Biden’s administration this weekend pressured Israel to allow more aid into Gaza and to restore internet connectivity to the enclave, “a concerted effort to ease a growing humanitarian crisis that comes amid fears of a widening regional war,” Wapo reports.
“Biden and Netanyahu held a difficult conversation last weekend with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s decision to withhold part of the tax revenue it collects for the Palestinian Authority,” Axios reports.
The Israeli government said that it would transfer all the funds except for those it says go to Hamas-run Gaza. The PA funds terrorism and Hamas and is also very corrupt, which is why Donald Trump stopped funding them.
According to The Washington Post (WaPo), in Biden’s first phone call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since an expanded Israeli ground operation in Gaza began, the president “underscored the need to immediately and significantly increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to meet the needs of civilians in Gaza,” according to a White House summary of the call.
Later, a top Israeli official told CNN as many as 100 trucks a day could soon be moving into the strip.
Biden has also repeatedly insisted that the Palestinian Authority, which currently governs part of the West Bank, must also rule Gaza after Hamas is eliminated and that a Palestinian state must be established joining the two territories.
The reason the West Bank has as many problems as it does is because of the Palestinian Authority.
Biden wants a Palestinian state after they just tried to annihilate Israelis and admitted they’re going to continue trying to annihilate Israelis. The Palestinian Authority gives its money to terrorists. They don’t commit the acts per se, but they fund and incite them. That’s a well-known fact.
“Netanyahu is rejecting those tenets with increasingly forceful public statements, leaving it unclear how the United States and Israel will resolve fundamental differences about the future of the region. The most immediate issue, U.S. officials say, is deciding who will be responsible for governing the tiny enclave on “the day after” when the fighting in Gaza ends,” WaPo says.
WaPo continued: “The Palestinian Authority has been plagued for years by corruption and weakness, and Gaza voters ousted the PA from their government in 2006, a year after Israel withdrew from the enclave in favor of Hamas. But U.S. officials argue that there is no alternative to the PA as a pragmatic force representing the Palestinians, and Biden often speaks of a postwar Gaza that would join the West Bank in being run by a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority.”
American officials “insist that Gaza must be under Palestinian rule in a way that connects governance in the West Bank with Gaza,” said Martin Indyk, who represented the United States in failed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks under President Barack Obama. “There’s only one legally constituted candidate for this job: the Palestinian Authority.”
“Bibi [Netanyahu] rejects this idea out of hand because his coalition partners are intent on doing away with the Palestinian Authority,” added Indyk, who is now the Lowy distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They want to annex the West Bank rather than have the Palestinian Authority govern there, so they don’t want it resurrected via a new role in governing Gaza.”
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