Joe Biden has done more than arm Israel. Leaked documents reveal his own officials see him as complicit in Gaza’s devastating famine
President Joe Biden and his administration have been accused of being complicit in enabling a famine in Gaza by failing to sufficiently act on repeated warnings from their own experts and aid agencies.
Interviews with current and former US Agency for International Development (USAID) and State Department officials, aid agencies working in Gaza and internal USAID documents reveal that the administration rejected or ignored pleas to use its leverage to persuade its ally Israel — the recipient of billions of dollars of US military support — to allow sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza to stop the famine taking hold.
The former officials say the US also provided diplomatic cover for Israel to create the conditions for famine by blocking international efforts to bring about a ceasefire or alleviate the crisis, making the delivery of aid almost impossible.
“This is not just turning a blind eye to the man-made starvation of an entire population, it is direct complicity,” former State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned over US support for the war, told The Independent.
Israel has vehemently denied that there is a hunger crisis in Gaza, or that it has restricted aid. It says fighting with Hamas, the militant group that triggered the current war when it killed 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages in Israel on 7 October, has hampered aid efforts.
At least 32 people, 28 of whom were children, have died of malnutrition and dehydration in Gaza, according to Human Rights Watch. The deaths of those children, and the likely many more to come, might have been prevented if President Biden had reacted more forcefully to concerns shared publicly and privately.
From the time of the first warning signs in December, intensive US pressure on Israel to open more land crossings and flood Gaza with aid could have stopped the crisis taking hold, the officials said. But Mr Biden refused to make US military aid to Israel conditional.
Instead, the Biden government pursued novel and ineffective aid solutions such as airdrops and a floating pier. Now, some 300,000 people in Gaza’s north are experiencing a “full-blown” famine, according to the World Food Program, and the entire 2.3 million population of Gaza is experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger.
The level of dissent within the US government agency responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and combating global hunger has been unprecedented.
At least 19 internal dissent memos have been sent since the start of the war by staff at USAID criticising US support for the war in Gaza.
In an internal collective dissent memo drafted this month by numerous employees of USAID, the staff assail the agency and the Biden administration for its “failure to uphold international humanitarian principles and to adhere to its mandate to save lives.”
The leaked draft memo, seen by The Independent, calls for the administration to apply pressure to bring “an end to the Israeli siege that is causing famine.”
Not acting upon repeated warnings like these was a political choice.
“The US has provided both the military and the diplomatic support that enabled famine to emerge in Gaza,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former high-ranking USAID official under both Barack Obama and Joe Biden who worked on famine prevention in Yemen and South Sudan, told The Independent.
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