The State Department said Tuesday that the Biden-Harris administration would not cut off weapons supplies to Israel in reaction to what it said was a declining humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, due to Israeli mitigation efforts.
As Breitbart News noted in October, the Biden-Harris administration threatened a partial arms embargo if Israel did not take steps to comply with its demands on humanitarian aid to Gaza, and referred to U.S. human rights laws.
The Times of Israel noted:
US State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel appears to confirm a report that Joe Biden’s administration will not, for now, withhold weapons shipments to Israel, amid today’s deadline it put in place for Jerusalem to take a series of steps to improve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Patel acknowledges during a press briefing that Israel addressed some, but not all, of the measures demanded by the US in the letter, which gave Jerusalem 30 days to improve the humanitarian crisis or risk being deemed out of compliance with US law that bars offensive weapons from being transferred to countries that block aid from reaching civilians.
Nonetheless, he states that the US has not, at this time, “made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of US law.”
As Breitbart News noted earlier:
Asked by about a deadline imposed by the Biden-Harris administration, under which the U.S. would begin cutting off arms to Israel unless there is an improvement in humanitarian conditions in Gaza by Nov. 13, Mencer said that Israel had taken the demand “extremely seriously” and had acted to comply with its requests.
Mencer showed footage of trucks waiting to be offloaded on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom crossing. “These are images of 900 trucks worth of aid, just waiting to be picked up by international aid organizations,” he said.
He noted that an aid truck inside Gaza had been stopped earlier in the week and was discovered to be carrying weapons.
It is almost certain that the incoming Trump administration would have reversed any arms embargo; had Vice President Kamala Harris won the election, the State Department might have made a very different announcement.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
