USAID administrator Samantha Power said on Wednesday that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is “worse now than ever before” and acknowledged that “Israeli military operations & closed crossings” were the primary impediments to the delivery of American aid.
The post on X followed comments by Power that although Israeli operations in Rafah were “limited,” the “catastrophic consequences” of Israeli military actions in southern Gazan city were nonetheless taking place.
It is the latest and among the most direct examples of the Biden administration admitting that Israel is violating both international and U.S. law without saying so directly. As a result their policy remains largely unchanged.
Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act mandates that, “no assistance shall be furnished … to any country when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”
Lawmakers who have been critical of Biden’s “blank check” approach have identified the blocking of humanitarian assistance as the most obvious example of Israeli violations of U.S. law, and therefore as the reason why Washington should cut off arms sales to Tel Aviv.
But the administration has been unmoved. The NSM-20 report, a result of this pressure from Congress, ultimately concluded that the State Department “does not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance within the meaning of section 620I,” and that consequently no change in policy was required.
Administration officials told RS shortly before the release of that report that experts and staffers would possibly be willing to resign if the report asserted that Israel was complying with the law, since the blocking of aid has been so blatant. That became a reality this week when Stacy Gilbert, an adviser in the State Department’s bureau of population, refugees and migration, publicized her recent resignation. She called the NSM-20 report “patently false” and said that the department “could have AI write the report because it is not informed by reality or context or the informed opinions of subject matter experts.”
The administration’s own actions are also an acknowledgement of how difficult it has been for the U.S. to distribute aid in Gaza. The $320 million humanitarian pier, which was intended to be the Biden administration’s attempt to overcome the difficulties to distribute aid, has been a failure. Less than two weeks after it became operational — in which it delivered fewer than 60 aid trucks of aid, very few, if any, of which were distributed in Gaza — the pier was towed away and forced to suspend operations due to inclement weather .
There is evidence that U.S. pressure can push Israel to make some changes. After the Israeli strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen staffers led Biden to threaten a change in U.S. policy, there was a small uptick in the aid corridors opened and trucks allowed in. But even at the time, Power warned that famine was likely underway in parts of Gaza, and the entire population was at risk of facing famine. And now she says that partners on the ground indicate that the situation is even worse than it was before the WCK staffers were killed, and no change in U.S. policy appears to be forthcoming.
Blaise Malley is a freelance writer and a former Responsible Statecraft reporter. He is currently a MA candidate at New York University. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The American Prospect, The American Conservative, and elsewhere.
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File:Samantha Power Speaking in Geneva.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
Ashraf al-Mansi walks in front of members of his Popular Army militia. The group, previously known as the Counter-Terrorism Service, has worked with the Israeli military and is considered by many in Gaza to be a criminal gang. (Via the Facebook page of Yasser Abu Shabab)
Frightening images have emerged from Gaza in the week since a fragile ceasefire took hold between Israel and Hamas. In one widely circulated video, seven blindfolded men kneel in line with militants arrayed behind them. Gunshots ring out in unison, and the row of men collapse in a heap as dozens of spectators look on.
The gruesome scenes appear to be part of a Hamas effort to reestablish control over Gaza through a crackdown on gangs and criminal groups that it says have proliferated during the past two years of war and chaos. In the minds of Israel and its backers, the killings reveal Hamas’ true colors — and represent a preview of what the group may do if it’s allowed to maintain some degree of power.
Indeed, some are already arguing that these attacks should spark a return to war. “Hamas continues to show that their barbaric and irresponsible actions are the biggest threat to the Israeli and Palestinian people,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement, adding that Israel will “respond forcefully” to Hamas’ “brutal rule.”
The U.S. seemed to back Netanyahu up with a statement warning of a planned Hamas attack on Palestinian civilians. “Should Hamas proceed with this attack, measures will be taken to protect the people of Gaza and preserve the integrity of the ceasefire,” the State Department said. The Washington Post editorial board, in an editorial blaming Hamas for a potential collapse of the ceasefire, argued that “Terrorist brutality risks igniting a Palestinian civil war.”
But this emerging narrative omits crucial context: many of the groups now clashing with Hamas receive weapons, supplies and protection from Israel. And that support has continued despite Israel’s decision to sign onto a ceasefire. As Israeli troops have withdrawn from parts of Gaza, the leadership of many of these groups have retreated with them, giving the militants space to build up their forces and issue public calls to fight Hamas.
