Biden Says Israel's 'Indiscriminate Bombing' Jepordizing International Support

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Facts

  • At an event in Washington on Tuesday, US Pres. Joe Biden suggested that Israel is losing international support due to 'indiscriminate bombing' in the Gaza Strip. Biden also said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needed to change his hardline government and that Israel 'can't say no' to an independent Palestinian state.1
  • US officials on Tuesday confirmed that Israeli forces had begun to pump seawater into the sprawling tunnel network underneath the Gaza Strip, saying it could take weeks to fully flood the tunnels. It is assumed that Hamas is keeping at least some of the hostages in the tunnels, and Israel has declared 19 of 135 people still held in captivity in Gaza dead.2
  • The Israeli military announced on Wednesday that 10 of its soldiers, mainly from the Golani brigade, were killed in the Sajaiya neighborhood in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday. A colonel and a lieutenant colonel were among those who died, bringing the reported death toll for Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip to 115 since the ground offensive began.3
  • The UAE's Ambassador to the UN, Lana Zaki Nusseibeh, also said this week that her country would condition financial and political support for the reconstruction of Gaza after the war on the advancement of a US-backed initiative toward a two-state solution.4
  • On Monday, a gathering of Arab leaders in Qatar affirmed that they were opposed to deploying an international force or their own troops into the Gaza Strip as a settlement to the current hostilities. Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said that no regional state would put 'boots on the ground [following after] an Israeli tank.'5
  • Gaza's health ministry reports that the conflict has left over 18K people in the Gaza Strip dead, [many of whom it claims are children]. The official Israeli death toll stands at 1.2K people.6

Sources: 1Reuters.com, 2The telegraph, 3I24news, 4Israel national news, 5The times of israel and 6BBC News.

Narratives

  • Pro-Israel narrative, as provided by Jerusalem post. Though this has been a tragic war, Israel cannot allow Hamas to survive. Hamas seized upon the temporary pause to mark Israeli positions and prepare itself for continued attacks on Israeli forces in Gaza. Indeed, the pace at which Israeli forces maneuvered in Gaza threw Hamas's military leadership off-kilter, and Israel will have to work intelligently in its campaign in the south of the strip to fully eliminate the terrorist group so it can never launch an attack like Oct. 7 again.
  • Pro-Palestine narrative, as provided by Middle east eye. Israel continues to demonstrate that its war is not against Hamas but against the Palestinian people as a whole. Nowhere in Gaza is safe, and Israel has effectively rendered the north of the strip unlivable. Unfortunately, the temporary ceasefire only gave civilians a few days of relative rest, and now Israel has returned to killing Palestinians at an unprecedented rate. The US, Israel's biggest ally, must exert more pressure to end the war.

Predictions