Middle East Crisis: Biden Declares Israel’s Military Operation in Gaza ‘Is Not Genocide’ (2024)

Biden says there is ‘no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.’

“Let me be clear, we reject the I.C.C.’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders,” Mr. Biden said, adding to a series of denunciations of the prosecutor’s actions from U.S. officials throughout the day. “Whatever these warrants may imply, there’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”

American officials have said for months that Mr. Biden’s administration rejects the accusation that members of the Israeli military or the country’s political leaders are conducting a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Gazan authorities say at least 35,000 people have been killed during Israel’s bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7. Israeli officials deny their forces have purposely targeted civilians, arguing Hamas purposely hides its forces among noncombatants. They also deny Israel has restricted aid to Gaza with the intent of starving people.

Just hours before Mr. Biden’s comments, John Kirby, a national security spokesman for the White House, rejected the implication from the I.C.C. move.

“I.D.F. soldiers are not waking up in the morning, putting their boots on the ground, with direct orders to go kill innocent civilians in Gaza,” Mr. Kirby said, using the abbreviation for the Israel Defense Forces.

But Mr. Biden has rarely been as blunt as he was on Monday, prompted in part by the I.C.C.’s chief prosecutor’s request that the court approve arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu and the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, as well as for Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader within Gaza; Muhammad Deif, Hamas’s military leader; and Ismail Haniyeh, the movement’s Qatar-based political leader.

The prosecutor, Karim Khan, did not directly raise accusations of genocide in his request for the warrants, but they have been leveled against Israel by aid organizations and activists, including by many college students in the United States during weeks of protests, some of which turned violent, at campuses around the country.

Mr. Biden and his aides have repeatedly said they believe the deaths in Gaza are a tragedy and have said Israeli forces need to be more precise in their conduct of military operations to avoid civilian deaths as they prosecute the war against Hamas.

In his remarks on Monday evening, Mr. Biden said that his administration was “providing critical humanitarian assistance to help innocent Palestinian civilians who are suffering greatly because of the war Hamas — Hamas — has unleashed. It’s heartbreaking.”

Mr. Biden’s comments came as he vowed to do everything in his power to help win the release of the hostages still held in Gaza by Hamas. Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin, American parents of one of the hostages, Hersh Goldberg, were in the audience.

“I pledge to both of you and I mean it — and I know you know, Mom, I mean it — that I will not rest until we bring your loved one home,” Mr. Biden said. “We got to bring him home.”

Netanyahu calls the request to issue a warrant for his arrest ‘a disgrace.’

“The absurd and false warrant by the Hague prosecutor is not only directed against Israel’s prime minister and its defense minister — it is directed against the entire State of Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement.

Mr. Gallant did not immediately comment on the decision. The prosecutor also asked the court’s judges for arrest warrants for top Hamas leaders including Yahya Sinwar, who he said had likely committed “war crimes and crimes against humanity” as well.

Benny Gantz, a leader of Israel’s war cabinet who recently criticized Mr. Netanyahu for mismanaging the war effort, called the decision “moral blindness” and asserted that Israel was fighting “in the most moral way in history, while adhering to international law.”

“If the prosecutor’s position is accepted — that would be an ineffaceable, historic crime,” Mr. Gantz said in a statement.

Israel is not a member of the court and does not recognize its jurisdiction in Israel or Gaza, making the announcement a largely symbolic gesture. But those named in warrants could be arrested if they travel to one of the court’s 124 member nations, which include most European countries but not the United States.

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor, said he had reasonable grounds to believe Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant had committed war crimes, including starving civilians as a weapon of war.

In a news conference, the leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, Yair Lapid, also criticized Mr. Khan’s decision to request warrants as a “moral and diplomatic disaster.” But minutes later, Mr. Lapid denounced Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership and said the idea that his government would stay in power was a “chilling thought.”

Like many Israeli officials, Mr. Lapid assailed Mr. Khan for issuing arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders, seeming to equate the two sides.

“No such comparison can be made — it is unacceptable and unforgivable,” Mr. Lapid said. “We have been conducting a just war. Let us be clear: We will not stay silent.”

Israel Katz, the Israeli foreign minister, said he had ordered the immediate establishment of a “special command center” aimed at fighting the court’s decision. He said the pursuit of arrest warrants against Israeli leaders was meant to “shackle Israel’s hands and prevent it from exercising its right to self-defense.”