Experts who spoke with RS described the support for anti-Hamas militants as part of a long-standing Israeli policy of stoking division in Palestinian politics. In order to prevent the rise of a unified, nationalist Palestinian leadership, Israel has often offered assistance to smaller, less politically engaged factions. In Gaza, this approach has expanded to include highly controversial groups, including ones led by criminals and people with links to ISIS.
Now, it looks like the strategy could pay off for an Israeli leadership that remains skeptical of a lasting ceasefire. “We are starting to see these groups trying to sow the seeds of civil strife in order to try and destabilize things in Gaza,” said Tahani Mustafa, an expert on Palestinian affairs and a visiting scholar at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “That can be incredibly dangerous because it doesn't take much for Israel to use [it] as a pretext to revert back to war.”
Preventing Palestinian unity ‘at all costs’
Israel’s divide-and-rule strategy dates back to the early days of the occupation, when Israeli leaders attempted to govern the West Bank and Gaza in coordination with “village leagues” made up of apolitical Palestinian leaders. At that time, the goal was to find an alternative to dealing with the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, which sought to free Palestine through force of arms.
In the late 1980s, Israel also began to lend a certain degree of support to Islamists in Gaza, whom Israeli leaders viewed as less politically dangerous than the PLO radicals. But that equation flipped when Hamas, which Israel had initially supported, began to carry out attacks on Israeli civilians. Meanwhile, the PLO morphed into the Palestinian Authority, which now works closely with Israel on security.
Following a Palestinian civil war in 2007, Israel has primarily focused on ensuring that the PA and Hamas remain at loggerheads. At times, this has meant tacit acceptance of Hamas rule in Gaza, including through Netanyahu’s controversial policy of allowing Qatar to make payments to the Hamas-run government in Gaza.
Since the beginning of the current war, Israel has pitched a plan for post-war Gaza in which prominent clan leaders could manage the affairs of the enclave. As part of this policy, Israeli officials, with assent from the U.S., have attempted to cultivate relationships with influential families. Sometimes this just meant leaving behind weapons or supplies when Israeli forces evacuated an area. But other times, it was more direct.
“Shin Bet officers would actively reach out to people on their phones or send them [middlemen] with a clear message of ‘here are weapons, here is money, your job is to challenge Hamas,’” said Muhammad Shehada, a close watcher of the Gaza war and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Not a single clan agreed to cooperate as a clan, but members within the clan agreed.”
One family that Israel attempted to court is the Doghmush clan, several members of which have been publicly executed in recent weeks. The clan has a complicated history with Hamas, in part due to one influential Doghmush leader’s time running an ISIS affiliate opposed to Hamas in Gaza.
Further inflaming tensions is the fact that a handful of Doghmush members, at Israel’s request, recently began launching attacks against Hamas, according to family leader Nizar Doghmush, who condemned those members of his clan. So far, this condemnation has not been enough to spare the Doghmush clan from retribution. At least 27 people have been killed in Hamas-Doghmush clashes since the ceasefire.
As the war in Gaza dragged on, and Israel struggled to recruit from the major clans, it resorted to working with less savory characters, according to Shehada. Emerging evidence suggests that Israel is backing at least four different Palestinian armed groups across Gaza, which are now engaged in a low-level conflict with Hamas.
One such organization is led by Yasser Abu Shabab, known in Gaza as a “notorious criminal” due to his involvement in drug and weapons smuggling and apparent ties to ISIS in the Sinai, according to Mustafa. Abu Shabab’s “Popular Forces” have become infamous in Gaza for allegedly looting aid trucks in order to sell the supplies on the black market. (Israeli officials are now seeking to rebrand Abu Shabab as a “grassroots, deradicalized civil society activist,” according to Shehada.)
Husam al-Astal, who once served time in a Gaza prison alongside Abu Shabab, initially fought for the Popular Forces but has since split off and formed his own group, known as the “Counter-Terrorism Strike Force.” Astal has publicly said that he is working with Israeli forces, which on at least one occasion involved Israel bombing Hamas militants in order to preempt an attack on Astal’s fighters.
Hamas has also recently found itself fighting with a group known as the “Popular Army,” led by a previously unknown figure named Ashraf al-Mansi. Like the Popular Forces, the Popular Army has staged its operations in areas that remain under Israeli control. Video evidence strongly suggests that Mansi’s men are receiving supplies directly from Israeli forces, according to Sky News.
