On Oct. 27, three weeks into Israel’s punishing counterattack in Gaza, top Biden officials privately told a small group assembled at the White House what they would not say in public: Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets.
The Israeli Embassy in Washington denied claims that Israel Defense Forces hit targets with insufficient intelligence, saying the IDF is committed to “international law” and “applies a thorough legal process in the selection of targets and invests significant resources to minimize harm to civilians.”
This article, based on interviews with 20 administration officials and outside advisers, examines how Biden, more than five months after the Oct. 7 attacks, has found himself deeply entangled in a war he does not want and that threatens to become a defining element of his tenure. His allies privately acknowledge that it has done him significant damage domestically and globally and could easily become his biggest foreign policy cataclysm.
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This article is rather long but has some new key insights, Biden was told about the war-crimes israel was committing in oct. The nice old man act doesn’t hold up anymore
On Nov. 14, the White House decided to publicly back Israel on the matter. “We have information that confirms that Hamas is using that particular hospital for a command-and-control mode,” Kirby told reporters aboard Air Force One, citing declassified intelligence. “That is a war crime.”
Kirby added that the White House did not “want to see a firefight in the hospital where innocent people, helpless people, sick people are simply trying to get the medical care that they deserve.”
Hours later, the IDF began its raid of al-Shifa, drawing condemnation from the World Health Organization and human rights groups. The hospital’s operations collapsed, resulting in the death of least 40 patients, including four premature babies, according to the United Nations.
Van Hollen, who had received a classified briefing about the U.S. intelligence on al-Shifa, said there were “important and subtle differences” between what Biden officials were saying publicly and what the intelligence actually showed. “I did find there to be some disconnect between the administration’s public statements and the classified findings,” the senator said.