“I intend to speak with foreign ministers of leading countries around the world to urge them to oppose the Prosecutor’s decision and declare that even if warrants are issued, they do not intend to enforce them against Israeli leaders,” Mr. Katz said in a statement.

Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners were quick to dismiss Mr. Khan’s announcement, calling on Israel to press onward in its campaign in Gaza.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the hard-line national security minister, called on both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant to “ignore the antisemitic prosecutor of the antisemitic court and order the escalation of the attack on Hamas until it is totally defeated.”

Johnatan Reisscontributed reporting from Tel Aviv.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

One of the first aid shipments to arrive at a U.S.-built pier was looted.

Crowds of Palestinians intercepted a convoy of trucks that had loaded goods from the pier, hastily grabbing and running off with its contents, according to Abeer Etefa, a World Food Program spokeswoman. Two senior Western officials and Majdi Fathi, a Gazan photo journalist, confirmed Ms. Etefa’s account. The officials requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Aid groups and the United Nations blame the hunger crisis in Gaza on Israel’s restrictions on aid entering the enclave and also on black marketers who have seized supplies to sell at inflated prices. Israeli officials have insisted that enough supplies have been entering the territory and have accused Hamas of stealing and hoarding aid.

For months, as famine has threatened Gaza, Palestinians have forcibly taken aid off trucks. U.N. officials say the looting reflects the desperation of ordinary people trying feed themselves and their families, and they say it has decreased when large amounts of aid consistently enter the enclave.

On Saturday, 11 of 16 trucks that left the pier with aid were looted as they were on their way to a World Food Program warehouse, Ms. Etefa said, adding that the food aid agency had suspended deliveries from the pier on Sunday and Monday.

Footage taken by Mr. Fathi showed dozens of men chaotically grabbing and hurling boxes of supplies from the bed of a truck near Gaza’s coast. In an interview, Mr. Fathi, 43, a freelance photographer, said throngs of people had gathered on the coastal north-south road after hearing that a group of trucks had passed through the area the previous day.

“They completely emptied them,” he said.

In recent days, the aid has been driven from the pier to an Israeli-controlled section of Gaza. There, it has been offloaded from one set of trucks and put on another set of trucks before being transferred to population centers. It is unclear what arrangements have been made to guard the trucks after they leave the Israeli-controlled area

On Friday, 10 trucks carrying aid from the pier, including high-energy biscuits, had arrived at the W.F.P. warehouse without incident, Ms. Etefa said.

She said that incidents like the one on Saturday would recur as long as insufficient food assistance was reaching the people in Gaza, and that more Israeli-approved routes for delivering aid were needed to avoid crowds.

Aid delivery through the two main border crossings in southern Gaza increased sharply in April and early May, though it remained below the level that aid groups said was needed.

But since Israel invaded the eastern section of the southern city of Rafah on May 7 and closed the border crossing there, aid shipments through the southern routes has come to a near-halt, according to the primary U.N. agency for Palestinian aid. The agency, known as UNRWA, said that in a 15-day period through Monday, just 69 aid trucks entered through the two crossings — the lowest rate since the first weeks of the war.

In April, U.S. officials briefed reporters that they hoped the pier operation would initially bring in enough aid for around 90 trucks per day, before scaling up to 150 per day.

The war-torn territory of about 2.2 million civilians is more reliant than ever on humanitarian aid. The devastation after seven months of war and strict Israeli inspections and restrictions on crossing points has limited what can enter Gaza.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting to this article.

Former Trump officials meet in Israel with Netanyahu.

In a brief phone interview, Mr. O’Brien said he had wanted to visit Israel ever since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 to express his “solidarity for Israel and the Jewish people.”

Mr. O’Brien said Mr. Trump was aware of his trip to Israel, but he said the former president had not asked him to go or directed him to say anything to Mr. Netanyahu. He said he was there as a “private citizen,” adding that he did express his view to Mr. Netanyahu that the Hamas terrorist attack would never have happened if Mr. Trump were still president.

Asked whether Mr. Netanyahu also expressed these views about Mr. Trump, Mr. O’Brien said: “He’s a pro, and he understands he needs good relations with the Biden administration. But that was my sentiment.”

