As Israeli tanks and ground troops have moved to surround the southern city of Khan Younis amid relentless airstrikes, hundreds of thousands of civilians — many of whom have fled there from the north — are out of places to run.
“It’s not so much a question of intent,” a senior administration official said of Israel’s reported acquiescence to U.S. entreaties. “Intent is fine, but what matters are consequences … the impact on the ground” of Israeli actions. “This is what concerns us … and we are watching very carefully.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic conversations.
On Thursday, at a media availability with British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, Blinken reaffirmed that Israel has an obligation to put a “premium on protecting civilians and maximizing humanitarian assistance.”
“And there does remain a gap between exactly what I said when I was there: the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we’re seeing on the ground,” Blinken added.
But so far, the administration hasn’t shown any willingness to use its leverage with Israel — limiting either its supply of weaponry or its vocal support for what White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Thursday called Israel’s right to “go after this very legitimate threat” from Hamas — to pressure the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to comply more fully with U.S. appeals.
Washington has adopted what amounts to a good cop-bad cop approach in its public statements, coupling each assertion of Israel’s right to eliminate the threat from Hamas with increasingly defensive expressions of concerns about the deaths of civilians and the humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
“Look, we certainly share the concerns … about the humanitarian situation in Gaza,” Kirby said. “Name me one other nation, any nation, that’s doing as much as the United States to alleviate the pain and suffering of the people of Gaza? You can’t. You just can’t. The United States, through President Biden, is leading the effort to get trucks, food, water, medicine and fuel in to the people of Gaza. … And name another nation that is doing more to urge the Israeli counterparts, our Israeli counterparts, to be as cautious and deliberate as they can be in the prosecution of the military operations. You can’t.”
At times, the United States and Israel appear to be operating in two different realities. The Biden administration has repeatedly said it envisions a future, postwar Gaza under the administration of the Palestinian Authority that now rules the West Bank.
On Wednesday, in response to a media report that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has said the authority is ready to accept control of Gaza, Netanyahu posted a reply on X, formerly Twitter. “As long as I am the Prime Minister of Israel,” he wrote, “this will not happen.”
Blinken and others have said there can be no Israeli occupation or decrease of Palestinian territory after the war, but they acknowledged the need for a “transition” period after Netanyahu countered, in a November ABC interview, that Israel would have security responsibility for Gaza for “an indefinite period” after the war. Senior Israeli officials have also spoken of a permanent buffer zone, inside Gaza’s border, to protect Israeli security.
There have been some visible U.S. diplomatic successes, including the week-long pause in fighting — negotiated by the United States, Israel and Qatar, representing Hamas — that allowed about 100 hostages to be released. As a direct result of U.S. pressure, according to administration officials, Israel’s security cabinet agreed Wednesday night to allow an increase in fuel shipments into Gaza, which had largely stopped after the pause in fighting.
“There would be no hostages released and no aid coming into Gaza at all if it weren’t for U.S. intervention and Biden’s personal intervention,” said Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a former diplomat who advised both Republican and Democratic administrations on Arab-Israeli issues.
“It’s not as if the Biden administration has done nothing,” Miller said. “But let’s be clear. Biden has tethered himself to Israel’s war aims, and he has now attached his administration to a freight train that is charging through Gaza with the aim of eradicating Hamas’s military presence above and below ground and killing its leadership.”
Biden and Netanyahu spoke Thursday morning, according to a White House readout of the phone call, which noted that the U.S. president “stressed that much more [humanitarian] assistance was urgently required across the board.”
Thinking that Israel’s goals could be achieved in an area where millions of civilians are now crowded into a very small space “without bringing grievous harm to the civilian population is magical thinking,” Miller said.
It was unclear how much fuel entered Gaza through the Rafah crossing from Egypt on Thursday. According to Israeli media reports, the cabinet vote to allow an increase came after Washington demanded that the current level of fuel deliveries of about 60,000 liters (about 16,000 gallons) per day be doubled or tripled.
Netanyahu’s office wrote on X that a “minimal” amount of fuel “necessary to avoid a humanitarian collapse and the outbreak of epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip” would be “determined from time to time by the war cabinet according to the morbidity situation and humanitarian situation in the [Gaza] Strip.”
The situation described Thursday by Martin Griffiths, the U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, at a news conference in Geneva was the most pessimistic since the conflict began with the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
The message from the humanitarian community “writ large, not just the U.N.,” he said, “is that we do not have a humanitarian operation in southern Gaza that can be called by that name anymore. That the pace of the military assault in southern Gaza is a repeat of the assault in northern Gaza. That it has made no safe place for civilians in southern Gaza.” As a result, he said, the plan for delivering aid “is in tatters.”
The limited number of trucks carrying aid through the Rafah crossing, Griffiths said, “is at best humanitarian opportunism,” allowing limited numbers of vehicles “to try to reach through some roads which are still accessible, which haven’t been mined or destroyed, to some people who can be found, where some food or some water or some other supply can be given.”
In response to U.S. insistence for a plan that would avoid the scorched-earth offensive that has left northern Gaza in rubble, Israel has distributed maps that divide the area into hundreds of numbered, small spaces. It regularly issues calls — to those who can receive them amid electricity and communication blackouts — telling Gazans to evacuate certain numbered areas and move to “known shelters,” according to one announcement this week by the Israel Defense Forces.
According to the United Nations, 80 trucks carrying aid entered Gaza on Wednesday — less than half of the number during the pause in fighting, and far less than the pre-Oct. 7 average of about 500 — but the only area where aid could safely be delivered was in the far southern city of Rafah. A number of Gaza-based distribution trucks are stranded in the central part of the enclave and unable to reach the south.
Blinken, at his news conference, said there were “a number of things” the Israelis should be focused on. The administration wants them to tell civilians where to go and when so they can be safe from the fighting, and make “very clear when the periods of being able to move from one place to another are in place,” he said. Israeli forces must ensure these “daily pauses” apply to a broad area, not just a single neighborhood, so that people “have confidence to know that they can move out of harm’s way” and pledge to “fully” supply the safe zones with food, medicine and water.
Biden is under increasing pressure on Israel from both political parties, with most Republicans and many Democrats demanding nothing less than full support for Israel, while a growing number of Democrats have joined international calls for a cease-fire.
That call was amplified Thursday by the Arab League and the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which joined in supporting a new U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution to be offered by the United Arab Emirates that is scheduled for a vote Friday.
The United States, which has twice vetoed similar efforts in the past two months, has indicated it will oppose the measure, again on grounds that calling a permanent cease-fire would leave Hamas free to attack Israel again.
