Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has told CBS News that Israel is trying to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, but that is „not successful” because, he claimed, „Hamas is doing everything to keep them in harm’s way”.
Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel sends leaflets and phones civilians to tell them to leave areas which will be targeted by Israel, but he claimed Hamas „fires at the safe corridors that we provided”.
At the same time, The United States’ President Joe Biden finds himself under growing pressure to rein in Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
The growing civilian casualties and desperate humanitarian conditions have alarmed Arab allies, but also stirred an extraordinary level of criticism from within his own administration, informs Barbara Plett Usher, BBC State Department correspondent.
Several internal memos have been sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken through a channel, established after the Vietnam war, which allows employees to register disapproval of policy.
An open letter is also said to be circulating at the Agency for International Development (USAID). Another has been dispatched to the White House by political appointees and staff members representing dozens of government agencies; another to members of Congress by staffers on Capitol Hill. Much of this dissent is private, and the signatures are often anonymous out of concerns the protest might affect jobs, so the full scale of it is not clear. But according to leaks cited by multiple reports, hundreds of people have signed on to the wave of opposition.
At a minimum, the letters are asking that President Biden demand an immediate ceasefire, and push Israel much harder to allow for more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.
In some cases, the language is stronger, echoing the rhetoric of young political activists and apparently reflecting to some degree a generational divide that is more critical of Israel and sympathetic to Palestinians. The letters condemn the atrocities carried out by Hamas during its surprise 7 October attack that killed around 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians.
Propelled by the destruction in Gaza and growing anger in the Arab world, the administration’s rhetoric on protecting civilians has become more insistent. „Far too many Palestinians have been killed” in Gaza, Anthony Blinken said recently. He and other senior officials are now treating humanitarian assistance as not only a moral imperative, but a strategic one too.
Blinken highlights this: „it is the United States of America, not any other country, that was able to secure an agreement to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza” and „to get humanitarian pauses”.
„We’re listening,” he wrote after returning from his recent trip to the Middle East, in an email obtained by the BBC. „What you share is informing our policy and our messages.”
But core policy approaches have not changed, nor appeared to have had significant influence on Israel’s military campaign.
The Biden administration has become more open about airing its growing divergences with Israel. Blinken has deliberately set out principles of Palestinian governance and statehood for the „day after” in Gaza, that Israel’s right-wing government rejects.
The president is frequently on the phone to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and senior officials keep up a steady drumbeat of visits to the region, pressing Israel to follow the laws of war. But there is no suggestion the Biden administration is considering using its main leverage, putting conditions on its massive military assistance to Israel, which was ramped up even further after the Hamas attack.
Biden signalled this week that the US had not given Israel a deadline for its military campaign to end. It will end when Hamas „no longer maintains the capacity to murder, abuse and just do horrific things” to Israel, the president said.
Both the US and Israel want to destroy Hamas’s capacity as a military organisation so it can never mount a 7 October-style attack again, ergo a full ceasefire that ends hostilities in pursuit of peace does not make operational or political sense.
Biden’s solidarity with Israel is shared by Republicans and centrist Democrats, but concerns within the younger and more left-wing elements of the Democratic Party are growing, the BBC points out.
