Over the past year of war in Gaza, Israel has been controlling the entry of food to the Gaza Strip, at times blocking it completely and at other times allowing only small amounts of it.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has played a vital role in the famine in the Gaza Strip. Beginning with turning a blind eye to the targeting of humanitarian aid trucks to covering up Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid.
Blinken’s actions enabled Israel in its genocide in the Gaza Strip and helped arm it.
Blinken Approves Striking The Humanitarian Aid Trucks
According to a new report from the Drop News Site outlet, Antony Blinken has approved the targeting of aid convoys in Gaza.
In October 2023, Blinken participated in discussions with Israel’s War Cabinet. The discussions concluded that humanitarian aid to Gaza should be resumed but only for civilians.
In a speech that was revealed to the media, Blinken said that the U.S. and Israel have reached an agreement to enable humanitarian aid from donor nations and multilateral organizations to reach civilians in Gaza, stressing that if Hamas blocked humanitarian assistance from reaching civilians in any way, the U.S. would be the first to condemn it and would work to prevent it from happening.
Although one can not find any mention of the striking of aid trucks controlled by Hamas, the Israeli media starkly conveyed that the substance of the Blinken-approved policy was to bomb any aid truck controlled by Hamas and to halt the aid after that.
Israel Hayom, the Israeli news outlet affiliated with Netanyahu’s family, reported that Israeli officials were promised that they could strike humanitarian aid trucks controlled by Hamas.
The Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich said, “We in the cabinet were promised at the outset that there would be monitoring, and that aid trucks hijacked by Hamas and its organizations [sic] would be bombed from the air, and the aid would be halted.”
It should be noted that Hamas has civilian rule in the Gaza Strip as it has governed it since 2007. One of its roles in the Strip is to organize the process of the entry of food into the Strip, delivering it to civilians.
With Blinken’s decision, the police in Gaza could not organize the process of food entry anymore and the process was given to international organizations.
However, even international organizations were regarded as terrorists by Israeli officials. In December 2023, Israel’s Ministry of Defense declared seven charitable organizations as terrorist organizations - one of them is the Turkish IHH organization which has had many charitable activities in the Strip since the beginning of the war.
U.S. Officials Maintained That The U.S. Had Not Signed Such An Agreement
When the spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State Matthew Miller was asked about the agreement between Blinken and Israel, he claimed that the suggestion of the U.S. signing on targeting humanitarian aid trucks in the Gaza Strip is “absurd.”
Miller stressed that Israel has the right to target Hamas fighters in the same context.
State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel previously used the same justifications with the same wording when asked by Drop Site News about the agreement.
Patel said that the suggestion is “absurd” and also stated that “Israel has the right to strike Hamas militants.”
Israel Aims To Increase The Famine In Gaza While The U.S. Offers Lip Service
At the end of 2023, the U.N. Security Council voted on a resolution to facilitate the entry of aid into Gaza. The decision was watered down under U.S. pressure.
However, Israel was still creating massive obstacles to the distribution of humanitarian aid inside Gaza. Aid trucks would normally be delayed due to the military and Israeli protesters egged on by the government to block aid trucks. Some of the food in the trucks may reach Gaza rotten.
Still, the Israeli military was not satisfied by the many obstacles obstructing the aid trucks’ route and began to strike them.
On February 5, the Israeli military fired on a U.N. convoy carrying vital food supplies in central Gaza. No one was hurt but much of the convoy’s contents were destroyed, especially the wheat, which was hardly found in Gaza back then.
The U.S. State Department did not condemn the attack despite the serious situation of the famine in Gaza but just described it as “unacceptable,” although the attack was a possible war crime.
Just four days later, eight Palestinian police officers who were escorting humanitarian convoys were killed by Israel.
The U.S. State Department special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues David Satterfield commented on the targeting describing it as a major obstacle to the delivery of aid, still refusing to simply rebuke Israel.
As the previous attack of killing police officers organizing the food delivery did not get much response from the International community or U.S. officials, Israel repeated the attack a month later. On March 29, ten policemen were also targeted and killed while securing aid deliveries in two separate attacks, along with some of their family members and an unrelated bystander.
With this attack, Israel made it clear that it aimed to increase famine in Gaza by creating a chaotic situation in which aid could not be delivered.
Then, on April 1, the Israeli drones targeted a three-car convoy in three different airstrikes, several kilometers apart, belonging to the World Central Kitchen. Seven aid workers were killed.
Blinken said that the victims of the WCK’s workers are heroes and that the U.S. urged “a swift, a thorough, an impartial investigation to understand exactly what happened.”
However, follow-ups by the U.S. press in the next few months revealed that the State Department was happy to have the investigation conducted by the president and CEO of one of Israel's largest arms manufacturers, the ultimate culprit.
At least 291 aid workers were killed by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip. However, over the one-year war, the U.S. had not condemned the killing of any of them but just offered lip service while trusting Israel to investigate its crimes.
Despite Evidence, Blinken Coveres Up The Israeli Blockade To Humanitarian Aid And Helped Arming Israel
Accompanying its intensive strikes on Gaza, Israel continues to block humanitarian aid. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, 83% of required food aid does not make it into Gaza. People in Gaza have gone from having an average of two meals a day to just one meal every other day.
This Israeli blockade was covered by U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken.
The independent investigative news outlet ProPublica has issued an investigation on the deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. The outlet said the U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment that Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian and medical aid into Gaza to top diplomats in late April.
However, despite the concrete proof provided in a detailed 17-page memo, Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept the memo’s findings.
Responding to the USAID memo, Blinken said in a statement on May 10 that the U.S. does not assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or restricting the delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.
According to ProPublica which obtained a copy of USAID’s memo, the agency said that the famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance.
As U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid, Blinken seems to deliberately ignore Israel’s restrictions on aid deliveries to continue arming its forces.
Israel Circulated Fake Claims On Hamas Taking Over Aid Convoys Or Targeting Them
Israel has repeatedly claimed that Hamas militants looted the aid meant for the civilians in the Gaza Strip while basing their allegations on dubious videos.
In November 2023, Israel’s Arabic account on Facebook published a video showing people looting a UNRWA warehouse, where humanitarian aid was stored, claiming that the robbers were members of Hamas. The video was also shared by Israeli officials as the former Israeli Prime Minister's spokesperson to the Arab world, Ofir Gendelman.
Misbar’s correspondent in Gaza examined the claim and interviewed evacuees from where the video was captured, Khan Younis Training College which is affiliated with the United Nations Relief Agency. People from the site affirmed that the robbers were civilians, not members of Hamas.
When the WCK’s vehicles were targeted by Israel in Deir el-Balah city in the Gaza Strip, several Israeli accounts claimed that Hamas was the one who caused the explosion, not Israel.
Mossad Commentary, a prominent Israeli source, and other pro-Israeli accounts had claimed that the explosion was a result of a side bomb planted by Hamas for the Israeli forces in Deir al-Balah.
A visual investigation conducted by Misbar’s team revealed that one of the World Central Kitchen vehicles was struck from the roof, contradicting the claim of a side bomb planted by Hamas.
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