US smuggles Israeli troops into Gaza city under the guise of humanitarian assistance, then allows IDF to use Biden's floating pier

Coordination of US and Israeli troops to extract captives means that Biden has thrown in. The culpability is thick.

I once thought that President Biden could redeem his disastrous first steps after October 7th, where he bear-hugged Benjamin Netanyahu and pledged unconditional support.

There were plenty of missteps but, as Israel’s intentions have become increasingly clear, these missteps should have provided platforms on which Biden could step, turn around and say “No more” to Israeli leaders. I once held out hope that Biden would see that he could not both maintain his policy toward Israel and expect to emerge victorious at the ballot box in November. I believed he would see he would need to cultivate distance in order to bring the requisite pressure upon Israel to stop its campaign.

Now I see that Biden is totally gone. He is not reachable. He has thrown in with Netanyahu & Co. in every conceivable way, by every available metric. He is as guilty as they are. There’s no more track for him to reverse course. He’s gotten out over his skis, he’s run off the rails. He’s at that moment of swinging off of a cliff, that inflection between the force of momentum and the force of gravity, and he’s hanging suspended. There is no ground beneath him.

When the tent massacre happened in Rafah near the end of last month, people were outraged — not only at the barbarity of Israel’s attack, dropping bombs on a defenseless and exposed civilian population, but also that this somehow didn’t cross President Biden’s pre-established “red line” as he had set out with regards to Rafah.

Over the course of the week following the attack, White House spokespersons, notably John Kirby, walked back that line by adding all sorts of stipulations that had not previously been articulated by Biden at all. Kirby did so while exclaiming that the White House had always made this clear, thus engaging in a rudiment of gaslighting.

On May 31, President Biden commandeered air time to outline a ceasefire proposal that he claimed originated from the Israelis themselves. In his presentation, Biden implored both Hamas and Israel to accept the deal and not let this opportunity pass us by. Biden pleaded this, it should be noted, in the wake of reports that Israel expects hostilities to continue for seven more months — an unacceptable idea never directly addressed by the White House but one that clearly would be altered if this ceasefire deal went through.

It was the Israelis who came out immediately saying that the proposed deal was a “non-starter,” while Hamas released an initial statement expressing openness to the broad outlines of the proposal.

X post by Mario Nawfal, May 31, 2024, showing Hamas’s initial response to Biden’s outlined ceasefire proposal.

Yet ever since Biden’s press conference (in which he expended much political capital), his spokespeople have declared that it is Hamas that is the holdout and the impediment to peace. This has been especially true of Matt Miller’s responses from the podium. Up is down, black is white, this is an Israeli proposal and Hamas is the unreasonable one here.

People who are paying attention know the chronology of events, that Israel came out the very day of Biden’s broadcast to say it didn’t support what was explicitly described as a plan put forth by them. Yet Miller’s stance of continuing to blame Hamas reveals a strategy that can be described as pointed pretense. He is just pretending.

And the pretense must be for a domestic audience, for those only vaguely aware of the minute steps being taken. Miller’s words will be transcribed by some news outlets verbatim and will provide the appearance of Hamas’s recalcitrance. This fits the overall pre-established narrative where Hamas is the mule-headed villain, cartoonish and always unreasonable.

I’ve written a lot about Matt Miller over the past week, and Rifat Jawaid of Janta Ka Reporter has drilled down on Miller’s statements, too. Jawaid has focused on the same points that I have. He too saw Biden’s offer of 600 trucks of aid a day as conditioning that aid, thus participating in Israel’s war crime of withholding it (if not to that extent, then at least Biden supports it, because otherwise aid would not have ended up on the negotiating table). Israeli leaders have tentatively been drawn up on charges of using starvation as a weapon of war, and here is President Biden dangling morsels of food as an incentive to sign his ceasefire deal.

But Matt Miller has been saying some things that have continued to incriminate this White House. I wrote an extensive essay about Miller’s flat lie about UNRWA, the clearly false claim that UNRWA itself produced evidence that a dozen of its 30,000 employees participated in the October 7th attacks and that that evidence was why the White House suspended funding to the aid organization. No, UNRWA was reporting that Israel had lodged allegations, and UNRWA terminated those persons’ employment to circumvent the very action that the US and several other Western nations took.

So Miller simply lied through his teeth, jeopardizing not only his own credibility but that of the White House as a whole.

This week, Israel bombed an UNRWA school that had been converted into a shelter, in a designated safe zone. At least forty people were killed, including sixteen children. Matt Miller, in what Middle East Monitor generously called a slip of the tongue, defended Israel, saying that Israel has the right to target those civilians.

