In March 2024, the global authority on food security warned that Palestinians were experiencing “catastrophic levels of hunger”, and famine was imminent in northern Gaza as Israel continued its siege of the territory. That report was one of the most direct warnings from the UN and international relief groups, which had been raising alarms about the potential for widespread starvation in Gaza since December 2023.
Joe Biden was in the White House at the time, and his administration not only failed to heed those repeated warnings, but it worked to undermine UN agencies and humanitarian groups that tried to focus attention on Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. Today, Donald Trump and his administration are deeply complicit in the human-made famine unfolding in Gaza, but it’s important to remember that US complicity predates Trump – and it’s another stain on Biden’s legacy as president.
At several points during his presidency, Biden could have stopped starvation from spreading in Gaza, if his administration had listened to warnings from the UN and aid groups and used them as an impetus to limit unconditional US military support for Israel. Biden’s record is not only shocking for the multiple missed opportunities he had to change course, but for his callousness toward the suffering of Palestinians.
Top Israeli officials made no secret of their intention to starve Gaza’s population of 2.2 million, within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. Two days later, Israel’s then defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declared: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” He added: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” By December 2023, the UN’s hunger monitoring group, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), warned in a report that more than 1 million people in Gaza were facing widespread starvation within several months unless Israel eased its restrictions on aid.
The IPC, which includes the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization and other agencies, was set up in 2004 to sound the global alarm on food shortages and starvation that could lead to famine. (It declared famines in Somalia in 2011 and South Sudan in 2017, although a formal declaration of famine is retroactive and often lags behind deteriorating conditions on the ground.) Last month, the IPC warned in an alert that the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out” in Gaza, although the group still has not officially declared a famine.
In February 2024, Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, warned of the speed and scale of Israel’s mass starvation campaign. “We have never seen a civilian population made to go so hungry so quickly and so completely,” he told the Guardian, echoing reports by UN agencies and humanitarian groups showing that Israel was deliberately blocking food and other aid from entering Gaza, and using starvation as a weapon – a war crime under international law.
With such detailed warnings, the Biden administration and Israel’s other western supporters could not claim that they didn’t know the severity of hunger in Gaza, and the extent of Israel’s policy of intentionally starving Palestinians. As the alarms of imminent famine intensified in the spring of 2024, Biden could have acted by pressuring the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to allow more food into Gaza and enforcing US laws which ban weapons shipments to US allies that obstruct humanitarian aid.
Biden did not have to become so deeply complicit in Israel’s war crimes – his administration had the political leverage and legal mechanisms to restrain Netanyahu and end the war, saving thousands of Palestinian lives and many of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Instead, Biden and his aides contorted themselves to keep sending billions of dollars in US weapons that enabled Israel to continue its genocidal war.
And in the process of justifying his ineffective and morally bankrupt policies, Biden not only ignored warnings over the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, he flouted US law and his own administration’s rules. In February 2024, Biden issued a new national security memo that required the state department to certify that recipients of US arms would abide by international law and allow the delivery of humanitarian aid during active conflicts. The memo relied on existing US laws, especially the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the US government from providing weapons to a country that blocked American humanitarian aid, as Israel had done repeatedly during the Gaza war.
By May 2024, the Biden administration had a chance to use that law to restrict its weapons shipments to Israel and pressure Netanyahu into ending the war. Instead, the state department sent a 46-page report to Congress full of bureaucratic double-speak, which avoided concluding that the Israeli military had violated international law while using US weapons or that Israel had obstructed aid from reaching Gaza. If the administration had reached those conclusions in its reportBiden would have been able to suspend most arms deliveries to Israel, arguing that he was upholding US law. But Biden decided to continue enabling Netanyahu to kill thousands of Palestinians and to expand his siege of Gaza.
In October 2024, the Biden administration had another opportunity to change its policy when two of its top officials – then secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and defense secretary, Lloyd Austin – sent a letter to Israeli officials warning that they must take “concrete measures” to ensure that civilians in northern Gaza had access to food, medicine and other basic needs. US officials threatened that they could suspend military support to Israel if conditions did not improve within 30 days. Despite that ultimatum, the amount of aid reaching Gaza that month had dropped to its lowest level in 11 months.
After the US deadline passed in November 2024, the Biden administration did nothing and continued sending weapons to Israel, ignoring international condemnation and US law. As he had done since the Hamas attack in 2023, Biden sheepishly told the world that he would not impose any consequences on Israel, and would continue to protect Netanyahu’s government at the UN and other international bodies.
But Biden’s most craven attempt to undermine humanitarian groups working to raise awareness of potential famine in Gaza – and to protect Israel’s indefensible starvation policy – came during his final weeks in office. In late December, the Biden administration forced a US-funded organization, the Famine Early Warning System, to retract a report that warned of imminent famine in northern Gaza.
At that point, Trump had already won the US presidential election, and Biden no longer faced any political repercussions for breaking with Netanyahu. Yet Biden still couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge the suffering he had enabled Israel to inflict on Palestinians in Gaza. And that is Biden’s legacy: complicity in Israel’s starvation and other war crimes until his last days as president.
