This is additional pressure, while the White House is divided over the Israeli offensive in Gaza. Friday, May 3, nearly 90 parliamentarians in the ranks of American Democrats urged President Joe Biden to consider interrupting his arms sales to Israel, if the Israeli government does not change its method of fighting Hamas. At the heart of their criticism: the restrictions imposed by Israel on the delivery of humanitarian aid supported by Washington to Gaza, which “contribute to an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe,” the letter said.
If the signatories, including many elected representatives of the House of Representatives, ask the president to make it clear that any obstacle to the delivery of aid to Gaza “endangers Israel’s eligibility for new aid to offensive security from the United States”, the latter however specify that they want to maintain American aid relating to Israeli anti-missile defense systems, making it possible “to save lives”.
On April 29, a coalition of domestic and foreign lawyers, including at least 20 working in the Biden administration, had already called on the president to suspend military aid to Israel, arguing that his actions in Gaza were not consistent with the international humanitarian law, such as the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit disproportionate attacks against civilian populations. During the weekend of April 27, Reuters also reported that some senior US officials had said in an internal memo to Secretary of State Antony Blinken that they doubted the credibility of Israel’s guarantees regarding the use of weapons supplied by the United States, a shared observation by two important NGOs, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam.
Significant military support
It must be said that American support for its ally is significant: while each year Israel received more than $3 billion in military aid, the House of Representatives approved a new envelope of $95 billion for of Israel on April 20, to strengthen in particular the “Iron Dome”, the name given to the Israeli anti-missile shield. Since the Hamas attack on October 7, the United States has also orchestrated more than 100 individual arms transfers without notifying Congress, in order to conceal the extent of the support from the American administration, reports Opinion. In total, according to a note of March 1, 2023, the United States has sent more than $150 billion in aid to Israel since the 1940s, the majority of which (more than 78%) has been used to purchase weapons and equipment military.
For his part, Joe Biden takes an ambiguous line. While he has repeatedly reaffirmed his unconditional support for Israel, the American president has not hesitated in recent days to criticize his Israeli counterpart. “I think what he is doing is a mistake. I do not agree with his approach,” he declared on April 9, calling on the latter to authorize “total access for the next six or eight weeks to food and medicine entering the country.
Two months earlier, however, Washington had vetoed a draft resolution in the UN Security Council calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, for the third time since the start of the war. “We were simply unable to support a resolution today that would have jeopardized sensitive negotiations,” explained National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby at the time.