Biden announces aid by sea for hunger-ravaged Gaza
What happened
U.S. ships containing food for starving Palestinians in Gaza left Virginia this week, as President Biden sharpened his criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactics in the Gaza war. Biden announced in his State of the Union address that the U.S. would construct a temporary pier off the Gaza coast to facilitate shipments of aid, a plan Israel agreed to on condition that it be allowed to inspect the ships. But the two-lane, 1,800-foot floating causeway will take up to two months to build, and more than a quarter of Gaza’s 2.2 million people face catastrophic hunger right now. In northern Gaza, which has been almost entirely cut off for months, a shortage of clean water is spreading disease. Thousands of babies and young children are severely malnourished, and at least 20 people have starved to death.
In an effort to get aid in, Israel opened a new land route into northern Gaza this week, allowing entry to U.N. trucks containing food for 25,000 people. The U.S. and other nations also continued airdropping thousands of pounds of food daily. Yet the amount was far from enough, and one botched drop crashed into a crowd of people, killing five. Meanwhile, with no permanent cease-fire on offer and Hamas rejecting a proposal for a six-week truce, the fighting continued. Biden warned that an Israeli assault on the Gaza border city of Rafah, where more than a million people are sheltering, would cross “a red line,” saying, “you cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead.” Netanyahu insisted Israel would go in anyway. “I have a red line,” he said. “You know what the red line is? That Oct. 7 doesn’t happen again.”
What the columnists said
The Biden administration’s half-hearted efforts to stop the carnage have “failed dramatically,” said Elizabeth Shackelford in the Chicago Tribune. Netanyahu scoffs at U.S. pleas to protect civilians, while America’s inefficient airdrops fall far short of Palestinian needs. To turn this around, Biden must stop “blindly underwriting the war” with billions in military aid and tell Netanyahu he’ll get no more U.S. funds without a path to a lasting cease-fire.
That would be a devastating betrayal of one of America’s strongest allies as it fights a war it did not start, said National Review in an editorial. “Left-wing pressure” has already led Biden to potentially devastating mistakes. His nonstop “lectures and warnings” to Israel began almost immediately after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis. Now he’s “spooked by the excessively hyped idea” that Arab-American voters irate over Gaza will cost him the election in November, so he’s come up with a foolish plan to have the U.S. military build a supply pier. That will only put “hundreds of American troops” in reach of Iran’s proxy militias.
Israel has “the right of self-defense,” said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times, but it’s time to admit “something has gone terribly wrong.” Having turned Gaza into “a wasteland of death and destruction, hunger and ruined homes,” Netanyahu now refuses to do anything to provide order there, or to work with any non-Hamas Palestinian group that eventually might be able to do so. If Gaza ends up a “permanent, grinding humanitarian crisis” with no one in charge, Israel will become a pariah.