BIDEN MOVE NOT ENOUGH FOR SOME, TOO MUCH FOR OTHERS
Call for Israel to improve Gaza’s humanitarian conditions and support a ceasefire draws attacks from president’s political allies and opponents
President Joe Biden’s demand that Israel improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza and support a ceasefire drew sharp attacks both from frustrated political allies who said the US president did not go far enough and opponents who said he went too far.
In a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, Biden threatened to condition US support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza on its taking concrete steps to protect aid workers and civilians.
It was the first time that Biden, a Democrat and a staunch supporter of Israel, has sought to leverage US aid as a way to influence Israeli military behaviour.
The president has come under enormous pressure from his party’s left wing to do more to address the humanitarian catastrophe for Palestinian civilians from Israeli attacks.
“There should not be a total blank cheque. We should not have a pattern where the Netanyahu government ignores the president of the United States and we just send more 2,000-pound bombs,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, said.
Van Hollen, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Biden also should be more “publicly vocal” about US expectations for the campaign in Gaza and take a new approach at the UN Security Council rather than blocking resolutions critical of Israel.
Other left-leaning politicians had similar complaints.
“One day the president is ‘angry’ at Netanyahu, the next day he is ‘very angry’, the next day he is ‘very very angry’. So what? At the same time there is support for more military aid [to Israel] in a supplemental bill,” Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said on the Pod Save America podcast on Thursday.
“You cannot continue to talk about your worries about the humanitarian situation in Gaza and then give Netanyahu another US$10 billion, or more bombs. You cannot do that. That is hypocritical,” he said.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said there should be an immediate ceasefire. “I do not believe that opening up a new crossing into Gaza is enough,” he said on MSNBC on Friday.
Israel has said it approved the reopening of the Erez crossing into northern Gaza and the temporary use of Ashdod port in southern Israel, following the US demands to increase humanitarian aid supplies into Gaza.
While many Democrats criticised Biden for not going far enough, some Republicans, who have generally been more supportive of military aid for Israel, lashed out at Biden for his change in tactic.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton accused Biden of making the shift to aid his re-election chances. “To help his polls in Michigan, Joe Biden just strengthened Hamas’ negotiating position. He effectively encouraged Hamas to hold out and not release the hostages. Shameful,” Cotton said on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday.
The Republican-led House Rules Committee announced on Friday that it would consider a resolution that “opposes efforts to place one-sided pressure on Israel with respect to Gaza, including calls for an immediate ceasefire”, citing Biden’s statement and his administration’s decision not to use its UN Security Council veto to block a resolution calling for a ceasefire.
Republican Representative Brian Mast, a member of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, in a statement accused Biden of “trying to appease far-left lunatics by demanding Israel accept a ceasefire with terrorists”.
Families of hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 said a push for a ceasefire without their release could be dangerous.
“A ceasefire with no deal, or even a partial deal, could be a death sentence for our son and other hostages,” Orna Neutra, mother of Omer Neutra, said on Friday at a news conference with other hostage families in New York City.
The White House declined to spell out how US policy would change if Israel did not meet Biden’s demands.
Israel took action right after Biden put his foot down, others noted, suggesting it should have happened sooner.
“Within hours of Biden threatening to suspend US military aid to Israel, Netanyahu agrees to open a major crossing for humanitarian aid into northern Gaza, where starvation is widespread. Biden always had that leverage but wouldn’t use it,” said Kenneth Roth, former executive director at Human Rights Watch and now a professor at Princeton University’s School for Public and International Affairs.
When asked why Biden had shifted his position, White House spokesperson John Kirby on Thursday said the president had been shaken by the Israeli attack that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers.
Members of a displaced Palestinian family in a classroom at a UN-run school in Gaza City where they have taken shelter.
PALESTINIAN CHILDREN FACE LONG ROAD TO HEALING AMID TRAUMA OF CONFLICT
Eight out of 10 schools in Gaza are damaged or destroyed, Unicef has said, but it is the psychological damage the war has done to the territory’s nearly 1.2 million children that has experts really worried.
“To be able to learn, you need to be in a safe space. Most kids in Gaza at the moment have brains that are functioning under trauma,” child psychiatrist Audrey McMahon of Medecins Sans Frontieres said.
Younger children could develop lifelong cognitive disabilities from malnutrition, while teenagers were likely to feel anger at the injustice they had suffered, she said. “The challenges they will have to face are immense and will take a long time to heal.”
David Skinner of Save The Children said rebuilding the “schools is massively complicated … but it’s straightforward compared to the education loss”.
“What’s often lost about the coverage of Gaza is that this is a catastrophe for children,” he said. “These are children who have been bereaved, who have lost people, who are sick and malnourished.”
Small children whose brains were still developing were particularly at risk from mental health and cognitive damage,
Skinner said.
The UN child welfare agency estimated that 620,000 children in Gaza were out of school.
Skinner said getting them back into class and rebuilding their schools were only the first steps.
The true challenge will be healing displaced and traumatised young Gazans so that they can learn to learn again.
Fighting has ravaged Gaza since Hamas’ unprecedented October 7 attack resulted in 1,170 deaths in Israel, most of them civilians.
Israel has responded with a relentless offensive against Hamas that has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians.
When the war broke out, schools immediately stopped classes and the majority were turned into shelters for families fleeing air strikes.
Nearly half of the Palestinian territory’s population is under 18, and its education system was already struggling after five wars in 20 years.