It’s official: President Biden’s policy on Israel makes no sense except as a sudden, all-out drive to stop the war completely, leaving Hamas able to recover.
The Washington Post reports, citing four sources, that the White House has offered Jerusalem “sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels” if the IDF doesn’t go full-scale into Rafah.
Huh? Why not just hand the info over ASAP? It’d help the IDF target those leaders now, and make the precision strikes the White House says it wants more likely — it’s not like Israel wants to take the casualties of a full-on assault if doesn’t have to.
And this follows the freeze in many munitions the Pentagon was about to send over — including precision bombs, which (duh) are also beyond helpful for precision strikes.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is suddenly touting a new report claiming Israel’s use of US-provided weapons in Gaza likely violated international humanitarian law.
“When it comes to the use of weapons, concerns about incidents where given the totality of the damage that’s been done to children, women, men, it was reasonable to assess that, in certain instances, Israel acted in ways that are not consistent with international humanitarian law,” he said.
With zero public details on what weapons, used when and where, nor how any law was violated. Plus, what “international humanitarian law,” exactly?
As for “the totality of the damage that’s been done to children, women, men,” what hard info does Blinken pretend Washington has on that, when it’s basically impossible to learn while the war is still on?
The whole “assessment” was plainly cooked up for a talking point.
Notably, the United Nations just stopped treating the victim-counts by the Hamas-ran Gazan health authority as meaning anything — a wise move, as those numbers were plainly made up from the start.
Meanwhile, the consensus count of civilians fleeing Rafah has hit 360,000, more than a fifth of the number estimated to be there just a week or so ago.
So the “humanitarian” case for keeping the IDF out keeps weakening, even as the need to let Israel greatly ease delivery of aid — by completing its main combat actions by finishing off the last Hamas battalions and leaders now holed up in Rafah — grows.
Other grim news: Biden apparently decided on his new Israel-bashing approach well in advance of his Holocaust Remembrance Day remarks, but held off on any public steps until he’d given that speech — which, bizarrely, made an excellent case for why Israel must destroy Hamas.
None of this makes sense except as a strategy for appeasing the pro-Hamas protesters (because Joe thinks he’ll lose in November if he doesn’t) while creating excuses that (some) Israel supporters might buy for abandoning our ally.
It’s beyond despicable, and yet another gross violation of the president’s oath of office.
Election Day can’t come fast enough.