'Dramatically Worsened': Israel Defies Biden and Blinken's 30-Day Deadline to Increase Aid to Gaza
Sen. Chris Van Hollen tells Zeteo he's concerned the deadline was a "political attempt" ahead of the election to show Biden cared about the situation.
Israel not only failed to comply with the US 30-day deadline to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, it also made the crisis "dramatically” worse, aid organizations said in a scorecard on Tuesday.
Still, the US said on Tuesday it does not plan to limit arms sales to Israel, saying the Israeli government has made some limited progress in increasing the flow of aid – a decision that calls into question why the Biden administration issued specific demands with a specific 30-day deadline in the first place if it wasn’t going to enforce any of it with corresponding rigor.
“[M]y concern is this was a political attempt to try to send a message to voters a month ago that ‘oh, the president really does care about the situation – the humanitarian situation in Gaza,’” Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen told Mehdi on Tuesday (watch out for Mehdi’s full interview with the Democratic senator on Wednesday morning ET).
“Even More Dire”
The 30-day deadline was given to the Israeli government a month ago in a letter by US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who demanded Israel improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza or risk “implications for US policy.”
But in the time since receiving the letter, Israel has not met “the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response” and “concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza,” the eight aid groups said.