Blinken blinks, cancels 30-day deadline, ignores US law, gives genocide a thumbs up

Alameen Templeton
The White House has cancelled its 30-day deadline for Israel to improve aid supplies to Gazans, announcing yesterday as the ultimatum ran out that it hadn’t made up its mind yet, and probably won’t ever. Maybe.
The deadline ran out at midnight. But instead of imposing sanctions Wednesday, the White House announced Tuesday it had decided to forget about it.
The top level threat to choke off arms supplies to the Nazi state within 30 days if it continued starving Gazans was signed last month by Anthony Blinken, the secretary of state, and was being keenly watched by aid organisations.
Just out of reach
In the south of the strip, hundreds of truckloads of aid are sitting on the Gaza side of the border because the UN says it cannot reach them to distribute the aid due to the threat of settler lawlessness, theft, and Israeli military restrictions.
Aid NGOs issued a joint statement Tuesday, ahead of the Wednesday deadline, describing conditions in the enclave as “even more dire” than when Blinken drafted the letter on October 13.
“Israel not only failed to meet the US criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in northern Gaza,” said the groups, which include the Norwegian Refugee Council, Oxfam, Refugees International, and Save the Children.
The Cradle reports state department spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters Tuesday “we at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of US law” by blocking the entry of food, water, and medicine for two million Palestinians.
Blinken blinked
Of course, that can be interpreted to mean the White House believes the Gaza genocide is not in violation of US law … or that it had, as usual, taken the coward’s route and had simply not made an assessment – in other words, Blinken blinked.
Unfortunately, the latter is probably the correct interpretation – Netanyahu ignored them, the White House chickened out, and meekly pretended it had not failed to protect the constitution and US law that outlaws the sale of US arms into a genocide. And the White House press courps meekly pretended along with them.
“We are not giving Israel a pass,” Patel lied, adding that “we want to see the totality of the humanitarian situation improve, and we think some of these steps will allow the conditions for that to continue progress.”
So, the White House will allow the genocide to continue in the hope that turning a blind eye to mass murder will end mass murder. Such an approach can only work if the Israelis run out of victims and kill everyone.
Foot massage for genocide
Axios reporter Barak Ravid cited an unidentified White House source who said Blinken this week chose to continue “to press the Israelis on the issue instead of suspending weapons supplies”.
“‘PRESS the Israelis’? It sounds like Blinken is giving free foot massages to Israel’s war cabinet,'” a source who did not want to be identified because he-she-it-they is/are/aren’t a very close friend of Joe Biden and supplies his alternative Altzheimer meds, told Markaz Sahaba.
Blinken’s letter, co-signed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on October 13, gave top Israeli officials 30 days “to ensure noncombatants have access to food and other necessities.”
“Absent a change … the administration would be obliged to take steps laid out in laws and policies linking the facilitation of humanitarian aid during wartime and the compliance with laws of war, including the protection of civilians, to the provision of US arms and military assistance,” the letter cautioned ominously.
‘Above the law’
“Now, it’s 30 days later, the Israelis have intensified their atrocities – including using famine as a weapon – and, suddenly, the US is no longer ‘obliged to take steps laid out in laws’? What happened to those ‘obligations’? Were they voluntary? Is the White House or any administration official above US law? It would definitely seem so,” the Biden source said.
“How they must have laughed and laughed in Tel Aviv last month – almost as much as they must be laughing Wednesday again,” the source added.
NGOs are adamant the situation in Gaza today is even worse than 30 days ago and that there is no justification whatsoever for the White House to ignore clear US law and to deliberately and knowingly facilitate genocide.
“That situation is in an even more dire state today than a month ago … Israel has failed to comply with its ally’s demands – at enormous human cost for Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” a joint NGO statement says.
Blind eye
The UN said this week aid entering Gaza had plummeted to its lowest level since the start of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. Israel was deliberately blocking attempts to deliver humanitarian supplies, particularly to the north, they said.
Israeli media reports say the army has been “turning a blind eye” to gangs “systematically looting” the small number of aid shipments allowed in.
“The armed attacks take place just a few hundred meters away from Israeli troops. Some aid groups say attacked truck drivers have even sought help from the IDF, but the army has refused to intervene. Moreover, they say, the army bars them from taking alternate roads that are considered safer,” Haaretz reported Monday.
“Israel has decided and implemented famine as a method of war for the purposes of ethnic cleansing and to advance its colonial objectives,” the Palestinian envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour, said during a session of the Security Council on Tuesday night.
“Everything we warned against, everything Israel denied, is happening before our eyes,” he added. “We are at the last stages of an orchestrated plan to empty wide areas of Gaza from its Palestinian population.”
Mansour also condemned Israeli plans to annex the occupied West Bank, Maktoob Media reports.
“Palestinian people are faced with death, dispossession and displacement yet again, but once again… we will not disappear,” he said. “We are rooted in our land as the olive trees.”