AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: ProPublica has revealed USAID and the State Department’s refugees bureau both concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza, but U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top Biden officials rejected the findings of the agencies even though they’re considered the two foremost U.S. authorities on humanitarian assistance. Blinken’s decision allowed the U.S. to keep sending arms to Israel. Under U.S. law, the government is required to cut off weapons shipments to countries preventing the delivery of U.S.-backed aid. Days after receiving the reports, Blinken told Congress, quote, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

On Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, called for Blinken’s resignation, accusing him of lying to Congress. [Blinken] was asked about the ProPublica report Wednesday on CBS. This was his response.

SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: So, this is actually pretty, pretty typical. We had a report to put out on the humanitarian situation in Gaza and what Israel was doing to try to make sure that people got the assistance they needed. And I had different assessments from different parts of the State Department, from other agencies that were involved, like USAID. My job is to sort through them, which I did, draw some conclusions from that. And we put our report, and we found that Israel needed to do a better job on the humanitarian assistance. We’ve seen improvements since then. It’s still not sufficient.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, that was U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

We’re joined now by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Brett Murphy, a reporter at ProPublica, where his new piece is headlined “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.”

Can you respond to Blinken’s response to your report, Brett?

BRETT MURPHY: Yeah. So, he said, basically, it was his decision to make. He was getting a lot of information, and he ultimately decided that it was not the assessment of the State Department that the Israelis were deliberately blocking aid.

What he didn’t mention and what’s really important to note here is that the two agencies that had told him that they were in fact deliberately blocking aid, one being USAID, are the foremost experts in this, as you said. They are the ones responsible for delivering humanitarian assistance into Gaza, into war zones all over the world. In addition to that, his own refugees bureau had made a similar conclusion called that a law called the Foreign Assistance Act should have been triggered because the Israelis were restricting aid.

The other assessments he was receiving were nowhere near as detailed as what he received from USAID. They sent a 17-page memo with detailed evidence describing exactly what they knew to be the truth on the ground, and he ultimately rejected those findings in what he told Congress.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could elaborate, Brett, also on what U.S. obligations are under the Foreign Assistance Act?

BRETT MURPHY: Sure, yeah. So, it’s this law that has not been used very much systematically, but it basically says a foreign partner or ally that is receiving military assistance from the U.S. cannot at the same time be blocking U.S.-backed humanitarian assistance into a war zone. If it is the conclusion of the U.S. government that that is happening, the U.S. government is then required to cut off the military assistance. That’s what the law says.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Is there any other context in which this has occurred, that the U.S. has denied that a country is preventing U.S. aid from getting in in a conflict zone?

BRETT MURPHY: The last time it came up was in Turkey and Armenia. That was kind of the original context of the law itself. But, like I was saying, we have never truly been applying this in a systematic way. So, this has really been an obscure provision in the Foreign Assistance Act, but this year lawmakers, activist groups have been calling for the Biden administration to be using this exact provision.

AMY GOODMAN: We interviewed two people: Stacy Gilbert, the former senior adviser in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration — she resigned over this after 20 years in service — and Alex Smith, a former contractor for USAID, who was forced to resign over the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza. Talk about the significance of what they did, and Antony Blinken understanding full well what they understood and why they left.

BRETT MURPHY: Stacy Gilbert worked on the report that Secretary Blinken ultimately delivered to Congress. She was working on the drafts of that report. She was in the refugees bureau. She had a very clear understanding of what was going on. And what she ultimately said, when she resigned, when she saw the final version of what he had told Congress, she said, “We know this not to be true. We, the experts inside of the government, know that the truth on the ground is that the Israelis have been blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza.” This is what she said, and this is what she resigned over. And she said in her resignation letter that this report, what he told Congress, “is going to haunt us.”

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And can you explain: How detailed was that USAID memo that Blinken saw?

BRETT MURPHY: It was extremely detailed. It’s 17 pages of evidence that they were bringing to bear. The example that stuck out to me the most was on food, food shipments that were being held up just 30 miles outside of Gaza. There was enough flour, USAID said, to feed 1.5 million Palestinians for at least five months. But at the time — this was in the February to March timeframe — Israelis were not allowing flour into Gaza, because they said it was going to the U.N.’s branch there that had been accused of having ties to Hamas, so they were not allowing the flour in.

And this is what — this is the kind of thing that was really bothering USAID and frustrating their efforts. They couldn’t get food in. They couldn’t get medicine in, other supplies. A lot of their trucks, from, like, the Red Crescent, other humanitarian groups, were being turned around because of items in there the Israelis were not allowing in. Aid workers had been killed. Their convoys had been targeted. These were all the types of examples that USAID was telling Secretary Blinken.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And basically, there’s no recourse now, right, because it’s done? Or is there anything that the U.S., the Biden administration could now do differently?

BRETT MURPHY: Yeah, the law is not — it was not just a one-time shot. And this is what the U.S. government said, too, in response. They said, “We’re currently — we’re always assessing the situation.” They said that they believed that the situation was improving since after they applied leverage with this. The folks I talked to, both inside the government and in the humanitarian world, said that’s not true at all. The situation is as bad as it’s ever been, including since the Rafah incursion. But this law does not only have — you know, whenever Blinken addresses Congress to it; it can be applied at any point.

AMY GOODMAN: That they could cut off, that the U.S. government could cut off aid to — military arms to Israel.

BRETT MURPHY: Absolutely. If it assesses that the Israelis are deliberately blocking humanitarian assistance at any point, they can apply this law. That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: Brett Murphy, we want to thank you for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for ProPublica. We’ll link to your new article, “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.”

And this update from the streets of New York: Twenty-five protesters have been arrested outside the United Nations ahead of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s arrival to address the U.N. on Friday. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.