Biden administration’s hopes fade for Gaza ceasefire and humanitarian aid

US President Joe Biden gambled that a public declaration of the US-negotiated terms of the latest ceasefire and hostage-release deal would break a months-long stalemate between Israel and Hamas. Photo / AP

In the seven weeks since Israel began its military operation in Rafah, virtually all the bad things the Biden administration feared would happen have come to pass. Hamas, while debilitated, has not been destroyed. Palestinian civilian death rates have continued to climb. And spring’s hopes of a steady, sustainable flow of humanitarian aid throughout Gaza have disappeared as summer temperatures soar.

More than a million Gazans fleeing the Rafah offensive — most already displaced several times since the war began — have been newly set adrift in a wasteland of rubble and wrecked refugee camps where there is little or no shelter, food, water or medical care.

This month, dozens have been killed by Israeli strikes in and around al-Mawasi, a coastal area north of Rafah where many have sought refuge, according to international aid agencies. In recent days, Israeli forces again launched air and ground attacks in northern Gaza against what they said were Hamas tunnels, weapons depots and headquarters, despite declaring the area largely cleared of militants months ago.

While many hostages are believed to have died in captivity, between 50 and 100 — including five Americans — remain alive in Hamas hands.

In recent weeks, a pervasive gloom has fallen over the Biden administration as policy initiatives and a ceasefire seem ever more distant. Meanwhile, the prospect of regional war with Iranian proxies in Lebanon and beyond looms larger.

Relations have grown increasingly strained between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who last week publicly accused the State Department of holding up US arms shipments to Israel — and the administration, which denied the charge and stopped short of calling the Prime Minister a liar.

“We knew this was going to be hard” when President Biden flew to Israel last fall to pledge full US support in response to Hamas’ October 7 attack, a senior international official said. “We had no conception of how hard it was going to be.” Biden counselled a targeted, strategic approach that would shape a lasting peace, said the official.

In some respects, June has been the most difficult month yet. It began on a relatively high note, with Biden’s gamble that a public declaration of the US-negotiated terms of the latest ceasefire and hostage-release deal would break a months-long stalemate in indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas.

Relations have grown increasingly strained between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the US administration. Photo / AP

US will ‘keep trying’ for deal

Netanyahu acknowledged his war Cabinet “authorised” the proposal, which also calls for the withdrawal of Israeli troops. But he and some members of his government have publicly thrown cold water over any arrangement short of complete Hamas destruction and insist that Israel will retain security control over Gaza.

The Biden administration has put the onus on Hamas, which said it was “positive” about a plan that incorporated many of its previous stipulations, but made further demands, including that Israel put the terms of a withdrawal commitment in writing.

“We’ll continue to work this with urgency, with determination, to see if we can bridge the gap,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last Tuesday. “But I can’t tell you with conviction that we will.”

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller last Thursday acknowledged “a wide diversity of opinions” among officials on the likelihood of success. “But we’re going to keep trying” to reach a deal, he said.

“The plan now is to continue the reiteration publicly and privately [to Israel] that you’ve got to have an end state — something other than a campaign that just goes on and on,” the senior official said. “More likely they will wrap up Rafah in the next two or three weeks … then back to a situation where there is chaos and lawlessness on the ground.”

Asked whether the end of the Rafah operation would increase the provision of food and medicine, the official was less than hopeful. “The restraints [on humanitarian aid] will not be Israel, they will be because it isn’t safe on the ground in Gaza. We are essentially at that point today.”

The administration says it is close to an agreement with Persian Gulf nations to provide funds for reconstruction and assist in transitional security in a post-war Gaza. But the Arabs are likely to baulk at a chaotic arrangement where Hamas, Israel or both still wield power in the enclave.

If remnants of Hamas’ formidable army remain, as appears more than likely to the administration and some in the Israeli military, “are you going to get Arab boots on the ground? Shoot Palestinians? I don’t think so”, said David M. Satterfield, who served as Biden’s special envoy for humanitarian issues in Gaza during the first six months of the war.

“And will the Emiratis, will Saudi Arabia, put their dollars, their rials, their dinars into reconstruction in a situation” where they are “the potential target of further Israeli actions” in response to a residual or resurgent Hamas threat? Again, history would tell us the answer is unlikely to be yes”, said Satterfield, speaking last week at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Satterfield was at his most sombre on the subject of humanitarian assistance. Israeli military operations in northern Gaza during the first months of the war left tens of thousands dead. Those who survived but did not flee south were left without adequate food, water, fuel and medicine because of ongoing combat and Israeli military restrictions.

The situation had begun to slightly improve by late April, after much of the fighting moved to the south and Israel agreed to facilitate more assistance to the north.