The former Trump administration officials and Mr. Netanyahu met on Monday not long after the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor in The Hague, Karim Khan, sought arrest warrants for Mr. Netanyahu, his defense chief and three Hamas leaders on charges of crimes against humanity.

Mr. O’Brien said he told Mr. Netanyahu that Mr. Khan’s decision was a “disgrace,” and he reminded the Israeli leader of the Trump administration’s decision to impose sanctions on the International Criminal Court in 2020.

“I’ve spent my entire career as an international lawyer and I’m sickened by this prosecutor,” Mr. O’Brien said. “If he’s really concerned about a genocide he ought to be looking at the C.C.P. and the Uighurs,” he added, referring to the Chinese Communist Party’s oppression of Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang.

Mr. O’Brien and the other former Trump officials met with several other Israeli policymakers, including the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and Benny Gantz, a centrist member of Israel’s war cabinet who is increasingly at odds with Mr. Netanyahu.

The delegation also visited two sites of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7: the Nir Oz kibbutz and the field in southern Israel, close to the Gaza border, where young Israelis were murdered while dancing at a music festival.

Mr. Wittmann, the AIPAC spokesman, said the trip was planned several months ago and the organization had arranged and funded visits to Israel for former officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

A prosecutor is alleging Israeli officials have used starvation as a weapon of war. Here’s what the charge entails.

The starvation accusation, however, is directed at Israeli leaders. Although intentionally starving civilians has been considered a violation of international humanitarian law since at least the 1970s, it was only designated as a war crime in 1998, when the I.C.C. was established, as I wrote in a recent article on the subject.

There are two main elements of the crime, according to the I.C.C. statute. The first is the act itself: actions or policies that deprive civilians of “objects indispensable to their survival,” including by interfering with relief supplies. The second is the intent: Starvation must be deliberately used “as a method of warfare.”

In a statement, Mr. Khan said that evidence collected by his office, including interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses, authenticated video, photo and audio material, satellite imagery and “statements from the alleged perpetrator group,” suggested that Israel had “intentionally and systematically deprived the civilian population in all parts of Gaza of objects indispensable to human survival.”

The prosecutor alleges that deliberate starvation occurred through the imposition of a “total siege over Gaza.” He cites the closure of border crossings for extended periods, Israel “arbitrarily restricting” food and medicine after the crossings were reopened and the cutting off of water pipelines and electricity supplies from Israel to Gaza for prolonged periods. He also mentions attacks on aid workers delivering food.

Israel has previously vehemently denied placing limits on aid.

In addition to the specific charge of starvation, Mr. Khan also requested warrants for the Israeli leaders on charges of “extermination and/or murder,” both of which are crimes against humanity. It appears that those charges may relate at least in part to the siege, because the statement specifically mentioned deaths from starvation in that context.

As I wrote in the previous piece, intentionally depriving civilians of food and water could be a war crime even if no one actually starved to death. The crimes against humanity of extermination and murder, by contrast, would focus on the deaths that occurred as a result.

Alex de Waal, a professor at Tufts University and the author of three books on starvation and famine, has studied conflicts where hunger has been weaponized, including most recently in Ukrainian cities occupied by Russia.

While noting that starvation as a weapon of war has never been tested in court, Mr. de Waal said he believed the charge could be easier to prove in the context of Gaza than in other conflicts, because of the enclave’s dependence on essential goods coming through border crossings.

“In assessments for food insecurity, there’s always a margin of error. You don’t know what is being smuggled in, what food people find in the wild,” he said. “This is not the case in Gaza. In Gaza you can be very precise.”

He added that starvation “is different from other crimes because it takes time and the outcome is foreseeable. And there is the opportunity to remedy your actions.”

Marlise Simons contributed reporting

Here are some other leaders for whom the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants.

Russia

The court issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in March 2023 for crimes committed during Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, including for the forcible deportation of children. A warrant was also issued for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights. Mr. Putin has since made several international trips, including to China this month.

Sudan

The court issued warrants in 2009 and 2010 for former president Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in the western region of Darfur.

The court has also charged several other Sudanese officials, including a former defense minister, Abdel Raheem Muhammad Hussein, with crimes in Darfur.

In 2015, Mr. al-Bashir traveled to an African Union summit in South Africa in defiance of the warrant but was not arrested.

