Portside

The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death — likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.

It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”

In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”

Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”

The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.

Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede U.S. provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.

Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.

In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four U.S. officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.

“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”

A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.

“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.

The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo, Lew’s cable and their broad conclusions were also previously reported.

But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy — along with Lew’s decision to undermine them — reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.

Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.

The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.

“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”

Aid trucks wait in Egypt at the border with Gaza on Sept. 9. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime — money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.

One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.

In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.

Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.

In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”

“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”

As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.

The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.

Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.

In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.

In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.

USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.

Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.

Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.

On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.

Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.

The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.

But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.

The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”

By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.

“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.

It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”

Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)

But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.

The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.

Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.

===

Brett Murphy is a reporter on ProPublica’s national desk. His work uncovering a new junk science known as 911 call analysis won a George Polk Award, among other honors.

brett.murphy@propublica.org