Israel’s Strike On Iran Prolongs An Excruciating Limbo For Palestinians

As open fighting between two of the Middle East’s best-armed players worsens, more than a million Palestinian lives hang in the balance.

Israel on Thursday attacked Iran, in retaliation for an April 13 attack from Iranian drones and missiles, which was itself a retaliation for the Israeli bombing of an Iranian consulate on April 1.

Iran downplayed the significance of the strike, with state media saying it caused no major damage. The U.S., Israel’s military lifeline, did so too. Secretary of State Antony Blinken his career, and particularly since Oct. 7, Biden has prioritized backing Israel. Critics say this has made him unwilling to deploy U.S. leverage to prevent Israeli violations of human rights and other destabilizing actions. But as Israel enters a new level of conflict with Iran — widely seen in American politics as an enemy country — Biden may prove especially deferential to Netanyahu.

“I think the U.S. will have to sit harder on Israel to totally prevent any Rafah invasion,” said Marks of NYU.

The revival of hawkish talk about Tehran since its strike on Israel has already made it “that much harder to push the Israelis toward compliance” with international law “and to create pressure” on aid-related issues, argued the humanitarian organization source.

“Can the Biden administration and Congress find a way to stop Israel’s war in Gaza and scale a humanitarian response in Gaza while enabling [Israelis] to defend themselves against Iran? Sure, if they properly staffed up and stopped half-measures, they could walk and chew gum,” the source said. “For now, it looks like the latter may take priority over the former.”

But Biden’s oft-stated resistance to a regional conflict could yet convince his team they must halt an Israeli offensive.

“The administration has been pretty consistently holding the line on Rafah because they know it’s a game-changer,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy think tank. “Biden’s policy has been to try and keep the catastrophe contained within Gaza. It’s an indefensibly callous and dangerous policy, but they’ve been consistent about it.”

Egypt, which worked with Israel to impose a years-long blockade on Gaza, has repeatedly warned Israel and the U.S. about a Rafah assault, fearing it would push Palestinians to cross the Egyptian border en masse. Other U.S.-aligned governments in the region, like Jordan, are facing domestic pro-Palestinian activism that has made some officials worried about the stability of their regimes.

The third reality: Too little humanitarian aid is getting to people who need it in Gaza, and the flow is increasing too slowly, despite some claims of progress.

Israeli authorities have touted an increase in how many trucks of supplies they permitted into Gaza this month through the two currently open crossings into the region, at which Israeli personnel inspect all incoming material.

On Friday, top White House Middle East official Brett McGurk told a public briefing with Jewish Americans there have been “pretty significant changes” in Israel’s treatment of aid — an assessment that was not shared by any of the aid workers HuffPost for this story.

“We’re interested in outputs, not inputs, which to say is the lowering of malnutrition. … We’re interested in no civilian casualties, we’re interested in no indiscriminate bombing. Those are the outputs we’re interested in, and the administration signaled they’re also interested in those things,” said Bill O’Keefe of the charity Catholic Relief Services. “We want to make sure they don’t just get caught up in inputs: there have been some increased trucks, that’s great, but there have been increased trucks before, and then that comes down.”

And on April 9, United Nations spokesperson Jens Laerke told reporters that Israel was counting half-full trucks that enter its screening sites — not the number of repacked, fully-loaded trucks that actually enter Gaza, which aid workers believe to be lower.

Meanwhile, multiple humanitarian officials told HuffPost they have no more details about plans for two additional points for supplying aid to Palestinians — the Erez land crossing and the Ashdod port — two weeks after Netanyahu’s cabinet approved their use.

The road leading from Erez to populated parts of northern Gaza requires extensive repairs before it can be used, and Israel has not greenlighted the opening of another land route, at Karni, Marks said. Meanwhile, Israel’s one currently open crossing into Gaza, Kerem Shalom, is closed on weekends. Calls for increased staffing and screening capacity there have yet to be answered, several aid workers said; neither have appeals for Israel to ease its policy of refusing to let in many aid supplies on the grounds that they’re “dual-use” and could also be used by militants.

Global attention “needs to be not on volume but types of aid and services: Can you get in tubing to do nasal feeding, the right types of food, staff to access clinics?” Marks added. “We still haven’t had that kind of results-based response, as opposed to volume-based.”

Israel could, for instance, make an immediate difference by restarting electricity supplies to Gaza, Paul noted.

Several humanitarian officials also described continued challenges in transporting equipment and personnel to northern Gaza, where famine is already underway.

UNICEF struggled to send fuel and food north from Rafah last week in convoys Ingram participated in, she said, as authorities delayed trucks in holding areas and directed them to a heavily congested route. Israeli officials also maintain extremely limited hours at the checkpoint separating southern Gaza from the north.

“These curfews, we run up against them all the time,” Ingram continued. Once she did reach the north on Sunday, she was appalled: “People were approaching our vehicles, fingers to the mouth. We went to Kamal Adwan hospital, which is treating malnourished children. … It is cruel that this is being inflicted on children when there is food and nutrition treatments and other aid.”

An Israeli attack on Rafah would force many traumatized Palestinians to abandon what little refuge they have found.

Abood Okal, a Palestinian American who spent weeks in Rafah with his wife and child before being permitted to leave on Nov. 2, told HuffPost his sister Eman, her husband and their three children are now living in the space where the Okals had been staying.

They share a bathroom with 40 other people in a distant family friend’s house and can only communicate with their relatives every 3-4 days, when Eman is able to get a network signal.

Conditions in the other places Palestinians could flee to resemble those where Okal’s other sister, Asma, is staying: in a small tent in Al Mawasi, an overwhelmed coastal community where thousands of families from Rafah may move amid an Israeli offensive. Her children have contracted hepatitis A, one of many diseases that are spreading rapidly in Gaza, and she can only communicate with the outside world around once every two weeks, Okal said.

Soraya Ali of Save the Children, who visited Gaza earlier this month, told HuffPost she saw how people are living beyond Rafah in Deir Al Balah, in central Gaza. She witnessed a makeshift toilet facility shared by 200 people, dozens of people living in “unbearably hot” improvised “tents” crafted from plastic, sticks and tarpaulin and children spending their days roaming the streets seeking food and water.

In Khan Yunis, another town north of Rafah, the streets are full of unexploded bombs and Israeli attacks have destroyed infrastructure that was functioning a few months ago, said Ingram, who visited last week. “It is unrealistic to imagine that somebody could move back there and be safe,” she told HuffPost.

Additionally, people who have been living in Rafah and would now consider moving have already endured overcrowding and shortages of essentials for months. Oxfam’s Alhaddad mentioned one example: She has run out of heart medication for her mother.

“You’re starting already weakened,” O’Keefe said. Relocating civilians, he said, is a matter of providing not just food or shelter (which the Israeli military appears to be working on, by ordering tens of thousands of tents) but also water, sanitation and health equipment.

“We do not see how to safely provide for those people in order to allow for some sort of invasion of Rafah,” he added.

For humanitarian groups, major fighting in Rafah would make providing assistance to Palestinians nearly impossible.

It’s the “only place there is a semblance of an aid response,” Ali said. “If a ground incursion happens in Rafah, it would undo everything.”

Since the start of the war, aid organizations have developed storage and distribution facilities there, as well as accommodations for visiting staff serving Gaza’s population.

Between the added disruption to civilians’ lives and the worsening lack of aid supplies, full-on fighting in Rafah “would be the deadliest chapter of this conflict yet,” Ali said.