Joe Biden is complicit in Gaza’s starvation. Blood is on his hands | Mohamad Bazzi
IIn March 2024, the World Authority on Food Security warned that the Palestinians knew “catastrophic hunger levels”, and famine was imminent in the north of Gaza while Israel continued its seat of the territory. This report was one of the most direct warnings of the UN and international rescue groups, which had alarms on the generalized famine potential in Gaza since December 2023.
Joe Biden was at the White House at the time, and his administration not only failed to take into account these repeated warnings, but it worked to undermine the United Nations agencies and the humanitarian groups that tried to focus attention on the use by Israel of famine as a weapon of war in Gaza. Today, Donald Trump and his administration are deeply accomplices in the course of the famine of human manufacture in Gaza, but it is important to remember that American complicity is preceding to Trump – and that is another stain in Biden’s inheritance as president.
At several times in his presidency, Biden could have prevented famine from spreading to Gaza, if his administration had listened to the warnings of the UN and aid groups and used them as an impetus to limit unconditional American military support in Israel. The Biden record is not only shocking for the multiple missed opportunities he had to change course, but for his insensitivity to the suffering of the Palestinians.
The senior Israeli officials did not hide their hunger intention of 2.2 million inhabitants of Gaza, within days of the attack on October 7, 2023 of Hamas against Israel. Two days later, the Minister of Israel of Defense, Yoav Gallant, said: “I ordered a full seat on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. ” He added: “We fight human animals and we act accordingly.” In December 2023, the United Nations Hunger Monitoring Group joined the classification of the food security phase (IPC), warned in a report that more than a million people in Gaza faced a widespread famine within several months, unless Israel releases its restrictions for help.
The IPC, which includes the World Food Program, the World Health Organization and other agencies, was created in 2004 to ring the global alarm on food shortages and the famine that could lead to famine. (He declared famines in Somalia in 2011 and South Sudan in 2017, although an official declaration of famine is retroactive and is often late for deterioration of conditions on the ground.) Last month, the IPC warned in an alert that the “worst case of famine is currently playing in Gaza” in Gaza, although the group has still not officially declared a famine.
In February 2024, Michael Fakhri, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, warned against the speed and scale of the mass famine campaign of Israel. “We have never seen a civilian population made to be so hungry so quickly and so completely,” he said to the Guardian, echoing the reports of the United Nations agencies and humanitarian groups showing that Israel deliberately blocked food and other aid to the entry of Gaza, and the use of famine as a weapon-a war crime under international law.
With such detailed warnings, the Biden administration and other supporters of Western Israel could not claim that they did not know the gravity of hunger in Gaza and the extent of the Palestinian Hunger’s policy intentionally. While the alarms of imminent famine intensified in the spring of 2024, Biden could have worked by putting pressure on the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to allow more Gaza food and by applying American laws that prohibit weapons expeditions to American allies that obstruct humanitarian aid.
Biden did not have to become so deeply accomplice of the war crimes of Israel – his administration had the effect of political lever and the legal mechanisms to restrict Netanyahu and put an end to war, saving thousands of Palestinian lives and many Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Instead, Biden and his collaborators have distorted themselves to continue to send billions of dollars to American weapons that allowed Israel to continue his genocidal war.
And in the process of justifying its ineffective and morally bankrupt policies, Biden not only ignored the warnings on the humanitarian disaster which takes place in Gaza, it flouted the American law and the rules of its own administration. In February 2024, Biden published a new national security memo which obliged the State Department to certify that the beneficiaries of American weapons would respect international law and would allow the delivery of humanitarian aid during active conflicts. The memo relied on existing American laws, in particular the 1961 law on foreign assistance, which prohibits the United States government from providing weapons to a country that blocked American humanitarian aid, as Israel had done on several occasions during the Gaza War.
In May 2024, the Biden administration had the possibility of using this law to restrict its arms expeditions to Israel and put pressure on Netanyahu to end the war. Instead, the State Department sent a 46-page report to the congress full of double bureaucratic speaker, which avoided concluding that the Israeli army had violated international law while using American weapons or that Israel had obstructed aid to the damage of Gaza. If the administration had reached these conclusions in its report, Biden could have suspended most of the arms deliveries to Israel, arguing that it confirmed the American law. But Biden decided to continue to allow Netanyahu to kill thousands of Palestinians and extend its Gaza seat.
In October 2024, the Biden administration had another opportunity to modify its policy when two of its senior officials – then Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, and the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin – – sent a letter to Israeli officials warning that they must take “other basic measures” to ensure American officials have threatened to suspend military support in Israel if the conditions days. Despite this ultimatum, the amount of aid reaching Gaza this month had dropped to its lowest level in 11 months.
After the deadline of the United States in November 2024, the Biden administration did nothing and continued to send weapons to Israel, ignoring international conviction and US law. As he had done since the attack on Hamas in 2023, Biden timidly said in the world that he would not impose any consequences on Israel and would continue to protect the government of Netanyahu on the UN and other international organizations.
But Biden’s heaviest attempt to undermine the humanitarian groups working to raise awareness of potential famine in Gaza – and to protect Israeli’s indefensible famine policy – has come in the past few weeks of power. At the end of December, the Biden administration forced an organization funded by the United States, the early alert system for famine, to withdraw a report that warned against imminent famine in northern Gaza.
At this point, Trump had already won the American presidential election and Biden no longer faced any political repercussions for having broken with Netanyahu. However, Biden could still not resolve to recognize the suffering he had allowed Israel to inflict the Palestinians in Gaza. And it is Biden’s inheritance: complicity in the famine of Israel and other war crimes until his last days as president.