Mr. al-Bashir, 80, who was deposed in 2019 after three decades in power, also faces charges in Sudan related to the 1989 coup that propelled him to power, and he faces a death sentence or life in prison on those charges if convicted.

He has not been transferred to the court in The Hague and his whereabouts have been unclear amid a civil war that began last year. He had been held at a prison in Khartoum where he was serving a sentence for corruption.

Libya

The court issued arrest warrants in 2011 for Libya’s then-leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with one of his sons and his intelligence chief, accusing them of crimes against humanity during the first two weeks of the uprising in Libya that led to a NATO bombing campaign.

Mr. Qaddafi was killed by rebels in Libya months later and never appeared before the court. His son remains at large.

Kenya

The court dropped a case in 2016 against Kenya’s then-deputy president, William Ruto, who had been charged in 2011 with crimes against humanity and other offenses in connection with postelection violence in Kenya in 2007 and 2008. Mr. Ruto was elected president of Kenya in 2022.

Ivory Coast

Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of Ivory Coast, was also indicted by the court in 2011 for acts committed during violence after the country’s elections in 2010. Mr. Gbagbo and another leader in Ivory Coast, Charles Blé Goudé, were acquitted in 2021.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Who is Karim Khan, the I.C.C. prosecutor?

Among his high-profile clients were Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, son of the late Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi; and Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, who fired him.

One contentious case was his defense of William Ruto, now the president of Kenya, who faced charges of inciting violence that followed national elections. In 2016, when Mr. Ruto was deputy president, the case ended in a mistrial because of witness interference and political meddling. Mr. Khan was not accused of wrongdoing. He also worked on war crimes issues in Rwanda, Cambodia and Iraq.

The I.C.C. member nations elect a prosecutor in a secret ballot, and in 2021 they chose Mr. Khan after a monthslong deadlock. He received strong backing from Britain, among others in Europe. Though the United States is not a member of the court, Washington officials supported him behind the scenes.

One of his first acts as prosecutor, which took many by surprise, was to “deprioritize” an investigation into abuse of prisoners by American forces in Afghanistan, instead focusing on the larger-scale alleged crimes by the Taliban and Islamic State.

He began an investigation into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine soon after it began in 2022, and obtained an arrest warrant for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and another Russian official in March 2023. He had shown little progress in an investigation, opened in 2021, of alleged crimes by Israel against Palestinians, nor of crimes by Hamas.

Numerous legal commentators have argued that the disparity reflects a double standard that harms the court, though the court has said that the investigation has been hampered by lack of cooperation from Israel. Critics charged that Mr. Khan was slow to react to the Hamas-led attack against Israel on Oct. 7, and Israel’s subsequent military response, which has created a humanitarian crisis in its effort to crush Hamas.

But Mr. Khan has noted that investigators were allowed to work inside Ukraine immediately, while Israel has prevented him or anyone from his office from entering Gaza. He was recently permitted to travel to the West Bank and to villages in Israel that were attacked by Hamas.

Mr. Khan’s announcement on Monday that he had asked the judges for arrest warrants for two top Israeli officials — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the country’s defense minister — and three Hamas leaders was an exceptional event by I.C.C. standards.

Instead of waiting for judges to decide or sign warrants, he unexpectedly revealed his plans in a recorded announcement on the court’s website. Equally unusual was his simultaneous disclosure of a list of prominent experts, two of them former judges, whom he had consulted to review his evidence and his legal analysis before seeking the warrants. While prosecutors are known to consult specialists, some experts saw the publication of the list of names as an effort by Mr. Khan to demonstrate that there was strong legal support for his decision outside the court.

Christine van den Wyngaert, a veteran Belgian jurist who has served on the I.C.C. and other international tribunals, said Mr. Khan was “showing that he gave this a lot of thought.”

She added: “He appears to be more prudent than his predecessors. Their cases at times failed because they lacked sufficient evidence.”

Amal Clooney was on a panel of experts that recommended the I.C.C. arrest warrants.

She had received criticism on social media for not speaking up about the Israel-Hamas war. On Monday, she said in a statement that she was a member of an eight-person panel of legal and academic experts convened in January by the International Criminal Court at the request of its prosecutor, Karim Khan, to review his investigation into possible crimes committed in the conflict.