The crackdown on these groups, while brutal and extrajudicial, enjoys fairly wide support among Palestinians in Gaza. “Hamas has basically regrouped with other forces like Fatah, the [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], the [Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine] and others in order to try and reinstate a sense of law and order,” Mustafa said, noting that much of the demand for this sort of action has come from Gazans fed up with “lawlessness.”
The precise extent of these groups’ collaboration with Israel is hard to determine, but Shehada says some of them work closely with the Israel Defense Forces and carry out military operations on their behalf. Adding to the confusion — and suspicion — is the fact that Netanyahu has publicly admitted to working with some of these groups without naming any of them in particular, leaving Hamas wide latitude to crack down on alleged collaborators.
For Israel, alliances with Palestinian collaborators in Gaza are valuable for two main reasons. One is that these groups have little interest in Palestinian nationalism. “They have their own narrow self-interests, and that works very well for Israel,” said Khaled Elgindy, a visiting scholar at Georgetown and a former adviser to PA leaders.
Another is that, by subcontracting the fighting to Palestinians, Israel can distance itself from any resulting violence. “There's quite a lot of potential there for these groups to be disruptive,” Elgindy told RS. “And to the outside world, it will look like intra-Palestinian violence.”
Israel’s security establishment once sought to maintain stability at all costs, but now it appears to view chaos as an upside, Elgindy said. In the near-term, instability will provide plenty of opportunities for Israel to return to full-scale war in Gaza. And in the long-term, it will strengthen Israel’s argument that Palestinians are simply too divided — and militarized — to negotiate with in good faith.
Harder to understand is why the U.S. continues to support these policies. Mike Casey, who served as a foreign service officer in the Palestinian section of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem from 2020 to 2024, argued that Washington’s backing for Israeli efforts to divide the Palestinians has left everyone worse off. “There's just this constant cycle of violence that [the U.S. is] not taking steps to stop because the Israeli government is pushing to prevent a Palestinian state and Palestinian unity at all costs,” Casey told RS.
When Casey resigned from the State Department, one major factor was his frustration with the Biden administration for lining up behind Israel’s plan for a clan-based government in post-war Gaza. “We were just taking Israeli directives on what to do and not thinking through what's best for the United States, for our interests, for Palestinian interests and for Israeli interests,” Casey said. “We just did whatever Netanyahu and others would tell us to do.”
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Top image credit: U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy over lunch in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 17, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Claims that President Trump bullied President Zelensky and urged him to withdraw from the whole of the Donbas at their latest meeting in Washington will doubtless cause the usual furore in the Western media and commentariat, but they cannot be substantiated and are a distraction from the really important issue concerning U.S. and NATO strategy, which is whether the alliance should continue support to Ukraine at existing levels or seek radically to escalate.
Here, President Trump made the right decision by pulling back from his previous suggestion that the U.S. might provide Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine — presumably as a result of his recent telephone discussion with President Putin.
On the one hand the very limited number of land-based Tomahawks that the U.S. could provide would not seriously change the balance of forces between Ukraine and Russia — as Putin doubtless warned Trump. But in political terms the missiles would be seen in Russia as a huge escalation. They would be able to strike Moscow and far deeper into Russia, and they would need the direct assistance of the U.S. military both to set them up and to guide them onto their targets.
President Trump will hopefully exercise the same prudence and responsibility in his approach to two other wildly dangerous suggestions coming out of Europe: to shoot down Russian warplanes that violate NATO airspace, and to seize Russian cargoes on the high seas if they enter the ports or territorial waters of NATO countries. It is highly unlikely that European countries would take such steps without guarantees of U.S. backing. These suggestions should be categorically denied.
As I was told repeatedly during a visit to Russia this month, if NATO countries took either of these steps, Putin would have no choice but to order immediate military retaliation. NATO aircraft would be shot down. The Russian Navy would attempt to convoy Russian trade, and if intercepted, would fight. If the Scandinavians and Baltic States took such action in the Baltic — as they threatened to do in the summer — this would be seen as a blockade of St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad and therefore as an act of war.
At this point, a full-scale Russia-NATO conflict, possibly leading to nuclear exchanges, would take a huge leap closer.
