The US president was told in October that Israeli airstrikes were often carried out without “solid intelligence,” the newspaper claims
The White House knew since late October that Israel was regularly bombing civilian targets in Gaza, but President Joe Biden continued to publicly defend the Israeli military’s conduct, the Washington Post reported on Monday.
On October 27, three weeks into Israel’s war with Hamas, Biden’s top foreign policy officials told a small group at the White House that “Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets,” the newspaper wrote, citing three sources familiar with the meeting.
The officials also expressed concern that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had no clear plan for defeating the Palestinian militant group, with one source telling the Post that “from the very beginning, there’s been a sense of us not knowing how the Israelis were going to do what they said they were going to do.”
At the time, the US was rushing military aid to Israel. Two weeks before the meeting, Biden visited the Jewish state and publicly declared that “as long as the United States stands…[Israel] will not be alone.” On the same day as the meeting, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the US would not impose any “red lines” on how Israel conducted its military campaign.
The meeting did little to change the rhetoric of Biden or his officials. The president didn’t criticize Israel over the repeated bombing of a refugee camp in early November. Likewise, the White House publicly backed Israel’s decision to bomb Gaza’s largest hospital later that month, with Kirby telling reporters that Hamas had hidden a command center beneath the facility.
(Unarchived source: https://www.rt.com/news/594456-biden-israel-indiscriminate-bombing/ )
(Original source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/18/biden-israel-gaza-rafah-palestinians/ )
This isn’t news.
We know this.
(Okay, fine, it’s news and proof too, in case we need it in an argument, but I expected this, tbh.)
It’s nice to have western sources, of the trusted (CIA) variety saying these things if only because liberals can’t bat them away like they can Palestinian sources or anti-imperialist sources.
Oh, don’t worry, they will. Still, it’s funnier to watch them run in circles trying to figure out how the New York Post or whatever is actually Putin propaganda or something.
Some will, but this stuff still matters. There are some folks who really don’t want to believe this is happening, and who are really dug in on “well do you want Trump instead?”, but who aren’t so
that they’ll ignore all evidence forever.
You peel back their excuses one by one and some of them will change their minds.
Oh yeah, and mocking them for being just as dumb and ignorant as Trump supporters, and denying reality as much as them, once they’ve calmed down and are no longer furious you made that comparison, they might stop to think if that’s really a position they actually want to be in, even if they don’t consider it at the time.