WASHINGTON >> The Biden administration says Israel has made good but limited progress in increasing the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza and it will not limit arms transfers to Israel as it had threatened to a month ago if the situation had not improved.

State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said Tuesday the progress to date must be supplemented and sustained but “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, and we think some of these steps will allow the conditions for that to continue to progress.”

The decision from the U.S., Israel’s key ally and largest provider of arms and other military aid, comes despite international aid organizations declaring that Israel has failed to meet the U.S. demands to allow greater humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip, where conditions are worse than at any point in the 13-month-old war.

The Biden administration last month set a deadline expiring Tuesday for Israel to “surge” more food and other emergency aid into the Palestinian territory or risk the possibility of scaled-back military support as Israel wages offensives against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

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

Blinken stressed “the importance of ensuring those changes lead to an actual improvement in the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, including through the delivery of additional assistance to civilians throughout Gaza,” the State Department said.

The obstacles facing aid distribution were on this display this week. Even after the military gave permission for a delivery to the northernmost part of Gaza — virtually cut off from food for more than a month by an Israeli siege — the United Nations said it couldn’t deliver most of it because of turmoil and restrictions from Israeli troops on the ground.

Hunger experts have warned the north may already be experiencing famine.

Meanwhile, in the south, hundreds of truckloads of aid are sitting on the Gaza side of the border because the U.N. says it cannot reach them to distribute the aid — again because of the threat of lawlessness, theft and Israeli military restrictions.

Israel has announced a series of steps — though their effect was unclear. On Tuesday, it opened a new crossing in central Gaza, outside the city of Deir al-Balah, for aid to enter. It also announced a small expansion of its coastal “humanitarian zone,” where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are sheltering in tent camps. It connected electricity for a desalination plant in Deir al-Balah.

U.S. officials haven’t said whether they will take any action. President Joe Biden met Tuesday at the White House with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who said a “major objective” for the U.S. should be reining in Iran and its proxies. Herzog also called for the return of the hostages taken from Israel in the Hamas attack that started the war, to which Biden said, “I agree.”