Thought Portal

Govt. Agencies Found Israel Blocked Gaza Aid. Blinken Told Congress Otherwise

A report by ProPublica found that Israel blocked life-saving food and medicine from reaching Palestinians in Gaza

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks before boarding a plane, Oct. 11, 2023, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, en route to Israel. Jacquelyn Martin/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

A 17-page memo from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) detailed instances of Israel deliberately interfering with humanitarian aid efforts including the killing of aid workers, bombing hospitals, and denying trucks carrying food and medicine from entering Gaza, where the United Nations has declared a “full-blown famine” in the northern region.

In April, USAID sent their findings to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau determination was made known to top diplomats. U.S. law requires that the government suspend weapons shipments to any country blocking U.S.-backed humanitarian assistance. Despite the memo and list of evidence cited, Blinken rejected the assessment, ProPublica reported on Tuesday.

Following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, President Biden and his administration have continually emphasized its commitment to a cease-fire and hostage deal in Gaza. Since the Israeli cabinet declared war against Hamas, however, the U.S. has delivered more than 50,000 tons of missiles, artillery, and other military equipment, Israel’s Defense Ministry stated last month.

ProPublica wrote that both Blinken and the Biden administration did not accept the findings from the U.S. government’s top two authorities on humanitarian aid. In Blinken’s statement to Congress on May 10, he said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

According to a copy obtained by ProPublica of a cable between U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, and Blinken, the ambassador expressed that Israel’s war cabinet, comprising Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to handle humanitarian shipments to Palestinians in Gaza. Despite assessing that “Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede U.S. provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine, Lew wrote that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance.]”

Editor’s picks

A former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau, who worked on different versions of Blinken’s statement to Congress, resigned over the final version’s conclusion. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” Stacy Gilbert said in a statement shortly after her departure. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.”

On the day Blinken sent his report to Congress, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, (D-MD), denounced the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements” of the National Security Memorandum, or 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,” he wrote in a statement. “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.”

Among the evidence listed in the memo was a report that lifesaving food had been stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port — enough flour to feed 1.5 Palestinians for five months. In February, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich issued a directive to block deliveries of flour to the main U.N. agency for Palestinians and cited allegations that some of its employees were affiliated with Hamas.

At least 930 trucks of food, medicine, and other aid were held in Egypt awaiting approval from Israel as of March, USAID’s memo detailed. The memo to Blinken also cited numerous incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by airstrikes even after some had shared their locations and received approval from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Israel’s government has insisted that most of those violent incidents were unintentional.

On April 1, seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) workers were killed by an Israeli strike while delivering aid to Gaza. The workers were traveling in two armored cars branded with the charity’s logo in a de-conflicted zone, WCK said in a statement following the deadly tragedy. The seven killed were from Australia, Poland, United Kingdom, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada, and Palestine. “Despite coordinating movements with the IDF, the convoy was hit as it was leaving the Deir al-Balah warehouse, where the team had unloaded more than 100 tons of humanitarian food aid brought to Gaza on the maritime route,” the statement read.

WCK CEO Erin Gore wrote, “This is not only an attack against WCK, this is an attack on humanitarian organizations showing up in the most dire of situations where food is being used as a weapon of war.” {read}

Ruwa Romman, who is a Palestinian American and the first Muslim woman to serve in the Georgia House of Representatives, had hoped to give a speech on Palestine at the Democratic National Convention. 

“I was incredibly honored to be considered,” she told Rolling Stone on Thursday. 

But on Wednesday night, the Uncommitted Movement learned that the DNC would not be offering them a chance to speak on the main stage. The Uncommitted Movement represents more than 700,000 voters who voted “uncommitted” during the Democratic presidential primary campaign in support of Palestine, demanding a cease-fire and an end to U.S. arms shipments to Israel. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel declared war on Hamas, in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel.

The movement’s voters could be especially crucial in Michigan, where more than 100,000 Democratic primary voters checked “uncommitted.” The DNC has provided several untelevised forums to the Uncommitted Movement this week, but refused to allow the group to put a speaker on stage — not even Romman, a Democratic state lawmaker in Georgia, a key battleground state. 

“The reality of the situation is that we genuinely are asking for the bare minimum,” Romman said. “This was a symbolic gesture. This was supposed to be something that we could take back and say, ‘Look, the party is listening.’”

Before the Uncommitted Movement learned that they would not have the chance to speak, its leaders were “heartened because we saw that families of Israeli hostages were invited onto the stage,” Romman said. “So we thought, okay, this is it.”

On Thursday, Mother Jones published a draft of the speech that Romman had hoped to deliver. In it, she talks about the devastation of being “moral witnesses to the massacres in Gaza.”

