By Peter Baker
President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Thursday that strikes on aid workers “are unacceptable” and he appeared to threaten to condition future support for Israel on how it addresses U.S. concerns about civilian casualties and the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, the White House said.
During a lengthy and evidently tense call with Netanyahu, Biden expressed his frustration over the killing of seven aid workers by Israeli military forces and what he sees as the broader disregard for the suffering of innocents in Gaza even as he expressed support for Israel’s right to respond to Hamas for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.
“President Biden emphasized that the strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation are unacceptable,” the White House said in a sharp statement. “He made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers. He made clear that U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps.”
In saying that U.S. policy “will be determined” by Netanyahu’s response to Biden’s concerns, the president tied his support for the war more explicitly than ever before to Israeli conduct going forward. But the White House statement stopped short of directly saying the president would halt arms supplies or impose conditions for their use, as more and more Democrats have urged him to do.
The president has long resisted leveraging arms to influence Israel’s conduct of the war, with aides arguing that many of the munitions sent are air defense missiles. But even some of Biden’s close Democratic allies have increasingly come around to the view that Washington should exercise more control over the weaponry, including Sen. Chris Coons, a fellow Democrat from Delaware and confidant of the president.
“I think we’re at that point,” Coons said on CNN on Thursday morning, adding that if Netanyahu were to order the Israeli military into the southern Gaza city of Rafah in force and “drop thousand-pound bombs and send in a battalion to go after Hamas and make no provision for civilians or for humanitarian aid, that I would vote to condition aid to Israel.”
Some of former President Barack Obama’s old team have grown more outspoken in castigating Biden for not doing more to restrain Netanyahu, who goes by the nickname Bibi, and the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, saying that the president’s expressed outrage was meaningless otherwise.
“The U.S. government is still supplying 2 thousand pound bombs and ammunition to support Israel’s policy,” Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to Obama, wrote on social media. “Until there are substantive consequences, this outrage does nothing. Bibi obviously doesn’t care what the U.S. says, its about what the U.S. does.”
Jon Favreau, a former chief speechwriter for Obama, was even more derisive of Biden. “The president doesn’t get credit for being ‘privately enraged’ when he still refuses to use leverage to stop the IDF from killing and starving innocent people,” he wrote. “These stories only make him look weak.”
The killing of the World Central Kitchen workers has inflamed the tensions between Washington and Jerusalem at a time when Biden has complained that Israel has not done enough to curb the killings of civilians or facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Biden called himself “outraged and heartbroken” over the incident and made a point of calling José Andrés, the celebrity chef who founded World Central Kitchen, to express his condolences.
The seven were killed by three successive strikes on three cars traveling along a road in Gaza. Israeli officials have called the episode a tragic mistake based on a misidentification of the vehicles, but have not explained more explicitly how it happened. The cars were marked with World Central Kitchen logos, although the attack took place at night. Andrés has said his organization kept in touch with Israeli officials about travel plans.
As of Thursday morning, the Israelis had not yet communicated any initial findings of their promised investigation into the strike to the United States, according to a senior Biden administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail internal conversations.
Some Palestinian advocates reacted with aggravation to Biden’s expression of outrage over the deaths of the aid workers because in their view he has not responded with nearly enough indignation over the killing of more than 30,000 people living in Gaza, most of them civilians.
The president is evidently coming under pressure even from within his own family. Biden told Muslim community leaders at the White House on Tuesday evening that first lady Jill Biden had weighed in, telling him, “Stop it, stop it now, Joe.”