By Stephen Semler
Abstract: In October 2024, the Biden administration issued an ultimatum for Israel: Improve humanitarian access in Gaza to continue receiving US military aid. Purportedly out of a concern for the rapidly deteriorating conditions in the besieged enclave, the White House gave Israel 30 days to fulfill a list of demands to reverse the downward trajectory of humanitarian conditions. Failure, the administration warned, would jeopardize the US military support upon which Israel relies. At the conclusion of the 30-day deadline, the Biden administration announced no change in policy despite Israel’s failure to meet a single US demand.
This paper draws on new data on incoming humanitarian aid to illuminate the extent of Israel’s unwillingness to comply with the White House’s demands, examining the Biden administration’s unwillingness to hold Israel accountable, and how that further clarifies what US policy actually is. The paper finds that Israel allowed less humanitarian aid into Gaza after the Biden administration’s ultimatum than before it. Additionally, Israel would still be able to starve Gaza even if it met US demands — the Biden administration’s quota on incoming aid, for example, was far below the level USAID and other aid agencies say is required to avert famine in Gaza. It also finds that the single best action the Biden administration could adopt to improve humanitarian access in Gaza is to follow US law, which prohibits providing military aid to countries that obstruct US humanitarian aid.
The paper concludes that the 30-day ultimatum was a public relations stunt; a cynical attempt by the Biden administration to obfuscate the realities of its own existing policy, which has pushed Gaza to the brink of mass starvation.
Citation: Semler, Stephen, 2024. “Israel’s US-backed starvation policy in Gaza,” Security in Context Policy Paper 24-09. November 2024, Security in Context.
1. Introduction: Israeli policy in Gaza is US policy
The Israeli government denies food and other life-saving aid to Palestinians as part of its military campaign in Gaza, and that military campaign is enabled almost entirely by the support of the United States government. Multiple current and former Israeli officials have acknowledged that Israel’s ongoing military operations depend on continued US military support.
For example, retired Israeli general Yitzhak Brik has stated that:
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability…Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Israel’s dependence on US military support coupled with diplomatic and political backing gives the US immense leverage, should it choose to exercise it, over Israeli actions in Gaza. Israel is starving Gaza, and the Biden administration is at the very least allowing it to happen. This may not have been the US’s first policy choice, but it’s the one the Biden administration chose over preventing Israel from starving Gaza.
Still, White House officials insist that the Biden administration has no leverage over Israel. “There is a mistaken belief that the United States is able to dictate other countries’ sovereign decisions,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller has said. In reality, US presidents have stopped Israeli atrocities with a simple phone call, including in 1982 and 2021. Even though President Biden has opted to let Israeli atrocities continue unabated in 2023 and 2024 through his ‘no red lines’ policy for Israel, the extent of this leverage is betrayed occasionally by Israel’s own public statements.
For example, on 9 October 2023, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza, pledging that “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.” (Israel had already cut off electricity to Gaza, two days earlier.) A couple weeks later, when explaining to Israeli lawmakers in the Knesset why Israel had agreed to let a trickle of aid into Gaza, Gallant said, “The Americans insisted and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no?”
Biden is capable of changing Israel’s behavior, but he largely doesn’t; when he does, he only demands very marginal changes. The White House makes significant monetary contributions to the Gaza humanitarian response, but those contributions are easily outweighed by the Biden administration’s operating procedure of “no red lines” — either for Israel or for itself in its support of Israel. Recognizing Biden’s firm control over the situation in Gaza while witnessing that situation speed closer and closer toward mass starvation leads to a grim conclusion. Enabling Israel to impose famine in Gaza is the official, albeit unstated, policy of the Biden administration.
The purpose of the 30-day ultimatum to Israel issued in October 2024 was to make that policy preference less obvious. It was primarily about political optics, not a genuine commitment to humanitarian access as White House officials claimed. This is evident in three ways. First, Israel’s failure to meet any of the Biden administration’s demands resulted in zero changes to US policy. Second, Israel would still be able to starve Gaza even if it met the Biden administration’s demands. Lastly, if the Biden administration was truly concerned about the looming famine in Gaza, it would have followed US law and imposed an arms embargo on Israel, not giving it a 30-day grace period.
2. Biden’s 30-day ultimatum and Israel’s spectacular failure to comply with its demands
The Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel appeared to be nearing a breaking point in October 2024. US vice president and former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris wrote on social media on 13 October that “The UN reports that no food has entered northern Gaza in nearly 2 weeks. Israel must urgently do more to facilitate the flow of aid to those in need. Civilians must be protected and must have access to food, water, and medicine. International humanitarian law must be respected.” US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield warned that the US would not accept a “policy of starvation” in Gaza. “The government of Israel has said that this is not their policy…we will be watching to see that Israel’s actions on the ground match this statement,” she said.
