During a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Biden expressed his sympathies for Palestinians who died in the deadly hospital blast in Gaza —but also confirmed intelligence reports indicate that Israel was not behind the attack.
“Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” Biden told Netanyahu during a meeting. But Biden said there were “a lot of people out there” who weren’t sure what caused the blast.
From Newsmax:
Biden didn’t offer details on why he believed the blast was not caused by the Israelis. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said an Israeli airstrike caused the destruction and hundreds of deaths. The Israeli military denied involvement and blamed a misfired rocket from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group. However, that organization also rejected responsibility.
Biden had been scheduled to visit Jordan after the stop in Israel, but meetings there with Arab leaders were called off after the hospital explosion. And his remarks spoke both of the horrors the Israelis had endured, but also the growing humanitarian crisis for Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
He told Netanyahu he was “deeply saddened and outraged” by the hospital explosion. He stressed that “Hamas does not represent all the Palestinian people, and it has brought them only suffering.”
Biden spoke of the need to find ways of “encouraging life-saving capacity to help the Palestinians who are innocent, caught in the middle of this.”
Watch the clip below:
Joe Biden flew to Tel Aviv so he could read a prepared statement on the Gaza hospital explosion.
He barely picked his head up during the most important exchange. Called Hamas "the other team" as if it's a football game. Rough. pic.twitter.com/NbyQqzLDUR
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) October 18, 2023
