US walks back Israel arms-embargo threat

The US State Department has announced that it will not withhold arms shipments to Israel despite the Jewish state failing to meet a set of conditions Washington said were mandatory for these shipments to continue.

In a briefing on Tuesday, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters that Israel had taken some, but not all, of the steps set out in a letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Israel’s defense and strategic affairs ministers last month.

The letter warned Israel that unless steps were taken to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within 30 days, the US would stop supplying the country with weapons, as US law forbids the transfer of arms to countries that prevent aid from reaching civilians.

Among other demands, the letter called on Israel to allow 350 aid trucks into Gaza every day, to open a fifth crossing into the Palestinian enclave, to stop the forced evacuation of civilians from northern to southern Gaza, and to rescind a law banning the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Israel has taken “a number of steps to address the measures laid out in the letter,” Patel said on Wednesday, adding that the State Department has “not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of US law.”

According to a report published by a coalition of aid agencies on Tuesday, Israel has only partially met four of the 19 conditions set in the letter. An average of 42 trucks have entered Gaza every day for the last 30 days, eight times fewer than the letter demanded, the agencies noted. Five new evacuation orders were issued in October, including one in northern Gaza, they continued, while no new crossing point was opened and UNRWA’s activities remain illegal.

COGAT, the Israeli military agency in charge of delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza, said on Tuesday that there is a backlog of 900 truckloads of aid on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Israel. “Before the organizations give out grades, they should focus on distributing the aid that awaits them,” COGAT said in response to the report.

The US is Israel’s largest arms supplier, providing more than two thirds of the Jewish state’s weapons imports. Back in May, President Joe Biden temporarily stopped deliveries of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and announced that more weapons could be embargoed if the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) pressed ahead with an invasion of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. The IDF entered Rafah regardless, and Biden eventually lifted the temporary arms freeze.

The US has spent $17.9 billion on military aid to Israel from October 2023 to October 2024, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University. This amount is greater than the yearly defense budgets of the Netherlands and Türkiye.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last October, multiple countries have suspended the sale of arms to Israel, including Canada, Italy, France, and the UK.