Purportedly out of concern for the imminent famine in Gaza, the Biden administration gave Israel 30 days to improve humanitarian access in Gaza or risk losing access to US military aid. Humanitarian access refers to the ability of humanitarian workers to reach populations impacted by crisis, and the ability of crisis-affected populations to obtain humanitarian assistance. In a letter from 13 October 2024, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin warned Israeli Ministers of Defense and Strategic Affairs Yoav Gallant and Ron Dermer that failure to improve the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza could result in restrictions on military aid under US law. The US spent a record $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel in fiscal year 2024 (1 October 2023 – 30 September 2024), according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
In the letter, the Biden administration ordered Israel to “surge all forms of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza.” The Biden administration would evaluate Israeli compliance based on its implementation of 15 demands (see Annex), but the bulk of the scrutiny would ultimately be directed at the first one listed — “enabling a minimum of 350 [aid] trucks per day to enter Gaza” — because it’s one of the few quantifiable demands, and among the quantifiable ones, it’s the one most relevant to humanitarian access. What’s more, aid truck crossings as a metric has already been established as a popular measure referenced by Biden administration officials and the media.
The Biden administration made clear that it would not be sufficient for Israel to meet this 350-aid truck threshold just once, or even a few times, during these 30 days. The aid truck requirement, like the 14 others, must effectively become the new normal: “Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for U.S. policy under…relevant U.S. law” (emphasis added). The relevant US law, discussed later in this paper, is Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits the President from providing military assistance to any country that obstructs the delivery of US humanitarian aid.
The White House’s letter was sent on 13 October, implying that this “sustained commitment” must be demonstrated between and including 14 October and 12 November. Due to a lag time in reporting, complete data for these 30 days became available from the United Nations (UN) on 18 November. Unlike previous analyses, this paper evaluates incoming aid trucks data into Gaza for all 30 days.
So did Israel demonstrate a sustained commitment in allowing 350 aid trucks into Gaza each day? No, not even close. During the aforementioned 30-day period, Israel allowed just 56 aid trucks per day into Gaza, on average — less than one-fifth the amount required by the Biden administration. The highest number of aid trucks it allowed into Gaza on a single day during this stretch was 129; the lowest number was zero.
As Figure 1 shows, not only did Israel fail to let in 350 aid trucks on a single day since the October 13 letter (this 30-day period is the shaded area in the graph below), it didn’t meet this threshold before the letter, either — Israel has never allowed 350 or more aid trucks to enter Gaza on any day since its military offensive in Gaza began in October 2023. These historical figures also reveal that Biden administration officials have been giving the press incorrect data. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller has repeatedly said that Israel has let in over 300 trucks per day. For example, on 15 October 2024, he said, “The changes that [Israel] made caused humanitarian assistance to increase. We got up to somewhere between 300 to 400 trucks going in on some days to Gaza.” That’s not true. The most aid trucks Israel has let in on a single day was 298, on 3 May 2024.
Figure 1 also shows that Israel made the opposite of progress during this 30-day period compared to the preceding months since October 2023. Israel on average allowed two-thirds more aid trucks into Gaza before the White House’s letter (93) than the 30 days after it (56). The declining amount of humanitarian aid entering Gaza is attributable to Israel and Israel alone. This decline is not due to a lack of demand — humanitarian needs in Gaza are higher than ever. It’s not due to a lack of supply, either. The IDF said earlier this month that there are currently over 600 aid trucks waiting on IDF approval to enter the Gaza Strip and drop off their cargo. The number of aid trucks forced by Israeli authorities to idle outside Gaza at any given time ranges from several hundred to several thousand. This has been the case since October 2023.
Figure 1.
The data mentioned above and used in Figure 1 were retrieved from a database maintained by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Israel often disputes OCHA data, claiming that the organization deliberately undercounts aid truck totals for political reasons, and asserts that the correct numbers are available through Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the IDF unit that oversees the humanitarian response to Gaza and tracks all incoming cargo to the besieged enclave.
OCHA and COGAT are ultimately counting different things. When an aid truck approaches the Gaza border, Israeli forces first inspect it on the Israeli side of the IDF border checkpoint. Then, if approved, the truck is waived across the Gaza border and drops off its cargo on the Palestinian side of the IDF checkpoint for pickup by aid agencies. COGAT counts trucks as they cross the border; OCHA counts the truckloads of aid as they arrive at UN warehouses or are otherwise made available to humanitarian agencies in Gaza.
