U.S. arms sales to Israel have come under increasing scrutiny amid outrage over the deaths of 33,000 people in Gaza, including seven aid workers from the Washington-based food charity World Central Kitchen who were killed in an Israeli airstrike on Monday.
President Joe Biden said in a statement On Tuesday, he was “angry and heartbroken” by the deaths, his latest scathing condemnation of Israel’s war conduct.
Israel called the attack “unintentional” and promised to investigate.
On Wednesday, Biden ignored a question about whether he would impose conditions on U.S. military aid. His aides said the administration was unlikely to do so, citing U.S. support for Israel’s right to defend itself against the “remaining threat” from Hamas.
National Security Council communications adviser John Kirby told reporters on Wednesday that the administration would await the results of the Israeli investigation. “I’m not going to make a decision in advance that hasn’t been made yet,” he said.
In an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, World Central Kitchen founder José Andres accused Israel of “systematically, vehicle by vehicle” targeting the organization’s food convoy. He said he had established clear communication with the Israeli military about aid worker operations.
Andres is a celebrity chef well known in Washington. That fact, along with the fact that the victims included American-Canadian citizen Jacob Flickinger, fueled outrage among members of Biden’s own Democratic Party and renewed calls for the president to provide military aid to Israel.
Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders posted on social media on Tuesday, “Israel has killed more than 200 aid workers in 6 months. This was not an accident. Netanyahu’s war machine no longer needs aid.”
weapons transfer
Israel is the largest recipient of US aid, with nearly $4 billion annually, much of it in the form of military aid.
Under U.S. law, the government must notify Congress of arms transfers worth more than $25 million to Israel.
In December, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken approved two emergency arms transfers to Israel, bypassing congressional review requirements for foreign arms sales.
Josh Paul, former director of the U.S. State Department’s agency responsible for arms transfers, said two more arms transfers have been made public since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. Paul resigned in October in protest of the United States’ “continued lethal aid to Israel.”
Paul told VOA that the two products were produced under a direct commercial sales process and had been notified to Congress. “But visibility is lower because less information is available to the public about direct commercial sales,” he said.
According to Israeli media reports, in addition to the four disclosed weapons transfers, there have been more than 100 arms transfers to Israel since October 7 without notifying Congress, mainly because the structures of the packages fell below the notification threshold . Washington postVOA confirmed this to a Defense Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ali Tolani, director of security assistance, arms trade and technology at the Center for International Policy, said the moves amounted to a “deliberate avoidance of transparency” by the government.
“It really doesn’t have credibility when they’re saying publicly that Israel needs to do more to protect civilians, but they’re privately promoting hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons,” she told VOA.
She said the Biden administration is refusing to use the most important source of influence it has, which is “providing significant amounts of weapons to Israel.”
this postal Reports say the transfers in recent weeks have included bombs and fighter jets worth billions of dollars, even as the government publicly criticized Israel’s intentions for a ground invasion of Rafah, where 1.5 million displaced Palestinians seek safety.
Unconditional support
Since Harry Truman recognized Israel minutes after its founding in 1948, every U.S. president has supported the country.
Nearly all did so unconditionally, except President George H.W. Bush, who issued an ultimatum to Israel in 1991 to freeze settlements on Palestinian land in exchange for $10 billion in loan guarantees.
This approach worked. But not everyone agrees that limiting aid will be transformative.
“The emotional issue of providing a nation with the means to defend itself sometimes triggers different reactions in different theaters. In the past, this has been an imprecise tool for the United States,” said Grant Lamm, a senior researcher specializing in military and military issues Lee said. Security Affairs at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“I think this has been internalized within this administration,” he told VOA. “That, combined with the president’s long-standing commitment to Israel, is why you haven’t seen any real steps taken along this line. .”
There are also concerns that attaching conditions to aid could send the wrong signal to Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies, raising the possibility of a second front in Israel’s northern border conflict with Lebanon.
March, to welcome Biden administration demands Israel offered assurances in February that the use of U.S. weapons complied with international and humanitarian law, which the U.S. government accepted.
Said the guarantees were “not credible” Human Rights Watch and Oxfam. Human rights groups cited examples of what they called Israeli violations of international humanitarian law, including “the denial of services vital to the survival of civilians and the arbitrary denial and restriction of humanitarian assistance.”
Eighty Muslim and Arab American organizations sent a similar letter to Biden on Wednesday, objecting to his “administration’s decision to falsely declare that Israel’s war on Gaza complies with U.S. legal requirements and authorize the continued transfer of U.S.-made weapons.”
The groups viewed the attack on World Central Kitchen aid workers as the latest example of Israel violating the laws of war.
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