Yet amid new displacement from the southern border city of Rafah since the Israeli military operation there began on May 7, aid to central and southern Gaza has been “almost entirely cut off”, said Tess Ingram, a spokeswomen for Unicef, the UN programme for children. UN agencies warned in early June that more than 1 million Palestinians could face starvation by July as famine looms in the north.

“There was a complete flip of the vulnerability of north-south,” Georgios Petropoulos, head of the Gaza division of the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said last Wednesday.

People protest against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government. Photo / AP

The north is now “sort of getting what it needs to keep people alive. Not dignified, not safe, not healthy, but at least they’re alive and they’re not rioting,” he said. “But the south is a big problem … anyone that was actually acutely vulnerable kind of moved to the south from the north, including very ill children.”

Most aid to southern Gaza had been delivered through the Rafah crossing with Egypt, the only portal into the enclave not controlled by Israel. That crossing has been closed on the Gaza side by Israeli forces, and Israeli media this week showed images of the terminal burned and gutted.

With Rafah out of commission, aid intended for central and southern Gaza must now enter through the nearby Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel. Once inside Gaza, aid agencies have to deconflict their route with the Israeli Defence Forces, navigate restricted zones and dodge ongoing combat and looters increasingly organised into criminal gangs that feed a black market.

A floating pier constructed in mid-May by the US military on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast to bring aid by sea has been only sporadically operative, as heavy seas have twice forced it to be dismantled.

Cogat, the Israeli military defence arm responsible for movement in and out of Gaza, said the United Nations, which handles most of the aid distribution, is responsible for not keeping up with the pace of entering goods and denies reports of starvation in Gaza.

Cogat said the contents of 1200 trucks were awaiting collection at Kerem Shalom and published a photo of acres of humanitarian goods piled in a central Gaza holding area after being offloaded from the US pier. The UN’s World Food Programme, which had agreed to handle distribution logistics from the pier, has said it is too dangerous because of looting and ongoing combat. More than 250 aid workers have been killed during the war, most of them by Israeli fire.

Petropoulos called Cogat’s charges “ridiculous”.

“Leaving things at the doorway of a house on fire is not really helping that house,” he said. “Having a conversation with me about my capacity inside Gaza to warehouse, to move, to distribute, to ship, is also a little bit absurd as far as I’m concerned when you are literally targeting and destroying my warehouses, one by one. I have no fuel. … You’re killing my staff.”

Absence of civil order

As desperation and lawlessness have taken hold inside southern and central Gaza — where most of the population is camped on rubble and beaches — the violent looting of aid vehicles that manage to leave Kerem Shalom has intensified over the past six weeks, aid agencies said.

What Petropoulos called “the absence of any kind of civil order and rule of law” has fuelled a black market, particularly for cigarettes — purchased in Egypt, hidden inside aid shipments and sold for up to several thousand dollars a carton by “criminals, cartels, smuggling operations and families” who realise “there’s lot of money to be made”.

Looting trucks and warehouses at gunpoint, the gangs often rifle through and discard humanitarian aid in search of cigarettes.

Israel has also allowed an increasing number of commercial vehicles to enter the enclave, many with their own armed protection that is not allowed under UN rules, carrying food for sale in Gazan markets at prices few can pay.

The Rafah escalation has “crippled” health services in central and southern Gaza by forcing clinics to shut down or move, pushing civilians farther from care and cutting off supplies, Unicef’s Ingram said.

It’s already too late for Haneen al-Zaanin, 6, who died on June 10 from acute malnutrition, according to a death certificate issued by Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital in central Gaza, and viewed by the Post.

Reached by phone in a camp in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, Haneen’s mother, Waf’a, said the family had relocated six times since leaving the north when the fighting began, most recently fleeing from the Rafah offensive. Sick with fever and diarrhoea since the war’s first month, Haneen weighed just 10kg when she died.

In another camp in Deir al-Balah, Shireen Abu Qamar, 36, is almost out of cash and options. The former journalist has already run through her savings and last month sold her jewellery as a last resort. Her family of five fled Rafah in May and can barely afford to buy what’s in the market. They subsist on donated humanitarian flour.

She thinks her youngest son, burned during an Israeli strike months ago, has hepatitis A from the unsanitary conditions in the camp. “The suffering we are experiencing here is greater than our suffering in Rafah,” Abu Qamar said.

According to the administration, the only viable plan remains the one Biden publicly put on the table nearly two months ago, and conversations are ongoing “about how to get a ceasefire that protects Israel’s security interests, that alleviates the suffering of the Palestinian people”, Miller said.

“We very much do think it’s possible to achieve one,” he said. “But as you heard [Blinken] say, just because it’s possible doesn’t mean that we will get there”.