Israel has implemented some of the changes the Biden administration wanted, but the U.S. expects more from them, according to President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
Sullivan’s assessment — that the U.S. has “seen them take some actions, [but] we would like to see more actions” — comes less than a week after Biden threatened to cut U.S. support for Israel unless they take “a series of specific, concrete and measurable steps” to mitigate humanitarian suffering and civilian casualties in Gaza.
“If you look at the last two days, there has been a substantial increase in the amount of aid going into Gaza. That’s good, it is not good enough,” Sullivan told reporters on Tuesday. “We would like to see more action following through on what the prime minister has announced publicly. And we’d like to see that over the course of the next few days.”
The Israel Defense Forces said 468 aid trucks entered Gaza on Tuesday, the highest in a single day since the war began, while more than 1,200 trucks have gotten into the strip over the last three days.
The administration has also frequently called for Israel to allow more aid into Gaza and they have conducted airdrops of aid into the strip because not enough aid was getting to Palestinians, who are now under threat of famine.
“I think Israel has not done enough to facilitate the kind of access we need to revert the kind of food conditions that we’re seeing to avert famine,” USAID Administrator Samantha Power said on Tuesday at a Senate Appropriations State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Subcommittee hearing.
She said there has been “a sea change” over the past few days in the amount of aid Israel allowed into Gaza after “a series of restrictions over many, many months” from Israel.
Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week that the U.S. would consider conditioning future aid to Israel and Gaza if Israel did not do more to prevent civilian casualties. While the U.S. president and his administration have urged Israel for months to protect civilians and allow more aid into the strip, Biden only publicly threatened to change U.S. policy following an accidental airstrike that killed seven aid workers.
“If Israel’s policy doesn’t change on a sustained basis, then our policy will change,” Sullivan explained.
Biden and his administration have continued to support Israel’s right to self-defense following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and had for months, despite opposition from progressives, Muslim and Arab Americans, and younger voters, who believe the administration should be doing more to end the war in Gaza.
While Israel has met some of the U.S.’s expectations, the two countries still disagree on a ground operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians have fled. Israeli leaders maintain they need to conduct full-scale operations in Rafah to achieve their military goals.
Netanyahu said on Monday that Israel had determined when their Rafah operation would commence, but he did not specify when it would be, and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that a date hadn’t been determined yet, according to Axios.
Sullivan also said Israel hadn’t shared a date for a potential Rafah invasion. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the same during a news conference at the State Department alongside U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron.
“The president’s been very clear about our concerns, our deep concerns about Israel’s ability to move civilians out of harm’s way, to care for them once they’re out of harm’s way, and to have any kind of major military operation that doesn’t do real harm to civilians, to children, to women, to men,” Blinken said.
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Sullivan said he had not seen “a credible and executable plan” with “any level of detail” for how to evacuate the civilians out of Rafah and provide them with the humanitarian aid they need.
U.S. officials have met multiple times with Israeli leaders over a potential Rafah operation, as the U.S. seeks to convince them that there are alternatives to a ground invasion that would allow them to still achieve their goals. A highly anticipated meeting between top Netanyahu advisers and U.S. leaders was canceled and has not yet been rescheduled.