The State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said Tuesday that the progress to date must be supplemented and sustained but that “we at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of U.S. law.”

It requires recipients of military assistance to adhere to international humanitarian law and not impede the provision of such aid.

“We are not giving Israel a pass,” Patel said, adding that “we want to see the totality of the humanitarian situation improve.”

The department’s decision comes a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top national security adviser, Ron Dermer, in Washington to go over the steps that Israel has taken since Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned in October of possible repercussions if the aid situation had not improved in 30 days.

lowest amount of aid
 

The US finding comes despite Israel not meeting a series of metrics set explicitly in the letter, including allowing a minimum of 350 trucks per day into Gaza.

The United Nations says October saw the lowest amount of aid entering Gaza this year, and the territory is receiving “nowhere near what we need to support more than two million Palestinians”

That was the assessment Tuesday from U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric who said that for a second month, the U.N. World Food Program was only able to reach half the people that rely on the United Nations for assistance, and only with reduced rations.

Dujarric said that a 14-truck convoy had planned to deliver supplies to shelters in Beit Hanoun and the Indonesian Hospital in Jabaliya in northern Gaza on Monday, where an Israeli offensive is under way, but only two trucks with ready-to-eat meals and wheat flour and one carrying water made it to two shelters.

It was the first time in over a month that people in Beit Hanoun received any food assistance.

The 11 other trucks didn’t make it because of delays in receiving authorization and crowds along the route, Dujarric said. WFP was planning another mission to Beit Hanon to reach the rest of the shelters and the hospital on Tuesday, but he said “those missions have been denied” by Israel.

He said WFP reported that 15 trucks carried food parcels and wheat through a newly opened crossing into central Gaza at Kissufim for the first time.

“We continue to call for the immediate opening of more land routes into Gaza and for the lifting of administrative and physical restrictions within Gaza to efficiently reach the most vulnerable people and areas,” Dujarric said.

Many civilians in Gaza are hungry, sick, “and desperately need assistance,” he said.

“We want all of the access points to be fully open,” Dujarric said. “We want to have the volume of aid going in that matches the needs. Right now, that’s not the case.”

Gravest international crimes
 

The U.N.’s top humanitarian official says “acts reminiscent of the gravest international crimes” are being committed in Gaza.

Calling the situation in the territory after more than a year of war “catastrophic,” Joyce Msuya told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that “the latest offensive that Israel started in North Gaza last month is an intensified, extreme and accelerated version of the horrors of the past year.”

She accused Israeli authorities of blocking aid from entering the northernmost part of Gaza, where she said around 75,000 people remain with dwindling food and water, and supplies have been cut off while people are being pushed south. Israel says it is battling Hamas militants who have regrouped there.

“Shelters, homes and schools have been burned and bombed to the ground,” Msuya said. “Numerous families remain trapped under rubble because fuel for digging equipment is being blocked by the Israeli authorities and first responders have been blocked from reaching them.”

She said hospitals have been attacked and ambulances destroyed.

Msuya stressed that “the daily cruelty we see in Gaza seems to have no limits,” pointing to the town of Beit Hanoun in the north which Israel has besieged for a month and where the U.N. delivered the first food supplies and water on Monday.

“But today, Israeli soldiers forcibly displaced people from those same areas,” she said.

“Conditions of life across Gaza are unfit for human survival,” Msuya said, pointing to insufficient food and shelter items needed for the coming winter.

She stressed that problems including the violent armed looting of U.N. convoys, driven by the collapse of law and order, can be solved “with the right political will.”

The Security Council meeting was called by Guyana, Switzerland, Algeria and Slovenia following last Friday’s report by hunger experts that called the humanitarian situation throughout Gaza “extremely grave and rapidly deteriorating” and warned that there is a strong likelihood of imminent famine in parts of the north.