Senator close to Biden opens door to conditioning US military aid to Israel

WASHINGTON

Sen. Chris Coons, an influential lawmaker and close Capitol Hill ally of President Joe Biden, opened the door Thursday to the US conditioning aid to Israel amid its ongoing war on the besieged Gaza Strip.

Asked during an interview with CNN, Coons said "I think we're at that point," caging his comments on whether Israel conducts "large-scale operations in Rafah," the southern Gaza city where 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge after being displaced.

"If Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister, were to order the IDF into Rafah at scale, they were to drop thousand-pound bombs, send in a battalion to go after Hamas, and make no provision for civilians or for humanitarian aid, I would vote to condition aid to Israel," he said, referring to Israel's military. "I've never said that before. I've never been here before."

The comments come after Israel carried out strikes on a humanitarian convoy in central Gaza that killed seven aid workers in what the group's founder called a "direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by the Israel Defense Forces."

Biden has expressed anger at the killings, but the White House has shown no willingness to change policy on Israel and has repeatedly rejected calls to condition aid. It is unclear if the growing number of the president's fellow Democrats who are backing the shift will affect his calculus.

Israel has waged a deadly military offensive on the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7 cross-border attack led by the Palestinian group, Hamas, killed less than 1,200 people.

Nearly 33,000 Palestinians have since been killed and 75,577 injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities. Israel has also imposed a crippling blockade on the Gaza Strip, leaving its population, particularly residents of northern Gaza, on the verge of starvation.

The Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.

Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which last week asked it to do more to prevent famine in Gaza.