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KN. The U.S. military finished installing a floating pier for the Gaza Strip, with officials poised to begin ferrying badly needed humanitarian aid into the enclave besieged over seven months of intense fighting in the Israel-Hamas war.
The final, overnight construction sets up a complicated delivery process more than two months after U.S. President Joe Biden ordered it to help Palestinians facing starvation as food and other supplies fail to make it in as Israel recently seized the key Rafah border crossing in its push on that southern city on the Egyptian border.
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The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would force President Joe Biden to send weapons to Israel, seeking to rebuke the Democrat for delaying bomb shipments as he urges Israel to do more to protect civilians during its war with Hamas.
The Israel Security Assistance Support Act was approved 224 to 187, largely along party lines. Sixteen Democrats joined most Republicans in voting yes, and three Republicans joined most Democrats in opposing the measure.
The act is not expected to become law, but its passage underscored the deep U.S. election-year divide over Israel policy as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government seeks to wipe out militants who attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing around 1,200 people and seizing 253 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.
According to Derek Grossman, senior defense analyst at the think tank RAND Corporation, adjunct professor in the practice of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California and former intelligence adviser at the Pentagon said, last June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted a picture of himself receiving a gift from Chinese Ambassador Cai Run of autographed copies of President Xi Jinping’s four-volume collection, “The Governance of China.”
This was at the height of tensions between Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden over a judicial reform plan that the prime minister’s right-wing coalition was pushing through parliament despite White House objections.
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Netanyahu noted that Xi had extended an invitation to visit China, underscoring the message that the Jewish state had alternative sources of support and need not rely on Washington.
A strategic pivot toward Beijing would have been surprising, but was at least conceivable. Israel was the first Middle Eastern nation to diplomatically recognize China’s communist government in 1950. Over the last three decades, the two nations developed close economic, technological, security and diplomatic ties, to a degree that set off some alarm bells in Washington.