By Diego Ramos / Original to ScheerPost
Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, an independent humanitarian organization, and former head of disaster assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, penned a fierce essay criticizing the Biden administration’s year-plus-long failure to hold Israel accountable and enforce the very measures it imposed on the Netanyahu government.
Beginning with the Biden administration’s most recent letter sent to the Israeli government—stating that Israel had 30 days to take “urgent and sustained actions to reverse” the humanitarian crisis in Gaza—Konyndyk plainly condemns the U.S. for failing to impose any consequences for Israel’s almost complete disregard to the letter.
According to Konyndyk, “When Refugees International and seven other prominent aid groups conducted a detailed analysis of 19 discrete actions the U.S. government had asked Israel to take, we found that Israel had demonstrated no meaningful action on 15 of them and had only partially addressed the remaining four.”
Despite this and previous efforts by the Biden administration, Konyndyk points to the near-entire displacement of Gaza’s population, the starvation of Palestinians, killing of aid personnel and blockage of aid from entering Gaza as clear cut examples of Biden’s unconditional support of Israel.
Konyndyk writes,
The results in Gaza speak for themselves: today, an estimated 50,000 children need treatment for malnutrition. Only four of the 19 bakeries supported by the World Food Program are operational, and just 17 of the 36 hospitals that Gaza had before the war are even partially functional. UNICEF estimates that 95 percent of Gaza’s schools have been damaged or destroyed, and over 1.9 million people—90 percent of Gaza’s population—remain forcibly displaced.
The rest of the essay points to other specific examples of blatant disregard for Israel’s dismissal of calls for humanitarian assistance, as well as testimonies from former Biden officials who resigned as a result of the administration’s actions.
Konyndyk puts it plainly:
The failure of the United States’ diplomatic effort to improve Gaza’s humanitarian conditions is rooted in two fundamental flaws: first, commingling humanitarian diplomacy with cease-fire diplomacy even as cease-fire negotiations foundered; and second, an absence of political will at the highest levels of the administration to hold Israel accountable for its humanitarian obligations under U.S. and international law.
The article can be found here.
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Diego Ramos
Diego Ramos, ScheerPost Special Projects Editor and New York bureau chief, is a journalist from Queens, NY. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He has previously worked at BuzzFeed News and was managing editor of Annenberg News at USC. He’s covered and researched myriad topics including war, politics, psychedelic research and sports.
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