Apart from being hideously dangerous, no such actions on the part of NATO are necessary. Of course, if Russian planes dropped bombs or fired missiles at NATO territory they must be shot down; but so far nothing of the sort has happened. And above all, thanks to the tremendous advantages that contemporary military technology gives to the defense, the Ukrainian front is holding extremely well. The Russian army is advancing, but very slowly. Thus fighting for the small town of Pokrovsk in Donetsk province has now been going on for almost 15 months with no Russian breakthrough.
Nor is there any sign of the appearance of new weaponry (like the tank and the bomber aircraft in the First World War) that could allow Russia quickly to break the stalemate.
At this rate — even if Russia can eventually conquer the remaining 30 percent of Donetsk province held by Ukraine, or if Trump can somehow pressure Ukraine into withdrawing from this territory as part of a peace settlement — much greater Russian conquests will remain out of sight, and Russia will have no chance to bring about a collapse the Ukrainian state.
As to the idea of a deliberately planned and successful Russian invasion of NATO itself, this is such self-evident rubbish that Western military “experts” should be ashamed to peddle it. By the same token however, the idea of Ukraine reconquering its lost territory from Russia has also long since been revealed to be hopeless.
At present therefore Ukrainian independence is secure, and will remain so even if a few towns in Donetsk fall to Russia. The real danger is rather that if the war continues indefinitely, domestic political change in Europe will lead to the evaporation of willingness to go on supporting Ukraine, leading to a collapse of Ukraine’s capacity to continue the war. Political developments in France, Germany and Britain make this possibility obvious.
However, this development would take years to come to fruition; and in the meantime, the Russian economy is also suffering, with inflation beginning to eat into living standards and efforts to control inflation hurting businesses. It seems likely therefore that if Russia can eventually take the whole of the Donbas, then Putin would be willing to stop if Russian concerns in the wider areas of U.S.-Russian relations and European security were addressed.
In the meantime however, the result of growing Russian military frustration has been to increase demands by hardliners to bring the war to a victorious end by some act of radical escalation that would terrify the West into imposing Russian terms on Ukraine.
They seem however to have no clear idea of what this escalation should consist of; and so far Putin has consistently rejected a strategy that would be both immensely dangerous and would offer no sure prospect of success. This nationalist pressure means that it would be even more difficult for Putin to avoid military retaliation if the escalation came from the Western side.
This danger is increased by the truly grotesque nature of much of the present security debate in Europe — though “debate” is a truly misleading term for a scene that more closely resembles a hen-house spooked by a (possibly imaginary) fox. Three Russian planes that deviated for 12 minutes by a maximum of five miles from their legal corridor over the Gulf of Finland have been turned by parts of the Western media and commentariat into a massive campaign of violations of NATO airspace.
Meanwhile, some unarmed drones over Poland have generated a spate of reported sightings of alleged (but so far wholly unproven) Russian drones from Norway to Italy, quite possibly by the same people who in peaceful times report UFOs. Some fires (without casualties), many of them with no proven links to Russia at all, have been turned into a supposedly massive Russian campaign of hybrid warfare.
As so often, this hysteria comes served with a giant helping of hypocrisy. In this “reporting” and “analysis” there is rarely the slightest mention of the fact that by far the greatest act of sabotage in Europe since the start of the war — the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline — was directed against Russia, and that the only actions that have caused deaths have been mines planted on ships with Russian cargoes in the Mediterranean.
Instead of engaging in this kind of frenzy, responsible European establishments that truly had the interests of Ukraine at heart would be helping the Trump administration to craft a detailed peace proposal that would freeze the existing borders of NATO and the Russian-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and place limits on NATO forces on Russia’s borders and Russian forces in Belarus in return for Russia moderating its demands on Ukraine.
They should also be developing a compromise solution to control over the western Donbas involving neutralization under U.N. control. This might not work at present if Putin is really determined to take the whole of the Donbas, but at least we would have a viable proposal ready if the situation on the ground does shift somewhat in Russia’s favor.
And in the meantime, we should all keep calm. The fox is nowhere near our hen coop yet, and nothing is to be gained by running around squawking.
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Top image credit: A Ukrainian diver, Volodymyr Z., who is wanted by Germany over his alleged involvement in the 2022 explosions that damaged the Nord Stream pipeline and severely disrupted Russian gas supplies to Europe, walks escorted by Polish Police at the district court in Warsaw, Poland, October 1, 2025. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel
It wasn’t that long ago that the mysterious attack on the Nord Stream pipelines was a massive outrage across the Western world.