OCHA’s counting method can result in undercounts for particular days. This is why the figures above are subject to change — OCHA will retroactively update its database if it receives information that more aid trucks came in on a given day. However, COGAT’s tallying method systematically produces overcounts. First, IDF security requirements typically limit aid trucks to 50 percent capacity, meaning that Israel’s truck count can’t be equated with truckloads, while OCHA counts truckloads. Second, the IDF includes commercial cargo in its humanitarian aid tally. These are not the same thing for the basic reason that only the latter is geared toward humanitarian needs. Commercial products in Gaza are prohibitively expensive. Put simply, the IDF counts commercial cargo in its aid figures even though it does not qualify as aid.
The Biden administration’s 350-truck requirement pertains to humanitarian assistance, not commercial goods. There is a separate demand in the aforementioned letter calling on Israel to allow an additional “minimum of 50-100 commercial trucks per day.” This means that if Israel complied with the US truck demands, IDF data should show that Israel let in at least 400 trucks per day, on average. Instead, Israel’s own data shows that it’s continuing to block humanitarian aid: on 2 November, COGAT said it allowed 76 trucks into Gaza each day over the last 30 days, on average. Ultimately, the difference between UN and Israeli data in terms of compliance with the Biden administration’s truck quota is the difference between Israel meeting just 16 percent or 19 percent of the quota, respectively.
In addition to failing to meet the truck quota, Israel also failed to meet the Biden administration’s other 14 requirements, and took actions that further compromised humanitarian access in Gaza. An evaluation from eight leading humanitarian organizations published on 12 November 2024 — the final day of the administration’s 30-day deadline — reached the following conclusion:
“Israel not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza. That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago.”
On the same day that that evaluation was published, the White House announced that there would be no change in policy despite Israel’s spectacular and comprehensive failure to meet the Biden administration’s aid truck quota and 14 other demands. This communicated that the Biden administration was never serious about enforcing its own demands concerning humanitarian access in Gaza; instead, it signaled that the intent of the 30-day deadline was merely for the administration to be perceived as committed to the humanitarian and human rights values it espoused in its letter to Israeli leadership.
3. The Biden administration’s demands were about political optics, not humanitarian access
The Biden administration’s ultimatum was primarily about political optics, not humanitarian access. Otherwise, it would have demanded concrete and quantifiable improvements in Palestinians’ access to urgently-needed humanitarian aid in the quantities needed to avert famine in Gaza. The only quantifiable metrics the Biden administration demanded concerned actions that gesture toward, but do not actually measure, humanitarian access.
The White House’s aid truck quota is case in point. In terms of political optics, it gave the Biden administration a firm, empirical, and impressive-sounding benchmark to give to the press. In terms of humanitarian access, Israel could still impose famine on Gaza even if it let in 350 aid trucks per day, for two main reasons.
First, Biden’s aid truck quota may sound like a lot, but 350 aid trucks per day is still insufficient to address the threat of famine in Gaza. UN officials and other aid agencies say 600 aid trucks must enter Gaza each day to meet people’s minimum needs. One of these aid agencies is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which has repeatedly said that 600 aid trucks — containing food and other humanitarian supplies — must enter Gaza each day. In May, USAID chief Samantha Power said in a statement that “[B]arely 100 trucks of aid a day entered Gaza” in the last two weeks, “far less than the 600 needed every day to address the threat of famine.”
Even after USAID determined that 600 aid trucks are needed in Gaza daily, Biden only required Israel to let in 350 per day. After Israel ended up allowing an average of just 56 aid trucks to enter Gaza each day during the 30 days after the White House made its demands, the Biden administration refused to hold Israel accountable. Figure 2 puts these numbers into perspective.
Counting the number of incoming truck crossings into Gaza make for convenient photo ops for publication and promotion by Israeli authorities, but it’s not a good measure of humanitarian access. Biden’s truck quota effectively gave Israel license to continue starving Palestinians so long as Israeli leaders made more of an effort to make it seem like they’re not doing it intentionally. Israel didn’t end up making much of an effort.
Figure 2.
Second, there is no guarantee that even 600 daily aid trucks would be enough. While counting the number of aid trucks dispatched into Gaza is a useful metric by which to gauge Israeli obstruction of humanitarian assistance at the border, neither the number of aid trucks that enter Gaza (as the IDF counts them) or even the number that reach warehouses in Gaza (as OCHA counts them) can be equated to the amount that actually reach Palestinians in need. In theory, they should be. In Gaza, they are not. This is because Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian assistance does not stop at the border; it restricts the delivery of humanitarian assistance inside Gaza in a variety of ways. This includes killing aid workers, of course, but also more subtle methods like denying aid workers access to certain areas and delaying their movements.
