As Israel pounded northern Gaza with air strikes last October and ordered the evacuation of more than a million Palestinians from the area, a senior Pentagon official delivered a blunt warning to the White House.
The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel, Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, wrote in an Oct. 13 email to senior aides to President Joe Biden. Stroul was relaying an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone,” she wrote.
The emails reviewed by Reuters show a scramble inside the Biden administration to warn the White House of the impending crisis – and the White House’s initial resistance to a ceasefire in the early, chaotic days of war. The three sets of email exchanges began on Oct. 11, during Israel’s fifth day of air strikes after the Hamas incursion.
After Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques, the U.S. State Department’s top public diplomacy official, Bill Russo, told senior State officials that Washington was “losing credibility among Arab-speaking audiences” by not directly addressing the humanitarian crisis, according to an Oct. 11 email.
Gaza’s health authorities reported that day a death toll of about 1,200. As Israel defended the strikes, saying Hamas was using civilian buildings for military purposes, Russo wrote that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East were monitoring Arab media reports that accused Israel of waging a “genocide” and Washington of complicity in war crimes.
“The U.S.’s lack of response on the humanitarian conditions for Palestinians is not only ineffective and counterproductive, but we are also being accused of being complicit to potential war crimes by remaining silent on Israel’s actions against civilians,” Russo wrote
Biden’s public comments on Gaza had largely given Netanyahu a free hand against Hamas. At the time, Biden faced only scattered protests from the left wing of the Democratic Party over his support for Israel’s counterattack. Israel’s likening of the Hamas assault to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington resonated widely in the U.S.