President Joe Biden and his top national security officials are increasingly confronting questions about Israel’s commitment to minimizing civilian deaths and how scenes from Gaza could affect his domestic political standing.
Even some allies of the administration are worried that defending Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas terror attacks could become an untenable position for the White House. A massive blast that ripped through Jabalya refugee camp on Tuesday vividly captured the tightrope that the Biden administration is trying to walk: Maintaining in public that Israel is trying to contain Palestinian civilian casualties, even as bloody scenes of destruction pour out of Gaza, fueling public outrage and calls for a ceasefire.
The airstrike, which left catastrophic damage and killed a large number of people, has raised new questions about how effective Biden and his top officials have been in convincing their Israeli counterparts to protect the lives of Palestinian civilians. It is also intensifying concerns within the administration that the mounting civilian death toll could further erode international support for Israel, isolating the country at a moment of deep regional instability.
The wide-scale casualties in Gaza are weighing heavily on senior US officials, who are ratcheting up the pressure – both in private and in public – on the Israelis to contain civilian deaths. That pressure has originated from the president on down: Concerns about the safety of Palestinian civilians was front and center yet again when Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone on Sunday.
The rapidly mounting civilian death toll in Gaza has come as a surprise to some American officials, who recognize each instance of humanitarian carnage will be accompanied by more pressure to denounce Israel’s tactics, a line the White House has so far refused to cross.
“They’ve got a huge amount of anxiety about innocent lives being killed,” one source in close contact with Biden’s national security team said. “They obviously care deeply about that. … There is not a lack of empathy.”
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Article URL : https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/01/politics/biden-israel-strikes-on-civilians/index.html