Joe Biden has a Benjamin Netanyahu problem.

As most readers are doubtless aware, an aid convoy carrying desperately needed food into and through besieged Gaza ended up at the center of a “chaotic situation” a few days ago, when more than 100 people were killed trying to get their hands on bags of flour just outside Gaza City.

If you’re starving and your family is too, “patient” isn’t something you’re likely to be if you spot a convoy of food. In northern Gaza, the situation’s acute. They’re eating cactus leaves, donkey feed and, anecdotally anyway, “scraps of food left by rats.” According to UN health agency spokesperson Christian Lindmeier, a 10th child “officially registered in a hospital as having starved to death” on Friday. Ramesh Rajasingham, an OCHA official, this week told the Security Council that one in six children under two in northern Gaza suffers from acute malnutrition. And on and on.

No one knows exactly what happened on Thursday. Drone footage released by the IDF shows throngs of people surrounding food trucks. From the sky, the scene was indistinguishable from ants swarming large crumbs on a sidewalk. At some point, the ants dispersed in an apparent panic. No one disputes that Israeli forces opened fire. The question is why. Israel says some among the crowd posed a threat. The official line is that “a mob moved in a manner which endangered” Israeli troops. “We did not fire on those seeking aid, despite the accusations,” Daniel Hagari said, claiming that “most” of the ensuing deaths resulted from a stampede. Or else from Gazans being run over by food trucks. Eyewitnesses tell a different story.

Multiple people who spoke to The New York Times said Israeli tanks moved towards crowds of hungry Gazans in the minutes before the trucks arrived, began firing on the crowd as people swarmed the trucks and proceeded to shoot civilians as the fled, in some cases killing them with their bags of flour. Other witnesses suggested tanks fired at, or at least in the direction of, those attempting to rescue the injured. A doctor at Kamal Adwan said almost all the injuries the hospital saw were from “gunshot wounds in the chest and abdomen,” as the Times wrote, adding that the facility, in its depleted condition, was only able to perform 20 operations, and those with “no anesthesia.” Israel refused to release unedited drone footage of the event.

I assume this goes without saying, but: If even half of that’s true, it constitutes a heinous war crime. It’s hard to say what’d count as exculpatory for the IDF, but I suppose Israel could argue that the sheer desperation among Gazans means that absent a military show of force, aid trucks will be overwhelmed when they reach their destination, thereby making the safe distribution of food and water impossible. But shooting people in the chest and abdomen seems like an odd definition of facilitating the safe distribution of life-saving provisions.

In a February 27 address to the Security Council, World Food Program deputy director Carl Skau described the logistical challenges of getting food to northern Gaza where, as he put it, “conditions are particularly dire”:

On Sunday, February 18, we resumed deliveries to the north for the first time in three weeks. Our intention was to send 10 trucks per day, for seven days, to address immediate needs, and provide some reassurance to people living there that sufficient food would be brought in.

However, on both February 18 and 19, our convoys faced significant obstacles. There were delays at checkpoints; they faced gunfire and other violence; food was looted along the way; and at their destination they were overwhelmed by desperately hungry people.

As a result, we have been forced to pause deliveries of food to the north until conditions are in place that allow for safe distributions — both for our staff, and for the people receiving our assistance. This is not a decision WFP has taken lightly, as we know it means conditions will worsen, and more people will be at risk of dying from hunger-related causes.

But the breakdown in civil order, driven by sheer desperation, is preventing the safe distribution of aid.

In other words: This isn’t working. And irrespective of what actually happened in the pre-dawn hours of February 29, I think it’s fair to assess that the Israeli military can’t be trusted to preside over the distribution of food and other humanitarian relief to Gazans. The IDF’s not exactly impartial.

On Friday, Biden said the US will start conducting its own airdrops over Gaza, joining Egypt, France, Jordan and the UAE. New York-based International Rescue Committee says that’s not enough. “Airdrops do not and cannot substitute for humanitarian access,” the group said.

In what certainly came across as an indictment of the Israeli military’s actions (even if he didn’t mean it that way), Biden said innocent Gazans are “caught in a terrible war unable to feed their families, and you saw the response when they tried to get aid in.” “We need to do more,” he said. “And the United States will do more.”

There’s something (a lot) absurd about the notion that the US needs to resort to air drops to get aid to Gazans lest they should starve. Consider recent precedent. In 2014, the US conducted a series of air drops to the Yazidis because they were stranded on a mountain, surrounded by ISIS. Here, the US is airdropping aid to Palestinians because they’re stranded in northern Gaza surrounded by America’s second-staunchest global ally.

For months, Netanyahu openly flouted Biden’s calls for discussions around Palestinian statehood. Netanyahu also refuses to entertain calls for a lasting ceasefire. And he’s deaf to international demands that he not risk a massacre in Rafah. Now, it looks like the IDF may be firing on civilians trying to get food from aid convoys. At the least, they’re firing towards civilians near aid convoys. I’m not sure that distinction matters, but just in case.

At some point, Biden has to draw the line. Or at least a line. Netanyahu’s humiliating this White House in an election year. Biden’s polling behind Donald Trump. He (Biden) has to turn out progressives in November. And progressives are losing patience with the situation in Gaza. It’s doubtful, to say the least, that Trump would be anything other than supportive of Israel’s war effort. However, if Trump were president and Netanyahu did anything to embarrass him (regardless of context), that slight would be remedied in short order. By contrast, Netanyahu doesn’t seem to give a damn what Biden thinks or says, a testament to the notion that nice guys finish last, and an ironic outcome for this president given his long-standing, genuine (as opposed to purely transactional) support for Israel.

I don’t know what the answer is. The Times indicated on Friday that the US is “examining” the possibility of building a “temporary port that would allow aid to be brought in by sea.” Using US troops to build it isn’t under discussion, nor would “American amphibious landing craft” be used in any such operation. A US military intervention of any sort is a non-starter I suppose, but Thursday’s events underscored just how untenable this situation really is.

There was always something tragically absurd about the US working night and day to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza while simultaneously sending Israel weapons to destroy it. Now, and assuming the eyewitness accounts of Thursday’s events are at least partially true, the US is a party to a state actor firing on, at or, if you want to give the IDF the benefit of the doubt, in the immediate vicinity of, starving civilians trying to access food trucks during a famine. Again: That’s completely untenable.