The US has demanded proof on the ground that Israel does not have a policy of starvation in northern Gaza as it turned up the pressure on the Netanyahu government to allow more aid into the territory.
The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the security council on Wednesday at a meeting convened by France UK and Algeria that such a policy “would not just be horrific and unacceptable” but also had “implications under international and US law”.
“The government of Israel has said that this is not their policy, that food and other essential supplies will not be cut off, and we will be watching to see that Israel’s actions on the ground match this statement,” she added.
Her warning came after a US government letter sent to Israel privately on Sunday, warning it would partly cut off arms supplies unless the supply of aid was permanently transformed within 30 days.
The sudden surge in pressure is in part a response to growing fears that Israel may be trying to force Palestinians to leave northern Gaza using starvation, but also reflects a new assertive line being pushed by the US vice-president, Kamala Harris, worried her election prospects will be damaged if the administration is seen to have presided over an enforced mass exodus.
Thomas-Greenfield also warned that civilians must not be declared combatants by Israel if they fail to obey instructions to leave northern Gaza.
Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, said Israel “remains committed to working with our international partners to ensure aid reaches those who need it” in Gaza. He denied there was a shortage of aid in Gaza and said the “problem is Hamas, which hijacks the aid – stealing, storing and selling it to feed their terror machine”.
UN statistics show the number of convoys crossing into Gaza collapsed in October.
Joyce Msuya, the acting head of UN humanitarian affairs, accused Israel of impeding food convoys and told the security council: “Given the abject conditions and intolerable suffering in north Gaza, the fact that humanitarian access is nearly nonexistent is unconscionable.”
She said that nearly 400 Palestinians had reportedly been killed and almost 1,500 injured in the past week in Gaza. “The world has seen the images of patients and displaced persons, sheltering near al-Aqsa hospital, burning alive,” she told the security council. “Scores of others, including women and children, are suffering the excruciating pain of severe life-changing burns. There is no way to get them the urgent care they need to survive and manage such injuries. If such horror does not awaken our sense of humanity and propel us to action, what will?”
In its volte-face over the weekend, Washington sought commitments to open border crossings that have been kept shut since the beginning of October, after months of refusing to use US weapons supplies as leverage on Israel. Past pressure from the US over the supply of aid into Gaza has normally led to Israel lifting the blockages, but it has subsequently reverted to well-documented stricter bureaucratic controls on aid once diplomatic pressures eased.
A senior Israeli general staff officer reacted to the US pressure cautiously on Tuesday, saying: “We take orders only from the chief of staff and pass them on to the divisional commanders. There is no starvation of the population here in order to evacuate them. No way.”
In the past two days, he added, the IDF had taken unusual measures in order to bring convoys of trucks to Jabaliya, despite the fighting. “Not much has changed in the routine of humanitarian aid,” he said. “The decisions and the plans are made only on the basis of operational planning.”
The US is demanding the entry of at least 350 aid trucks into Gaza each day through all four major crossings controlled by the IDF. It also requires adequate pauses in fighting to allow aid to flow, and written undertakings that Israel is not seeking to starve and drive Palestinians from northern Gaza. The letter, sent to the minister of defence, Yoav Gallant, and the strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, and signed by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and its secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin, said there had been a recent reduction in the amount of aid entering Gaza.
It said the amount of aid that entered Gaza in September was the lowest of any month during the past year, figures that were confirmed at a UN security council meeting last Thursday and had dropped by more than 50% since March.
Cogat, the Israeli military body that oversees aid distribution in Gaza, posted on social media on Wednesday that 50 trucks carrying humanitarian aid – including food, water, medical supplies and shelter equipment provided by Jordan – were transferred to northern Gaza through the Allenby Bridge crossing and the Western Erez crossing. It added that 145 humanitarian aid trucks entered Gaza via the Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings.
The Blinken-Austin letter also signalled an unusual defence of the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, Unrwa, saying that restrictions on the organisation being proposed by the Israeli government “would devastate the Gaza humanitarian response at this critical moment and deny vital educational and social services to tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which could have implications under relevant US law and policy”.
The demarche signals how the US is offering contrasting levels of support in the three theatres of war that Israel is operating, and in the process risks sending mixed messages that may reflect divisions within the US administration.
In Lebanon, the US backed calls in September for a 21-day ceasefire, but then in the wake of the killing of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, appeared to greenlight Israel’s air and ground offensive. The state department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday, however, that Washington had “made clear that we are opposed to the campaign the way we’ve seen it conducted over the past weeks”.
The US is also backing European allies angered by the insistence of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that the international peacekeeping force Unifil leave its posts in southern Lebanon. The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, will visit Italian troop commanders in Lebanon on Friday to confirm that Italy opposes the withdrawal of Unifil forces in the face of Israeli threats. Italy may call for a change in the Unifil mandate.
In the face of an expected Israeli attack on Iran, seen as a reprisal for Tehran’s strikes on Israel at the start of this month, the US is sending an air defence system to supplement Israel’s ability to protect itself from a ballistic missile attack. The supply of the Thaad missile system is part of a bargain designed to ensure Israel holds back from hitting Iranian economic and nuclear targets, an induced self-restraint that might persuade Iran in turn not to mount further retaliation, which could bring the whole region closer to all-out war.