On the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security advisor, told attendees at the Israeli embassy in Washington that he traveled with U.S. President Joe Biden to Israel 11 days later, on Oct. 18, part of a contingent with “the first president to visit Israel in a time of war.”
On Oct. 20, 2023, two days after that visit, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters at a press briefing that “this is the first president ever that’s been able to go to an active warzone without our military, you know, controlling what’s happening on the ground.”
In an interview published by The New York Times on Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken revealed that the White House threatened Israel that it would cancel that trip of Biden’s if the Jewish state didn’t agree to U.S. demands.
“The very first trip that I made to Israel five days after Oct. 7, I spent with my team nine hours in the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, six stories underground with the Israeli government, including the prime minister, including arguing for hours on end about the basic proposition that the humanitarian assistance needed to get to Palestinians in Gaza,” Blinken told the Times.
The argument took place, Blinken told the paper, because Israelis were “totally traumatized.”
“This wasn’t just the prime minister or a given leader in Israel. This was an entire society that didn’t want any assistance getting to a single Palestinian in Gaza. I argued that for nine hours,” Blinken said. “President Biden was planning to come to Israel a few days later, and in the course of that argument, when I was getting resistance to the proposition of humanitarian assistance getting in, I told the prime minister, ‘I’m going to call the president and tell him not to come if you don’t allow this assistance to start flowing.'”
Blinken told the Times that he “called the president to make sure that he agreed with that, and he fully did.”
“We got the agreement to begin assistance through Rafah, which we expanded to Kerem Shalom and many other places. We’ve tried all along to look out for the needs of so many people who’ve been caught in this horrific crossfire,” he told the Times. “And we have a traumatized Palestinian population.”
Blinken said that aid in Gaza has been “grossly insufficient.” He and other senior U.S. officials have said in the past that Hamas seizes aid that enters Gaza, although that didn’t come up in the Times interview.
Blinken told the paper that Hamas isn’t receiving sufficient blame.
“Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender—I don’t know what the answer is to that,” he said. “Israel, on various occasions has offered safe passage to Hamas’s leadership and fighters out of Gaza. Where is the world? Where is the world, saying, Yeah, do that! End this! Stop the suffering of people that you brought on!”
He then hedged again. “That doesn’t absolve Israel of its actions in conducting the war,” he said. “But I do have to question how it is that we haven’t seen a greater sustained condemnation and pressure on Hamas to stop what it started and to end the suffering of people that it initiated.”