Blinken decides against changing military assistance to Israel, Axios reports

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has decided not to change military assistance to Israel for now, Axios reported on Tuesday, citing two unnamed US officials.

The announcement came shortly after President Joe Biden’s administration concluded that Israel is not currently impeding assistance to Gaza and therefore is not violating US law, the State Department said on Tuesday, although Washington acknowledged the humanitarian situation remained dire in the Palestinian enclave and wants to see more steps to address the issue in coming days, the report said.

Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in an Oct. 13 letter gave their Israeli counterparts a list of specific steps that Israel needs to do to within the next 30 days to address the worsening situation in Gaza. Failure to do so may have possible consequences on US military aid to Israel, they said in the letter.

But on Tuesday, the deadline mentioned in the letter, State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel repeatedly declined to say if the specific criteria were fulfilled. Instead, he told reporters that Israel has taken steps to address the demands and that Washington would continue to assess the situation.

“We’ve seen some progress being made. We would like to see some more changes happen. We believe that had it not been for US intervention, these changes may not have ever taken place,” Patel said, adding that Washington will continue to assess Israel’s compliance with US law.

International aid groups said Israel had failed to meet the series of US demands intended to improve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza by the Tuesday deadline.

Patel, fielding repeated questions from reporters in the briefing, declined to explain why Washington chose to make the assessment based on Israel’s measures to address the problems instead of actual results on the ground, which US officials have repeatedly said would be their measuring stick.

Earlier this month, the State Department said the results on the ground as of Nov. 4 were not good enough.

On Tuesday, Patel said Israel had taken some steps, including reopening the Erez crossing, waiving certain customs requirements and opening additional delivery routes within Gaza.

For more than a month, Israeli forces have been pushing deeper into north Gaza, surrounding hospitals and shelters and displacing new waves of people in an operation they say is designed to prevent Hamas fighters regrouping.

Biden, whose term ends soon, has offered strong backing to Israel since Hamas-led gunmen attacked Israel last October, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages.

More than 43,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past year and Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of wrecked buildings and piles of rubble where more than 2 million Gazans seek shelter as best they can.