CRAZY LAZY SIMS

Interviews with current and former US Agency for International Development (USAID) and State Department officials, aid agencies working in Gaza and internal USAID documents reveal that the administration rejected or ignored pleas to use its leverage to persuade its ally Israel – the recipient of billions of dollars of US military support – to allow sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza to stop the famine taking hold. The former officials say the US also provided diplomatic cover for Israel to create the conditions for famine by blocking international efforts to bring about a ceasefire or alleviate the crisis, making the delivery of aid almost impossible. “This is not just turning a blind eye to the man-made starvation of an entire population, it is direct complicity,” former State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned over US support for the war, told The Independent. [...] “This is a population that is starving to death, this is a population that is being pushed to the brink,” the World Health Organisation’s emergencies director Michael Ryan said at a press conference on 31 January. The same day Mr Ryan described Gaza’s grim outlook, White House national security communications adviser John Kirby defended the Biden administration’s decision to suspend aid to UNRWA. Mr Kirby denied that cutting off assistance to the UN entity with the largest footprint in Gaza would have a detrimental effect on the humanitarian situation there, and instead claimed that the US was “working so hard to get more [humanitarian] assistance into the people of Gaza”. [...] A cable drafted by officials at the agency and leaked to HuffPost in early April said that “the threshold to support a famine determination has likely already been crossed,” and that the level of hunger and malnutrition in Gaza was “unprecedented in modern history”. A separate memo written by USAID officials for Mr Blinken and leaked to Devex found that Israel may be violating a White House directive requiring recipients of US military assistance to permit the unimpeded delivery of US-funded humanitarian support. The UN has said repeatedly that, by the time an official declaration of famine is made, it will be too late to prevent thousands of deaths. The declaration requires a painfully precise collection of data that is not possible to get while the north of Gaza remains cut off by the fighting. [...] According to UN figures, more than half of Gaza’s population– some 1.1 million people – face catastrophic food insecurity. This represents the highest share of a population ever recorded globally. One in three children under the age of two suffer from acute malnutrition. [...] “I believe the US to be complicit in creating the conditions for famine,” the current anonymous USAID employee told The Independent. “Not only has our response been woefully inadequate, but we’re actively responsible in large part for it.”