After the US vetoed three previous resolutions, the United Nations security council voted on Monday to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza during the remaining weeks of Ramadan. The UN resolution was approved after Joe Biden’s administration dropped its veto threat and lifted its diplomatic cover for Israel, at least temporarily, by abstaining from the vote.
Has Biden finally decided to use his leverage over Israel to stop its devastating war in Gaza, which has killed more than 32,000 people, the majority of them women and children and displaced over 75% of the population? It doesn’t seem so: on the same day that the US abstained on the UN ceasefire resolution, allowing it to pass, the Biden administration inexplicably declared that Israel had not violated international law or blocked humanitarian aid from reaching desperate people in Gaza.
It’s astounding that the US could make this declaration a week after the UN’s global authority on food security found that famine is imminent in northern Gaza – where 1.1 million people, nearly half of Gaza’s population, are facing catastrophic malnutrition and shortages of food. Since December, humanitarian groups and UN officials have raised the alarm about Israel’s policy of intentionally starving Gaza and the potential for widespread famine. But the Biden administration largely ignored these warnings, and continued to send weapons to Israel despite US laws that prohibit shipping arms to allies that obstruct aid.
“We have not found them to be in violation of international humanitarian law, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance,” Matthew Miller, a US state department spokesperson, said at a press conference on Monday. Miller confirmed that Israel, along with six other countries that are receiving US military aid, had submitted written assurances by a 24 March deadline that they’re not using American-supplied weapons to violate international law.
These declarations are required under a new national security memorandum that Biden issued last month, under pressure from Democratic members in Congress and progressive voters angry over Biden’s unconditional support for Israel since it launched its war on Gaza after the 7 October attack by Hamas. The memo sets out standards that recipients of US military aid must adhere to, and it requires the administration to submit an annual report to Congress. That report, which will be due in May, must explain how beneficiaries of US military support are abiding by international law and allowing the transport of humanitarian aid during active conflicts.
It’s clear that the Biden memo is an exercise in bureaucratic ass-covering, and not any real change in US policy. How else can the administration explain its conclusion that Israel is abiding by international law and not obstructing humanitarian aid as the entire world can see the opposite playing out in Gaza?
As it has done since the start of the war, the Biden administration is taking Israel at its word, despite voluminous evidence of violations of international law. To start, Israel is likely violating parts of the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which both prohibit using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war and consider it a war crime. By continuing to send weapons to Israel, the Biden administration should be worried about not only violating its own policies and US laws, but complicity in potential Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.
On Tuesday, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, delivered a damning report to the UN human rights council, saying that Israel has carried out acts of genocide in Gaza and should be subject to an international arms embargo. “The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” the report said, adding there were “reasonable grounds” that Israel was carrying out three of the five acts defined as genocide under a UN convention adopted in 1948.
In late January, the international court of justice ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide by its military in Gaza, and to allow more humanitarian aid into the territory. The court, which released an interim judgment in a case brought by South Africa, could take years to hear evidence and issue a final ruling on whether Israel has committed genocide. But human rights and international relief groups have documented that Israel continues to ignore the court’s interim orders by obstructing the delivery of food and other aid into Gaza.
The Biden administration is also willing to ignore the world court’s findings, which are binding on its member states. The court does not have its own enforcement powers, but it can refer cases to the UN security council, where the US had consistently used its veto to protect Israel from demands for a ceasefire until this week. So far, Israel shows no sign of complying with the UN resolution that calls for an immediate ceasefire, the release of all remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas, and the removal of “all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance”.
While UN security council resolutions are also considered binding on member states, the council would likely need to pass additional measures, such as sanctions, to punish Israel for not complying with the initial ceasefire resolution. But it seems highly unlikely that Biden would allow such a measure to pass without using the US veto.
In fact, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was so enraged by the Biden administration’s failure to veto the latest UN resolution that he lashed out at the US president by cancelling a high-level Israeli delegation’s visit to Washington scheduled for later this week. The group of Israeli military, intelligence and humanitarian officials was supposed to discuss alternatives to a ground invasion of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have taken refuge. For weeks, Netanyahu has flouted US warnings and insisted that he plans to press ahead with a military invasion of Rafah, despite the devastating impact on civilians.
But Netanyahu managed to put aside some of his anger at Biden: he did not recall the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who is currently visiting Washington with a long wishlist of US weapons that Israel wants to be expedited through required US reviews. These deals include thousands of bombs and other munitions that allow Israel to sustain its brutal war in Gaza, and more sophisticated weapons that take years to build, including dozens of new F-35 and F-15 fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters.
Netanyahu’s strategic temper-tantrum – where he defies the US on protecting civilians in Rafah but continues pleading for more American weapons – encapsulates the dysfunctional US-Israeli relationship under Biden. And it makes clear what the Biden administration has tried to obscure for months: the bloodshed in Gaza would not be sustainable without deep US complicity and support.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, and a journalism professor at New York University