As Israel lets less and less aid into Gaza, it obstructs more and more of the aid it does let it in. Humanitarian groups need permission from Israeli authorities to deliver aid to most places in Gaza. A few things can happen after aid groups submit a “facilitation request” to the IDF to deliver aid. Israel accepts the aid group’s request and allows the humanitarian mission to proceed unencumbered. Or Israel approves the request, but then blocks or delays the mission once it’s underway, causing the aid group to abandon or only partially complete the mission. Another possibility is that Israel approves the request, but then the aid group cancels its planned mission. Cancellations are often due to security concerns (e.g., Israeli bombardment) or logistical problems (e.g., unexploded ordnance contamination on roads) — these issues also prevent aid groups from filing a request in the first place. Lastly, Israel can reject the humanitarian movement outright and for no stated reason.
The IDF highlights the number of missions it approves, but includes in that total number the ones it approves but then directly impedes, and the cases where aid groups are forced to cancel their mission due to problems often stemming from Israeli military operations. In October, Israel denied or impeded 59 percent of these facilitation requests — up 11 percent from the previous high in September — and facilitated just 37 percent (the remaining 4 percent were withdrawn). The last time Israeli authorities approved more than 50 percent of these requests was in July. Israeli authorities appear to impose delays or denials based on the type of aid to be delivered by the humanitarian mission. For example, OCHA has reported that UN food convoys are three times more likely to be denied access to north Gaza than non-food aid convoys. Israeli authorities have not provided an explanation.
Here is a specific example of how Israel’s systematic obstruction of humanitarian aid can apply to the aid trucks the IDF does let into Gaza and even clears for distribution. Because Israeli forces have cut off northern Gaza from the south, any humanitarian movements that must travel between those two areas must pass through an IDF checkpoint. The IDF has two checkpoints between the north and south, but it refuses to operate more than one at a time. This means that all humanitarian missions — responding to massive humanitarian demands in Gaza — must use the same checkpoint, resulting in bottlenecks that prevent delivery of urgently needed assistance. When an IDF checkpoint gate broke in late September, Israeli forces did not open the other checkpoint. As a result, various humanitarian teams were stranded in the north for 13 nights before they were able to cross back to the south. These delays disrupt essential missions, eat up scarce resources, and make personnel and transport unavailable for other aid missions.
4. The Biden administration’s (non-)compliance with US law
The third and final indication that the 30-day ultimatum was just humanitarian cover for the Biden administration’s inhumane policy is the fact that the ultimatum was issued in the first place. There is no legal or moral explanation for the White House’s decision to give Israel a 30-day grace period instead of enforcing US law. The single best policy the Biden administration can enforce for humanitarian access and famine prevention in Gaza is to simply uphold the law.
The conclusion of the 30-day deadline on 12 November 2024 should have marked the beginning of a US arms embargo on Israel. The only legitimate counterargument is that one should have been imposed a long time ago. The reason is simple: US law is clear about prohibiting military assistance to countries that obstruct US humanitarian aid. This is spelled out in Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act:
“No assistance shall be furnished under this Act or the Arms Export Control Act to any country when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”
Of all the laws governing the provision of US military assistance, Section 620I is among the lesser-known ones for the simple reason that it’s rare for countries receiving US military aid to jeopardize that aid by obstructing its benefactor’s humanitarian assistance.
But the law certainly applies here. The Biden administration enacted a record $17.9 billion in military aid for Israel in fiscal year 2024. The US is also by far the top funder of humanitarian activities in Gaza, meaning that US humanitarian aid is virtually assured to be obstructed by Israel as it restricts humanitarian aid as part of its use of starvation as a weapon of war. Crucially, Section 620I excludes a requirement that all US humanitarian assistance be directly or indirectly obstructed; i.e., even partial restrictions on US humanitarian assistance are enough to trigger Section 620I and its ramifications.
To avoid triggering Section 620I, the Biden administration has relied on a legal loophole in order to continue arming Israel: By avoiding making a formal assessment that Israel is in violation of Section 620I, the White House avoids triggering an arms embargo on Israel as the law demands.
In May, the administration reported to Congress that it did not “currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery” of humanitarian aid. The Biden administration followed the same playbook on 12 November, when it announced that there would be no change in policy despite Israel’s failure to meet US demands on humanitarian access. State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said, “Currently, we have not made an assessment that they are in violation of U.S. law.”
