Pablo PardoWashington Correspondent
Washington Correspondent
Updated Thursday, March 7, 2024-18:42
Elections Trump vs.
Biden: the race that half of the US does not want
Middle East The US opens another crack in Netanyahu's war cabinet
The United States will intervene in
Gaza
for humanitarian purposes.
Joe Biden has ordered the Armed Forces to establish a port in that territory to be able to bring food and
humanitarian aid
to the population.
In recent days, deaths due to malnutrition have begun to occur - at least 12, according to the American press - due to the reluctance of the Israeli authorities to allow the free passage of
humanitarian aid
trucks .
Biden will officially announce it tonight (Spain time) during his
State of the Union address
.
The White House's goal is to allow
a humanitarian maritime traffic corridor from Chipe
, where at least one ship with food is already located, to Gaza.
To this end, the US Armed Forces will build a port in the Palestinian territory
that will allow the arrival of large-scale and continuous aid to the Strip, which has been plunged into chaos since the
Palestinian terrorist group Hamas launched a savage attack against Israel in which
more than 1,300 people died
, of which about 800 were civilians.
Since then, Israel has invaded Gaza, in a war in which more than
30,000 Palestinians
have died , of which 24,000 are civilians.
The decision is one more step in Washington's policy of imposing some control on Netanyahu's Israeli government in its offensive.
The US has not spared diplomatic efforts, especially involving the director of USAID (the US international development agency, similar to the Spanish AECI),
Samantha Power
.
This is how the US began to drop humanitarian aid on Gaza from military planes based in Jordan on Saturday, continuing and reinforcing an initiative that had already been started, in addition to that Arab country, by the Netherlands and France.
A key factor in the aerial operation was convincing Israel to allow planes
to fly at low altitudes
, so food could be dropped more accurately and not fall into the sea.
Although Joe Biden's Government has not publicly criticized Israel, keeps its arms shipments to that country unchanged and covers a third of the cost of the war for Tel Aviv, the
discomfort with Netanyahu in the White House
and the State Department is considerable. .
Washington believes that Israel is specifically attacking the offices of the Palestinian police that protect aid convoys, leaving them unprotected against the increasing numbers of looters who are proliferating in Gaza amid the chaos of war.
Israel also wants
to expel the UN from Gaza
.
Finally, the Biden team is concerned about Israeli indifference to what happens after the war.
Its insistence that Hamas has no future in Gaza and that only groups with no political affiliation will be authorized to exercise authority in the region is, for Washington, the equivalent of giving the
green card
to mafias and highwaymen to take control of the fringe.
In fact, in northern Gaza, which has been under Israeli occupation for three months, humanitarian aid convoys often have to pay a
toll
in the form of delivering one or several trucks to the
armed groups that control the region
in order to follow your path to the areas where the population most in need is.
Biden prefers that Hamas exists - at least, it is an interlocutor, which receives help from allies of the US and Israel such as Qatar - than that there is a chaos of armed gangs and mafias from which a new Al Qaeda could also emerge, a version Palestine of the
Taliban
, or a faction of the
Islamic State
that ends up leaving the current Islamists as a lesser evil.