Trump is suspending aid to Ukraine – but he’s rolling over for Israel

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In his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, Donald Trump barely mentioned Gaza or the wider Middle East, making only a passing reference to bringing back US hostages held by Hamas militants in Gaza. He didn’t even expound on his plan for the US to take over the devastated territory and turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East”, while expelling 2 million Palestinians to neighboring Arab countries.

But Trump is already going down the same failed path as his predecessor, Joe Biden, who sent Israel a virtually unlimited supply of weapons – and failed to use US political cover at the United Nations and billions of dollars in arms as leverage to stop Israel’s war on Gaza. On 1 March, the Trump administration announced it had approved $4bn in new weapons to Israel under emergency authorities, meaning the deal would bypass even a perfunctory review in Congress. A day later, Benjamin Netanyahu banned all food and other aid deliveries to Gaza, imposing a new siege that threatens to collapse a fragile ceasefire reached in January.

While he goes easy on the Israeli prime minister, Trump this week suspended all US military aid to Ukraine, days after Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy had a dramatic on-camera confrontation in the White House. Trump and his aides say they are using the suspension of billions of dollars in military support, along with a pause in intelligence sharing, as leverage to persuade the Ukrainian leader to cooperate with US efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Trump’s sudden cutoff of weapons to Ukraine proves that the US president is capable of swiftly ending arms shipments to any American ally. But Trump, like Biden before him, refuses to use that same kind of leverage to force Netanyahu to change his policies toward Gaza. Both Trump and Biden simply decided they don’t want to stop sending billions of dollars in weapons to Israel, depriving themselves of the most powerful influence they have over Netanyahu and his extremist government.

For a businessman who prides himself on his ability to negotiate tough deals with hardball tactics, Trump is being a weak negotiator. He is refusing to play his strongest cards with the Israeli leader to ensure Netanyahu sticks to the ceasefire Trump supported. Netanyahu also knows how to placate Trump, being sycophantic in ways that Zelenskyy has so far refused to do. After Washington announced the latest $4bn in weapons shipments to Israel, Netanyahu thanked Trump profusely and called him “the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House”.

Trump is so eager to show his support to Israel that he and his top aides are claiming credit for massive weapons deals that the Biden administration approved in its final days. In announcing the latest deal that skirted congressional review, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, claimed that the US administration had approved nearly $12bn in new weapons to Israel just six weeks into Trump’s second term. But more than $8bn of these arms transfers were initiated in early January by Biden, who insisted on arming Israel into the twilight of his presidency despite being undermined and humiliated by Netanyahu for more than a year. (Those weapons included 3,000 Hellfire air-to-ground missiles worth $660m, and tens of thousands of heavy bombs, artillery shells and GPS guidance kits and fuses for bombs, totaling $6.75bn.)

The latest batch of munitions approved by the Trump administration includes more than 35,000 US-made, 2,000lb “bunker buster” bombs, which cause enormous casualties when dropped on population centers. In the first month of its war on Gaza, which started after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel, the Israeli military dropped hundreds of 2,000lb bombs on the territory – an intensity unmatched since the US bombardment of Vietnam. Israel’s extensive use of these bunker buster munitions, along with “dumb bombs” that often kill and wound civilians indiscriminately, likely constitute war crimes, according to UN experts. At least one US-based human rights group has asked the international criminal court to investigate Biden and two of his top cabinet members for “aiding and abetting” Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, based on the unfettered flow of US weapons and intelligence support.

While Trump has nothing but contempt for international law, he’s been emboldened by Biden and other western leaders who for 15 months ignored and tried to discredit international courts and prosecutors in order to protect Israel while it waged its devastating war on Gaza. Trump’s disdain for the rules-based international order, which was put in place after the end of the second world war to manage global conflicts, is partly rooted in seeing that order shattered by both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Netanyahu has also been emboldened by the collapse of the west’s even nominal rhetoric about respect for international law and human rights. Since launching the Gaza war, Netanyahu has shown that he will respond to raw power and leverage, which Trump has decided to use only against Ukraine. With Trump maintaining an uninterrupted supply of weapons to Israel, Netanyahu has little incentive to change course and be less obstinate. Already, the Israeli premier has been working to undermine the ceasefire with Hamas, which was brokered by the Biden administration and Trump’s incoming Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real estate developer. The truce took effect a day before Trump’s inauguration on 20 January.

As the ceasefire’s first phase expired on 2 March, Netanyahu refused to start the second phase, which requires a complete Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza and negotiations over a more permanent truce. Instead, Netanyahu wants to change the deal and is pressuring Hamas to accept a six-week extension of the first phase of the ceasefire, with Hamas committing to release more hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, but without an Israeli commitment to a full withdrawal or long-term truce. Netanyahu is worried that his governing coalition would collapse if he agrees to a permanent ceasefire, especially since the far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has repeatedly threatened to resign and bring down the government if Netanyahu ends the war before destroying Hamas.

With Trump’s support, Netanyahu is now violating the ceasefire he had accepted by imposing another blockade on Gaza. Israeli officials say they coordinated the cut-off of humanitarian aid with the Trump administration, which issued a statement that blamed Hamas for the suspension of ceasefire talks, even though the group had agreed to move to the second phase. As the Biden administration did for months, Trump put all the blame on Hamas while absolving Netanyahu of responsibility for trying to change the ceasefire terms and drag out negotiations so he can stay in power.

Israel’s latest siege deprives Palestinians of basic needs like food, fuel and medicine – and it plunges Gaza back into the worst days of the Israeli military assault, which killed more than 48,000 Palestinians and displaced nearly 2 million. The blockade also opens Israel to renewed charges that it is committing war crimes in Gaza. Both the Geneva conventions and the Rome Statute, the founding document of the international criminal court, prohibit using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war, and consider it a war crime. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on charges of using starvation as a method of warfare and other crimes against humanity.

Today, Trump is repeating the failed and morally bankrupt policies of the Biden administration – unwavering support and unrestrained weapons shipments to Israel, even as Netanyahu backs out of his commitment to the ceasefire that both administrations pushed him into accepting. And Trump risks becoming as deeply complicit in Israel’s war crimes as Biden had been.