“But in this pain,” she writes, “I’ve also witnessed something profound — a beautiful, multifaith, multiracial, and multigenerational coalition rising from despair within our Democratic Party.” 

Editor’s picks

She continues: “For 320 days, we’ve stood together, demanding to enforce our laws on friend and foe alike to reach a cease-fire, end the killing of Palestinians, free all the Israeli and Palestinian hostages, and to begin the difficult work of building a path to collective peace and safety. That’s why we are here — members of this Democratic Party committed to equal rights and dignity for all. What we do here echoes around the world.”

Part of Romman’s frustration was that former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan spoke on Wednesday. Duncan, a Republican, has opposed abortion.

“He’s a Republican, an anti-choice Republican, and in this big tent that we were building throughout the week, there was no room for me in it,” she said.

Romman intended to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in her speech. “Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President Harris and defeating Donald Trump who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur,” she says in the draft.

Referencing President Barack Obama’s most famous slogan, she hoped to say: “To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes we can — yes we can be a Democratic Party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars. That fights for an America that belongs to all of us — Black, brown, and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like my grandfather taught me, together.”

Kabosu, the world wide web-famous Shiba Inu who straddled multiple meme eras as the face of “doge,” has as died. She was 18.

Kabosu’s owner, Atsuko Sato, said her dog died — “crossed the rainbow bridge” — Friday, May 24. “She went very peacefully without suffering, as if falling asleep while feeling the warmth of my hands petting her,” Sato said. “Thank you all so much for loving Kabosu all these years. I am certain that Kabosu was the happiest dog in the world. That makes me the happiest owner in the world. I would like to express my deepest appreciation to everyone who has sent us much love to us.”

As mentioned earlier, a good UV sanitizer will only work through direct exposure. So UVC radiation can only inactivate a virus if the virus is directly exposed to the UV rays. The effectiveness of an UV sanitizer also depends on the dose and duration of the device. As the FDA says, most UVC lamps sold for home use are of low dose, “so it may take longer exposure to a given surface area to potentially provide effective inactivation of a bacteria or virus.”

These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI

Over 100 artists including Rage Against the Machine co-founders Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha, along with Boots Riley and Speedy Ortiz, have announced that they are boycotting any concert venue that uses facial recognition technology, citing concerns that the tech infringes on privacy and increases discrimination. 

The boycott, organized by the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, calls for the ban of face-scanning technology at all live events. Several smaller independent concert venues across the country, including the House of Yes in Brooklyn, the Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, and Black Cat in D.C., also pledged to not use facial recognition tech for their shows. Other artists who said they would boycott include Anti-Flag, Wheatus, Downtown Boys, and over 80 additional artists. The full list of signatories is available here.

“Surveillance tech companies are pitching biometric data tools as ‘innovative’ and helpful for increasing efficiency and security. Not only is this false, it’s morally corrupt,” Leila Nashashibi, campaigner at Fight for the Future, said in a statement. “For starters, this technology is so inaccurate that it actually creates more harm and problems than it solves, through misidentification and other technical faultiness. Even scarier, though, is a world in which all facial recognition technology works 100% perfectly – in other words, a world in which privacy is nonexistent, where we’re identified, watched, and surveilled everywhere we go.”

Facial recognition technology at venues has grown increasingly controversial over the past several months, particularly as Madison Square Garden Entertainment and James Dolan have garnered scrutiny for using the tech to kick out lawyers affiliated with ongoing lawsuits against the company. Several attorneys had been removed last year from events at MSG’s venues including its eponymous arena and Radio City Music Hall. Last October, attorney Barbara Hart was removed from Brandi Carlile’s Madison Square Garden Concert because her law firm was litigating against MSG in a class action lawsuit. (Hart herself wasn’t involved with that suit.)

Perhaps the protests were too utopian, not pragmatic enough, and had some things backward. But I am not interested in fixating on what the young and impatient Occupiers should have done instead. There is no simple formula for what makes social movements effective, for how to back up their numbers and networks with the power to make lasting change. But too often the focus has been on what the 2011 activists did or didn’t do, rather than the reaction they awakened. Too rarely do we mourn all the hopeful visions forgotten when a phalanx of police comes to restore order.

The fact is that when a global, unarmed movement called for a democracy worthy of the 21st century, the response from those in power was no, with all the cruelty they thought they could afford. The crackdown isn’t even over. Wars that began in 2011 are still raging in Syria and Yemen, and elected authoritarians are still consolidating power. Trump’s “favorite dictator,” Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has made the crackdown a way of life. They are not done.

The reaction against the movements of 2011 has demonstrated how dangerous real democracy can seem to those who gain from its decline. The consequences are everywhere around us. So much of the mess of the world right now happened because, for some, the noise of democracy was unbearable. In the decade to come, that noise needs to grow louder.