With Russia the presumed culprit, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen vowed the “strongest possible response,” while a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared it “a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression towards the EU.”
What a difference a few years makes. Not only is Russia no longer a target in the criminal investigation, but most Western officials have seemingly lost interest in finding out who was really behind the attack and bringing them to justice.
Last week a Polish court put a major wrench into the gears of the case, blocking a Ukrainian suspect’s extradition to Germany and ordering him released from custody, with the judge declaring his alleged crime a lawful military action taken that was “justified, rational and just,” and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk deeming it “rightly so. The case is closed.”
It’s an odd response to an attack in Sweden and Denmark economic zones that crippled infrastructure partly owned by Europeans (the pipelines were located in the Baltic Sea and brought Russian natural gas to Germany and were 51% Russian owned, with the rest owned by companies in Germany, France, and the Netherlands), an attack once widely denounced by much of the Western establishment. But this is just the latest instance of Polish officials’ disinterest in, if not outright public celebration of, the sabotage.
Probably the best-known instance is former foreign affairs minister and now Deputy Prime Minister Radosław Sikorski’s now-infamous (and since-deleted) “Thank you, USA” tweet, posted mere hours after the attack in September 2022 and accompanied by a photo of the aftermath of the underwater explosion. But you could go back much further.
There are morethanhalf a dozencables in the WikiLeaks-released tranche of U.S. diplomatic communications that detail the Polish government’s opposition to Nord Stream dating back to the 2000s, including from Sikorski himself, who had served an earlier stint as foreign minister from 2007 to 2014.
In one September 2007 cable, Polish officials laid out their government’s official position that “Poland considers the project as opposing our interest and the general rule of European solidarity.” Another from November that year describes Poland as “among the most vocal opponents of the project,” and that Poles viewed it as the “modern Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” referring to the secret deal between Moscow and Berlin in 1939 to carve the country in two.
Poland has been an unwaveringopponent of the pipeline ever since, viewing it as a dangerous political project to not just sideline Poland and Ukraine, but make Germany and other Western European powers more dependent on Russian energy.
So it’s not exactly surprising that while much of Europe expressed outrage at the pipeline’s destruction — especially with consensusbeingfor a time that Russia was responsible for destroying its own geopolitical trump card — Polish officials have been somewhere between celebratory and gloating.
“The destruction of Nord Stream, as far as I’m concerned, was a very good thing,” Sikorski told The New Statesman a year later. “The problem with North Stream 2 [the English translation of the pipeline’s name] is not that it was blown up,” tweeted Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk earlier this month. “The problem is that it was built.”
Meanwhile, while Germany has been understandably eager to get to the bottom of who was responsible — the switch-off of Russian gas exports to the country that the attack contributed to has sent its energy market reeling, hastening a process of economically ruinous deindustrialization — Poland has not exactly been helpful. As German investigators followed the trail of evidence to Ukrainians and then Poland, which the saboteurs allegedly used as an operating base from which to plan and resource the operation, they were met with resistance from their counterparts in the fellow NATO state, who dismissed the widespread reports of possible Polish complicity as simply Russian propaganda.
By September last year, angry German investigators were privately accusing the Polish government of having sabotaged their probe and engaged in “obstruction of justice.” One former head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, charged outright that it had done so to “to cover up its own involvement in the attack on the pipelines,” because “operations of such dimensions are inconceivable without the approval of the political leaders of the countries involved.”
In other words, the Polish court’s decision to release the leading suspect last Friday is just the capstone to this alleged Polish campaign of obstruction of Germany’s investigation. The judge who ordered the case closed, it should be noted, was not acting in defiance of the official Polish government position, but in deference to it. Polish officials, including Prime Minister Tusk, repeatedlyspoke out publicly against the suspect’s extradition in advance of the ruling.
It all adds to mountingtensions between the two NATO allies, tensions that could strain the alliance should evidence ever surface that Germany’s own ally assisted what is essentially a terrorist attack against it. Lucky for everyone involved, the Ukrainian suspect’s release makes it exceedingly unlikely not only that the perpetrators of the attack will face justice, but that the world ever finds out which larger powers, if any, were behind it and for what reason. It’s not farfetched to wonder if that’s by design.
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