United States Must End Weapons Shipments to Israel Now

By the AFP Staff

With new leaks revealing that the secretary of state lied to Congress last spring about Israeli war crimes, the time has come for the United States to stop funding and arming Israeli escalations in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

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Last May, in an official report delivered to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote to legislators, noting, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

The problem is, Blinken’s assurances were lies.

On Sept. 24, multiple U.S. media outlets received leaks from two State Department agencies—the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration—that showed U.S. officials believed Israeli forces were, in fact, deliberately withholding aid bound for Gaza—a war crime and a violation of U.S. laws. Their conclusions predated Blinken’s official statement by less than a month.

The official determinations should have frozen U.S. taxpayer-funded military and economic handouts to Israel, as U.S. law requires the federal government to stop weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. The United States also follows international law that notes the denial of humanitarian aid to civilians, including children, and attacks against humanitarian workers assisting children are prohibited under the Fourth Geneva Convention and amount to a crime against humanity and a war crime.

Now, thanks to these leaks to U.S. media outlets, we know that, before he assured Congress that Israel was following international laws, USAID had already sent Blinken a 17-page memo on Israel’s crimes. The memo detailed instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and blocking trucks full of vital food and medicine.

This news follows on recent reports that Israel has been expanding its genocidal war in Gaza to the West Bank and southern Lebanon, going so far as to raid a West Bank news agency with armed Israeli troops and to commit an international act of terrorism by infiltrating global supply chains to booby-trap commercial communications de-­ ­­vices with explosives.

As AFP goes to press, it will have been almost one year since Hamas fighters in Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, were able to exploit gaps in Israeli border security, thanks in large part to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sending Israeli forces to the West Bank to help illegal Israeli settlers harass and terrorize innocent Palestinians. On that date, Hamas fighters were able to enter Israel and kidnap and kill hundreds of Israelis.

Now, by expanding the war in Gaza to the West Bank and Lebanon, Netanyahu has been able to avoid accountability for his own failures that allowed Hamas to benefit from Israel’s apparent weakness.

We have been told that President Joe Biden has had harsh words for Netanyahu in private conversations, but, so far, Biden has been completely impotent to rein in the Israeli leader—despite the fact that U.S. taxpayers almost exclusively arm and fund Israel’s genocidal war machine.

To get an idea of the total scope of U.S. commitments to Israel, since the start of the war in Gaza last October, the Times of Israel reported on Aug. 26, “Five hundred [U.S.] transport planes and 107 ships have delivered more than 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment from the U.S. to Israel.”

As the federal government and the U.S. military gear up to send even more money, men, and materiel to the Middle East in support of Israel’s ongoing escalations, this newspaper calls on Washington to halt any further military and economic aid until Israel accepts a ceasefire that a majority of Americans and the rest of the world support.