For this investigation, the panel was asked to determine if the prosecutor’s applications for arrest warrants met the International Criminal Court’s standard. Specifically, the group was asked whether there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that those named in the warrant applications had committed crimes within the court’s jurisdiction, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The panel unanimously concluded that there were such grounds, and published a report on Monday detailing their findings. Ms. Clooney said in a statement that the panel “engaged in an extensive process of evidence review and legal analysis,” before reaching its decision.

“The law that protects civilians in war was developed more than 100 years ago and it applies in every country in the world regardless of the reasons for a conflict,” Ms. Clooney said. “As a human rights lawyer, I will never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s.”

Israel — like the United States — is not a signatory to the international treaty that created the court, and does not accept the court’s jurisdiction. But Ms. Clooney said, “I do not accept that any conflict should be beyond the reach of the law, nor that any perpetrator should be above the law.”

Ms. Clooney is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, a group of associated lawyers with a specialty in human rights, and is an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School in New York City. She also founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice with her husband, the actor George Clooney, a nonprofit that provides free legal support to victims of human rights abuses.

In September 2021, she was appointed by Mr. Khan to serve as a special adviser on the Sudanese region of Darfur, where a civil war has led to a humanitarian crisis that U.N. officials say is one of the worst in decades.

The panel convened to consider arrest warrants in the case of Israel and Hamas included Adrian B. Fulford, a former judge of the International Criminal Court and retired justice of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales; and Theodor Meron, a Holocaust survivor, former Israeli official, and former judge of the international tribunals on Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

In an op-ed published in The Financial Times, the members of the panel said that they “hope that this process will contribute to increased protections for civilians and sustainable peace in a region that has already endured too much.”

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Leaders of past protests in Israel re-emerge as Parliament reconvenes.

Before the assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, mass rallies against a judicial overhaul plan, advanced by Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right and religiously ultraconservative governing coalition, had rocked Israel for months. The grass-roots leaders of those antigovernment protests had largely stepped back after the Hamas-led attacks, but on Monday, during a “Day of Disturbance,” many re-emerged to lead demonstrations.

Shikma Bressler, a particle physicist who became the face of the protests last year but who lowered her profile as Israel waged war in Gaza, led an action on Monday that saw convoys of hundreds of cars driving slowly on highways across the country, snarling traffic and converging on Jerusalem.

A large rally was planned outside Parliament to coincide with the assembly’s opening ceremony.

A protest group called Brothers and Sisters in Arms, made up of military reservists, was back out on the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway on Monday morning, holding portraits of hostages who remain in Gaza. The group rose to prominence during last year’s protests against the judicial overhaul plans.

At that time, the group made contentious calls for volunteer reserve soldiers to quit the military, arguing that the judicial plan undermined the democracy they had signed up to serve. But on Oct. 7, the group’s leaders abruptly reversed course and urged all those who received call-up orders to join the war.

The 2023 protests focused on domestic issues like the judicial overhaul plan, the nature of Israeli democracy and religious-secular tensions. By contrast, the scattered protests that have been building up over recent months have centered on demands for the government to bring the hostages home and to take responsibility for the policy and intelligence failures before Oct. 7.

Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has so far refused to take any personal responsibility for those failures. His defense minister, Yoav Gallant; and Benny Gantz, a former military chief and another key member of the war cabinet, have implicitly accused Mr. Netanyahu of putting his own political survival ahead of national security by appeasing his far-right coalition partners in the way he is prosecuting the war.

Mr. Gantz and Mr. Gallant have, in recent days, publicly demanded that Mr. Netanyahu come up with a decisive and coherent strategy for postwar Gaza, where Hamas keeps returning to areas that the Israeli military says it has cleared. Mr. Gantz issued an ultimatum that he would quit the government by June 8 if there was no clear path forward.

Mr. Gantz’s centrist National Unity party joined the government in October out of a sense of responsibility, he said at the time. His party’s departure would not topple Mr. Netanyahu, whose coalition would still command a majority of 64 seats in the 120-seat Parliament.

But Monday’s protests underscored popular frustration with the government, which has so far failed to achieve its stated goal of eliminating Hamas in Gaza.

“No majority of 64 will stop the people,” Ms. Bressler, the protest leader, said as the convoys prepared to set out.