US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday the US stands with Israel, Americans are grieving at Hamas’s “slaughter” of over 1300 people, and indicated it was the “other team”, not Israel, that was responsible for the bombing of a hospital in Gaza that killed hundreds of civilians, even as he announced Israel had agreed to allow humanitarian assistance to move into Gaza from Egypt.
During a visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, a day after an attack on the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, which Palestinian officials claimed was a result of an Israeli strike and Israel claimed was a result of a failed rocket launch by the Islamic Jihad, Biden told Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu, “I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday. And based on what I have seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you. But there’s a lot of people out there who are not sure. So, we got to overcome a lot of things.”
Biden travelled to Tel Aviv on a rapid visit to offer staunch U.S. support in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli villages and military bases by Gaza-based Palestinian Hamas gunmen who killed close to 1,400 people and took about 200 hostages.
Later, speaking at an event, Biden said: “I caution this while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice we also made mistakes,” Biden said on a visit to Tel Aviv.
{{/usCountry}}Later, speaking at an event, Biden said: “I caution this while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice we also made mistakes,” Biden said on a visit to Tel Aviv.
{{/usCountry}}But as concerns mount about Israel’s retaliatory strikes in Gaza extracting an enormous humanitarian cost, Biden added that Hamas did not represent the Palestinian people, encouraged “lifesaving capacity” to ensure that innocent Palestinians were caught in the middle, and warned Netanyahu that the world was watching.
“It’s just not the example of our power, it’s the power of our example that’s almost as important. The world is looking. We — Israel has a value set like the United States does and other democracies — and they are looking to see what we are going to do,” Biden said.
He also announced subsequently that Israel’s cabinet had agreed to allow humanitarian access from Egypt to Gaza, based on the understanding that there will be inspections and the aid will go to civilians and not Hamas. Biden said the US will provide $100 million in humanitarian assistance to Gaza and West Bank, which will help support over a million displaced and conflict-affected Palestinians and meet emergency needs in Gaza.
In a readout of the meetings with Netanyahu and the war cabinet, the White House said that Biden had reiterated American support for Israel, reaffirmed US’s determination to provide Israel with what it needs, and discussed efforts to rescue hostages and American efforts to facilitate provision of humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza.
After Biden’s comments, the National Security Council said, citing overhead imagery, intercepts and open-source information, that the US government currently believes that Israel “is not responsible” for the blast at a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday.
Biden’s visit is aimed at conveying both this public solidarity and cautionary message to Israel. But Tuesday’s attack threatened to derail his visit as Arab capitals rose up in fury against the attack which, in the region, was quickly attributed to Israel. Biden was meant to go to Jordan for a summit with regional leaders but the summit was cancelled, with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas deciding to be in West Bank during a three-day period of mourning, even as the President’s entourage was about to depart Washington DC.
On Air Force One, John Kirby, the national security council spokesperson for strategic communication, told reporters that Biden was looking forward to going to Amman and meeting leaders. “The main reason that Abbas pulled out of the meeting in Jordan was because of three days of mourning, which is of course completely culturally understandable. I mean, he absolutely had to go home, and we understand that. And without him there, certainly that made it more difficult to have the kind of discussions that we wanted to have in Amman,” Kirby said, adding that Biden had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah and would speak to him and other regional leaders on the way back to DC again.
Kirby added that in his conversation with Netanyahu, Biden was aiming “to get a sense from the Israelis about the situation on the ground and, more critically, their objectives, their plans, their intentions in the days and weeks ahead”. “And he will be asking some tough questions. He will be asking them as a friend — as a true friend of Israel. But he will be asking some questions of them. He is also going to make it clear that we continue to want to see this conflict not widen, not expand, not deepen.” At the same time, Kirby said that Biden will ask Israel what it needs from the security assistance point of view and express US’s willingness “to do everything” to meet those needs.
Netanyahu, in his opening remarks during the meeting with Biden, thanked the President for coming to Israel and his unequivocal support. “I have seen your support every day in the depth and breadth of cooperation that we have had since the beginning of this war, a level of cooperation that is truly unprecedented in the history of the great alliance between our two nations,” the PM said.
Netanyahu said that Hamas had killed 1400 Israelis, which given Israel’s population, was akin to killing 50,000 Americans on a single day. “That’s 15 9/11s. That is why October 7th is another day that will live in infamy. Mr. President, you rightly said that Hamas is worse than ISIS. The German Chancellor, who visited here yesterday, said that Hamas were the new Nazis. You are both right.”