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/ )

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