been an abject failure.

Had Biden officials taken their own advice when it came to Gaza, they might have saved countless lives. Instead, little now stands in the way of famine in northern Gaza and the deepening of the devastation that grips the rest of the territory. Gazans’ outlook is likely to worsen when Trump takes the reins, as his incoming administration has signaled that it will give Netanyahu an even freer hand. But Biden’s refusal to put real weight behind his rhetoric squandered the opportunity to shore up Gazans’ access to aid before this moment comes. Their unconscionable suffering will be an indelible stain on his legacy.

Eremy Konyndyk is president of Refugees International and a former head of disaster assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

(Source: Foreign Affairs)