The people of Gaza are enduring “catastrophic” levels of hunger, and famine is imminent in northern Gaza as Israel continues its devastating war and siege of the Palestinian territory. That stark warning came in a report on Monday from a global authority on food security which was set up 20 years ago by UN agencies and humanitarian groups to sound the alarm on famines.
While Israel bears much of the responsibility for this human-made famine, it’s not alone. Joe Biden and his administration are also complicit in this unfolding catastrophe: the UN and international relief groups have been warning about the potential for widespread starvation in Gaza since December. The Biden administration could have acted then, pressuring Israel to allow more aid into the territory and enforcing an existing US law that bars weapons shipments to US allies that obstruct humanitarian aid.
Instead, the US president and his aides dithered, as they have done repeatedly since Israel launched its war against Gaza after the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas. And it’s now too late to prevent a famine. As Martin Griffiths, the UN’s top emergency relief official, wrote on Twitter/X: “The international community should hang its head in shame for failing to stop it … We know that once a famine is declared, it is way too late.”
The aid group Refugees International was even more direct, noting that the “opportunity to avert famine in Gaza has been lost. A famine is now getting underway”. The group’s president, Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden administration official, wrote on X that a formal declaration of famine is retroactive, and often lags behind reality on ground. (For example, about half of the estimated 260,000 people killed by starvation in Somalia, between 2010 and 2012, had already died by the time a famine was formally declared in 2011.)
The Biden administration and Israel’s other supporters in the west can’t claim that they did not know the severity of the hunger crisis in Gaza, and the impact of Israel’s policy of intentionally starving a population of 2.3 million into submission.
The UN’s hunger monitoring group, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) – which includes the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization and other agencies – warned in a report in December that Gazans were facing widespread starvation within several months. The IPC cautioned that by early February, half of Gaza’s population would be in an “emergency” phase – defined as high acute malnutrition and excess mortality, and one level below the highest phase on the IPC’s scale, “catastrophic” conditions.
In its latest report on Monday, the IPC adjusted its projection – saying that 1.1 million people, nearly half of Gaza’s population, are now facing the highest level of malnutrition and catastrophic shortages of food. The report declared that famine is imminent in northern Gaza and “projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024”. While the world often hears warnings about famine as a result of war, the IPC has only raised this kind of alarm twice before: in Somalia in 2011 and South Sudan in 2017.
In other words, the IPC is fairly conservative in its assessment of food insecurity, and the Biden administration should have listened to its warnings about impending famine months ago. But Biden continued his strategy of unconditional backing for Israel, which he announced soon after the Hamas attacks. During a visit to Tel Aviv in mid-October, Biden embraced Benjamin Netanyahu in a bear hug, a gesture that has come to symbolize the dysfunctional US-Israeli relationship.
Biden’s aides have insisted that the president’s unwavering public support for Israel would allow him to exert pressure on the Israeli prime minister’s government behind the scenes. But Netanyahu and his hardline ministers continue to openly defy the US, Israel’s most important ally, without paying any price.
For months, Biden’s aides have been leaking stories claiming that the administration is close to a break with Netanyahu over his handling of the Gaza war – one report even said he called Netanyahu an “asshole” at least three times in private. But Biden’s supposed exasperation with Netanyahu has not translated into a change in US policy: the administration continues to provide US diplomatic cover for Israel at the UN security council and other world bodies, and a steady flow of weapons that allow Israel to sustain its brutal war.
And Netanyahu continues to flout Biden. In the latest example, he told Israeli legislators on Tuesday that, despite US opposition, he plans to press ahead with a ground invasion of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have taken shelter. A day earlier, during a phone call with Biden, Netanyahu had promised to send a delegation of Israeli military, intelligence and humanitarian officials to Washington to discuss alternatives to a military invasion of Rafah.
Netanyahu has consistently embarrassed and broken his promises to Biden since the start of the war. In January, during a call with Biden, he pledged to facilitate a shipment of US flour – enough to feed one million Gazans for a month – through the Israeli port of Ashdod. But Israel’s extremist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, blocked the shipment for nearly two months, as the UN and international relief officials continued to warn of the risk of widespread famine.
The Biden administration proved itself unable or unwilling to force Israeli officials to reverse their policy of obstructing large portions of the food and other aid mobilized by the international community from reaching Gaza as starvation loomed. At that point, Biden could have invoked a legal justification to stop the massive US weapons shipments to Israel: one part of the Foreign Assistance Act, passed in 1961, forbids the US government from providing arms to a country that is blocking American humanitarian aid.
On 12 March, Bernie Sanders, the independent US senator from Vermont, along with seven Democratic senators, wrote to Biden urging him to enforce that law. “According to public reporting and your own statements, the Netanyahu government is in violation of this law,” the legislators wrote, adding that the US “should not provide military assistance to any country that interferes with US humanitarian assistance”.
Biden and his aides could have prevented famine from taking hold in Gaza if they had listened to warnings from the UN and acted sooner. But the administration chose not to use an existing US law to force Israel to lift its siege and allow aid to reach desperate Gazans.
Instead, Biden has clung to his failed “bear hug” policy toward Netanyahu and his rightwing government. Since October, the Biden administration rushed tens of thousands of bombs and other munitions – approved under more than 100 separate military sales, the majority of which were not subject to Congressional or public scrutiny – to help Israel carry out one of the most destructive bombing campaigns in modern history.
Netanyahu will continue to be emboldened to defy and humiliate Biden, as long as Biden avoids using the most effective leverage he has over Israel: Washington can force a ceasefire by cutting off the supply of bombs that Israel drops on Gaza. Anything less will not absolve Biden and his administration of complicity in Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war and the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza today.
Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a journalism professor at New York University
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