In a pair of Sunday talk show interviews, Secretary of State Antony Blinken criticized Israel for its military attacks on Rafah. Keep in mind that Blinken, like his boss, President Joe Biden, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, has never spent a minute in uniform. Yet these three men who craft US foreign policy seem to believe they know how to fight and destroy Hamas. In fact, Israel does have this knowledge and is methodically eliminating the terrorist organization in Gaza.
For several months, the Israel Defense Force's (IDF) actions against Hamas haven't pleased the Biden administration. Equally apparent, and rightly so, Israel does not seem to care. Nonetheless, "During a pair of TV interviews, Blinken said the United States wants Israel to 'get out of Gaza' amid what he described as 'a horrible loss of life of innocent civilians,'" Fox News reported. However, Blinken told NBC's Meet the Press concerning a recent report on Israel's compliance with humanitarian law during war: "The report also makes clear that this is an incredibly complex military environment. You have an enemy that intentionally embeds itself with civilians, hiding under and within schools, mosques, apartment buildings, firing at the Israeli forces from those places."
Biden Team’s Counsel to Israel Contradictory
Blinken continued: "Now, at the same time, we share Israel's objective in making sure that Hamas cannot govern Gaza anymore, that it be demilitarized, that Israel get its leaders – we continue to support them." But Israel maintains there are as many as four battalions of Hamas terrorists in Rafah, and how better to get the leaders than to destroy them where they are? Yet Sullivan, in a telephone call with his Israeli counterpart, Tzachi Hanegbi, “reiterated President Biden's longstanding concerns over the potential for a major military ground operation into Rafah, where over one million people have taken shelter.”
So the convoluted White House strategy is to stop the IDF from entering Rafah, where much of the terrorist organization remains, because there will be an unacceptable loss of innocent civilians.
If the US policy toward the war in Gaza is not confusing enough, Biden recently clarified his administration's views at a campaign reception in Medina, WA:
"You know, there would be a ceasefire tomorrow if Hara...Hamas would release the hostages — the women and the elderly and the wounded. Israel said it's up to Hamas; if they wanted to do it, we could end it tomorrow. And the ceasefire would begin tomorrow. It all has to do — you know, we've not...anyway, I don't want to — I guess I shouldn't get into all this about Israel. But, you know...well, I don't want to get going, I guess."
So the president’s official word is that it's all up to Hamas, so Israel just has to withdraw its troops from Gaza and put no more pressure on the four battalions of terrorists. Apparently, that will persuade Hamas to surrender and give up the hostages who are left alive.
Palestinian Casualty Statistics Inaccurate
Coincidentally, the Biden administration has been citing the number of Palestinian civilians lost in Gaza as more than 35,000, primarily women and children, provided by Hamas. A graphic posted on May 6 by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) showed that 9,500 women and 14,500 children had been killed as collateral damage. Yet two days later, “in its May 8 report, the UN agency appeared to have cut [that] number nearly in half, showing instead that some 4,959 women and 7,797 children had been killed so far in the war," Fox News reported, explaining the disparity in UN numbers.
An additional caveat should be applied to any Palestinian casualty data coming from Gaza. UN and media sources tend to use numbers provided by the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health (MOH) that play into the terrorists' false narrative of Israel's inhumane warfare. A recent study results by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, titled Gaza Fatality Data Has Become Completely Unreliable, explained: "A high proportion of reported deaths come[s] from an unknown methodology that may be misrepresenting the data, while enormous uncertainty persists regarding how many combatant fatalities go uncounted in tunnels and other battlespaces."
Whatever the message Biden and his national security team are trying to convey, it is garbled at best and incomprehensible in the extreme at worst. Furthermore, the numbers the administration is using to criticize Israel's handling of the war against Hamas are demonstrably unreliable. What Sullivan and Blinken are saying to the media and Israel is inconsistent with the battlefield reality.
The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliate.
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