TEHRAN- A senior official serving in the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has publicly admitted that famine is now occurring in the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Aid agencies have said that Tel Aviv is still preventing sufficient humanitarian supplies from entering the enclave to fend off the famine in Gaza despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promising Biden to allow more aid to reach the starving Palestinian population. 

Experts believe Biden’s pressure on the Israeli regime to allow more aid to Gaza was an attempt to boost his domestic popularity ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. 

Many polls indicated the incumbent U.S. President was falling behind his Republican challenger, Donald Trump, after failing to handle six months of mayhem in Gaza and the region. 

More recent surveys have indicated that Biden has gained a little ground after publicly calling out Netanyahu last week for the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Strip. 

Now the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, has publicly admitted that expert assessments from mid-March of famine occurring in the Palestinian territory are “credible”. 

Speaking before a U.S. congressional committee session, Power was asked: 

“So famine is already occurring there?” 

Power replied: “That is – Yes.” 

The acknowledgment would make the U.S. directly complicit in the man-made famine as Washington has been the strongest supporter of Tel Aviv in its indiscriminate war on Gaza. This support includes political and diplomatic shielding of the Israeli occupation from any punitive international measures.

Despite the acknowledgment, international aid agencies say the Israeli occupation has not kept its promise to the White House for a significant uptick in critical aid to enter the enclave where a vast majority of the population are starving. 

UN officials say there are few signs that the Israeli occupation regime has stayed true to its pledge with trucks entering half full and other crossing points supposedly aimed at expediting humanitarian aid shipments yet to be fully functional. 

This includes the immediate opening of Ashdod port north of Gaza as a doorway for maritime shipping of humanitarian aid, which aid agencies say has failed to materialize. 

The occupation regime claims a surge in humanitarian supplies, but UN data suggests the opposite with senior aid officials accusing the regime of bureaucracy at crossing points. 

Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of the Refugees International aid advocacy organization, says, “Very little has actually changed.” 

“There is a lot less than meets the eye so far,” Konyndyk added. 

In northern Gaza, where starvation among Palestinians is worse, the Israeli war minister, Yoav Gallant, says work at the Erez land crossing point, the main site from the besieged northern part of Gaza, (where aid entered occasionally from the outside world before the current Israeli genocidal war) was in progress. 

Gallant has, perhaps unsurprisingly, not made it clear when this crossing point will re-open. 

The UN agency, UNRWA, which is the most reliable and effective source of aid deliveries to Gaza, has reported that after a short increase of 246 trucks entering on Tuesday, that number has already fallen to 141 the following day. 

The number of aid trucks that were entering the enclave before Israel started war on Gaza on October 7 last year was between 500 and 700. 

Even then, before the war, international aid agencies were warning that 700 trucks were not enough to feed the Palestinian population in the coastal strip. 

Aid agencies have become more fearful of operating inside the coastal sliver after the Israeli military deliberately bombed a convoy operating with the International food charity World Central Kitchen, killing Western humanitarian workers at the beginning of April. 

Around 200 aid workers have been killed by the devastating Israeli onslaught on Gaza since October 7. 

The killing of Western aid workers is also reported to have led to a tense phone call between Biden and Netanyahu. 

Observers say what has become evident over the past week is that if Biden had wanted to pressure Israel over its numerous deadly acts in Gaza, he had the power to do so with a single phone call to Netanyahu. 

It took more than six months and 33,600 deaths as well as a famine for Biden to call out Netanyahu, yet that was essential for the president’s popularity, as some experts have pointed out, to avoid a wider regional war breaking out. 

Critics say the White House can use its powerful leverage of setting conditions on sending arms to Tel Aviv to end the war, but the Biden administration has refused to do so.