If the Biden administration was truly committed to improving humanitarian conditions in Gaza and upholding human rights, it would follow US law. This is what the international humanitarian community has effectively been asking for. More than 250 humanitarian and human rights groups are calling for an arms embargo on Israel, in part because “Gaza’s remaining lifeline — an internationally-funded aid response — has been paralyzed” by Israel’s siege and attacks on Gaza. The signatories to the joint statement are urging UN member states to “stop fueling the crisis.”
In other words, because the easiest route for successful humanitarian access in Gaza is an end to Israel’s military operations there, it follows that the best policy that the Biden administration should pursue is to follow US law. Due to Israel’s reliance on US military support to prosecute its military operations, a US arms embargo unlocks the ceasefire that Israeli leadership has rejected in favor of continuing its military operations. As is written in a May USAID report, delivering “humanitarian assistance at the scale required across Gaza is not feasible in the absence of a ceasefire.”
The administration’s de facto excuse for not complying with US law — thereby denying humanitarians the conditions needed to prevent famine in Gaza — is, cruelly, humanitarian “progress.” As a very recent example, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, State Department deputy spokesperson Patel claimed on 12 November that the Israelis showed improvement because of the administration’s 30-day deadline, and that the Biden administration was committed to improving humanitarian access in Gaza.
“We’ve seen some progress being made,” Patel said, “We would like to see more changes happen. We believe that had it not been for U.S. intervention these changes may not have ever taken place.”
On the same day as Patel’s comments, USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network reported that “humanitarian access to deliver food, nutrition, and health services has been nearly fully suspended in North Gaza since October 1,” and warned that “in the absence of a dramatic increase in food supply flows, famine will become the most likely outcome.” In southern Gaza, “food assistance supply flows have remained very low for six consecutive months.”
5. Conclusion
The 30-day ultimatum illuminates a grotesque tension at play among White House leadership. The Biden administration believes that its Israel policy should not be constrained by human rights law, but still badly wants to be seen as committed to upholding human rights. The White House’s letter to Israeli officials gestured at a commitment to human rights by expressing concern over the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Gaza and demanding of Israel improvements in humanitarian access purportedly to ameliorate those conditions.
But the ultimatum was all for show, a public relations maneuver to create the illusion of a commitment to human rights and distance itself from the mass starvation policy it is enabling. That the demands were not enforced, that they were written in a way that would still allow Israel to starve Gaza, and the context in which the ultimatum itself was issued all reveal how deeply unserious the Biden administration was about deviating from the genocidal status quo. In this way, the administration’s PR stunt backfired — it’s now clearer than ever that the Biden administration’s policy is enabling mass starvation in Gaza. The 30-day ultimatum for Israel may not have changed US policy, but it clarified what that policy is.
Annex 1
Here are the demands listed by the Biden administration in accordance to the letter to Israeli leadership on October 13. The outline format below reflects the format used in the letter.
1. Ahead of winter, surge all forms of humanitarian throughout Gaza by:
-Enabling a minimum of 350 trucks per day to enter Gaza through upholding your prior commitment to allow assistance to enter Gaza consistently through all four major crossings (Erez West, Erez East, Gate 96, and Kerem Shalom), as well as opening a new fifth crossing.
-Instituting adequate humanitarian pauses across Gaza as necessary to enable humanitarian activities, including vaccinations, deliveries, and distribution, for at least the next four months.
-Allowing people in Muwasi and the humanitarian zone to move inland before winter.
-Enhancing security for fixed humanitarian sites and movements.
-Rescinding evacuation orders when there is no operational need.
-Facilitating rapid implementation of the World Food Program winter and logistics plan to repair roads, install warehousing, and expand platforms and staging areas.
-Ensuring Israeli Coordination and Liaison (CLA) officers can communicate with humanitarian convoys at checkpoints and assign division-level liaison officers from Southern Command to the Joint Coordination Board.
-Removing restrictions on the use of container and closed trucks and increasing the number of vetted drivers to 400.
-Removing an agreed list of essential items from the dual-use restricted list.
-Provided expedited clearance processing at the Port of Ashdod for Gaza-bound humanitarian assistance.
2. Ensure that the commercial and Jordan Armed Forces (JAF) corridors are functioning at full and continuous capacity by:
-Waiving customs requirements on the JAF corridor until such time as the UN is able to implement its own process.
-Allowing the JAF to enter the Gaza Strip through the northern crossings, and others as agreed.
-Reinstating a minimum of 50-100 commercial trucks per day.
3. End isolation of northern Gaza by:
-Reaffirming that there will be no Israeli government policy of forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza.
-Ensuring humanitarian organizations have continuous access to northern Gaza through northern crossings and from southern Gaza.
