Aidworkers: Joe Biden exploits a tragic Israeli mistake

Joe Biden muscles up ahead of his call to Benjamin Netanyahu. Picture: AFP

Israel did the right thing this week by immediately investigating then taking responsibility and apologising for its missile strike on Monday that killed seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen in Gaza.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” Israel’s top military officer said.

“It was a mistake that followed a misidentification.”

Israel’s Prime Minister, President and Defence Minister have also apologised and announced steps to try to prevent it from happening again.

We say “try” because many people who should know better, including President Joe Biden, seem to have forgotten that errors are an inevitable part of war.

The President pandered to the anti-Israel faction in his party on Tuesday by harshly condemning Israel, lecturing it and then blaming it (not Hamas) for the larger humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

Even that apparently wasn’t enough. Egged on by the emerging anti-Israel liberal media consensus, Biden on Thursday called for an “immediate ceasefire” and urged Israel to make new concessions in hostage negotiations. He then threatened, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it, that “if we don’t see the changes we need to see” from Israel, “there will be a change in our policy.”

This is Biden administration opportunism, using the World Central Kitchen tragedy to push Israel to cut short the war and let Hamas survive. It’s also the worst thing the President could do to free the hostages.

The message Hamas will take away is clear: Keep rejecting hostage deals, do whatever you can to worsen the humanitarian catastrophe, and watch Biden blame and pressure Israel to compromise on its war aims. After Oct­ober 7, the US demanded Hamas release the hostages “uncon­ditionally”. It is now closer to demanding Israel unconditionally stop fighting.

Biden also seems to have forgotten his own mistaken missile strike. When the his Irish goodbye from Afghanistan was spoiled by a suicide bombing that killed 13 US troops, he ordered retaliation against ISIS-K. On August 29, 2021, a US Hellfire missile struck a car at a family home in Kabul in what General Mark Milley called a “righteous strike”.

It turned out the strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children. The Biden administration wasn’t quick to apologise.

“Almost everything senior defence officials asserted in the hours, days and weeks after it turned out to be false,” the New York Times reported. The explosives supposedly in the targeted car’s trunk were probably water bottles. The driver, an aid worker, had no ISIS ties. It took weeks for the Pentagon to own up to what it called a “tragic mistake”.

The fog of war is real, and for Biden this and other US strikes were mistakes. But he now holds Israel to a different standard.

His statements on the Israeli strike moved from “outrage” to recrimination: “This is a major reason why distributing humani­tari­an aid in Gaza has been so difficult – because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers”.

Left out is a critical word about Hamas, which started this war, steals aid and murders Palestinians who facilitate aid.

Rather than hold Hamas accountable and demand at every opportunity it release hostages, including five Americans, Biden places the full burden on Israel. He puts Israel on trial each day from Washington lecterns, undermining support for its war effort.

He has mostly resisted pressure from his left to cut off Israel and deny it the weapons to defeat Hamas. In the wake of this tragic Israeli mistake, and while Israel goes on high alert for an Iranian attack, he threatens to reverse even that support. If he does so, he will send the wrong message to our friends and especially our enemies in the Middle East.

He may also pay a bigger political price at home than he realises.