Freudian slips are significant precisely because they reveal something that the speaker has been trying to conceal, either from others or from her- or himself. This Freudian slip is significant, as it gestures at an underlying premise that the Biden White House has been careful not to articulate but under which it has been operating as though it were true.

Now we have this military operation where four people being held by Hamas were extracted from a refugee camp in central Gaza. This is in Nuseirat, the same city where the UNRWA school was bombed.

More than 270 people were killed in this extraction, with nearly three times as many wounded.

(As a reminder, hospitals in Gaza are largely disabled; even if any services are available, those services come without anaesthesia, painkillers such as acetaminophen, or disinfectant to sterilize wounds. Field hospitals during the American Civil War had a similar grade of supplies. Many of the injured are going to suffer, their wounds will get infected, and they will die.)

The United States took part in this operation! In fact, the helicopter that returned the Israeli troops from the refugee camp landed in the yard adjacent to Biden’s floating Gazan pier — the pier that was supposed to be dedicated to alleviating the restriction upon food aid and humanitarian assistance.

X post by Quds News Network, June 8, 2024

The U.S. participated in this bloody extraction, which is in many ways comparable to or worse than the tent massacre in Rafah or the Flour massacre, where more than 100 people died and 700 were injured. Those were war crimes — heinous atrocities. And now, from all appearances, the U.S. is directly involved.

(With respect, I note that the United States has issued a statement denying that IDF forces used its pier. US Central Command clarified that “[an] area south of the facility was used by the Israelis to safely return the hostages to Israel.” It stands to reason that allowing them to use the area adjacent is a form of coordination and collaboration.)

As the Chief of Communications at Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Muhammad Shehada, explained in an interview with TRT World Now:

Basically, the IDF snuck into central Gaza in civilian vehicles, using the basic population’s trust in these trucks that resemble humanitarian aid truck and also trucks that help displaced families move around.

And from there, they started to spray bullets at people on their way, everywhere in the street. They entered multiple buildings, some of which the hostages were inside, some others were just civilians in their own homes. And all of that happened with a very heavy indiscriminate cover that was provided by the IDF Air Force and Navy and ground troops, by bombarding and shelling the area in what is known as ‘fire builds,’ simultaneous dropping of an insane amount of bombs around the area to create a distraction or a cover for the unit that went inside.

So there is the indiscriminate shooting at civilians in the street, shooting of people in their homes, and then bombardment around the area to create the cover.

This is in addition to the escape of these troops through the Biden humanitarian pier that was established in Gaza for the sole purported purpose of bringing humanitarian aid to the starved population. So that entails multiple dimensions of war crimes, possible war crimes that the IDF committed in broad daylight.

(How do we know that this pier was meant purely for that one purpose? The White House told us so. John Kirby stated in no uncertain terms, “It is designed solely, only, for the delivery of humanitarian assistance. There’s no other purpose for this than humanitarian assistance.”)

This extraction is the same template used by Israel during the same day as the Superbowl, where two persons being held were extracted, with more than 60 Palestinians dead as a result. The press did then exactly what it’s doing now. It’s completely editing out the vast number of dead civilians in order to play up the “rescue of hostages” and to lean into the rhetoric of celebration and bravery.

Benjamin Netanyahu said after this operation that he will stop at nothing to return Israeli hostages. Apparently that doesn’t include negotiating. He hasn’t tried that.

He’s rejected that approach since the last exchange of prisoners demonstrated to the world that Hamas was not this animalistic group with which one could not reason. In fact, they could come to quite equitable terms. Netanyahu could not stand Hamas being seen as rational actors, so Israel broke off further exchanges in November so as to continue with Netanyahu’s plan to obliterate Gaza.

If he wants the hostages, all he has to do is negotiate for them. Any responsible leader would do this. Instead, he opts for a military operation that kills 70 people for every hostage extracted, a savage tally that we at home are forced to render as equivalent: one live Israeli is worth 70 dead Palestinians.

Now the U.S. is intimately involved in this slaughter of civilians, just as Matt Miller let slip. We have no position from which we could pivot and condemn Israel’s actions. Our hands are on the sticky knife.

There’s no real way for the U.S. to extricate itself from complicity (which at this point may rise to the level of collusion). Some speculate that Biden may already have guessed that he might lose the 2024 election and so may consider himself to have free rein to support Israel’s mission of “finishing the job.”

Whether or not that is true, it is clearly the case that the U.S. cannot portray itself as a neutral arbiter in brokering a peace deal or even a temporary ceasefire with Gaza’s leadership. All pretense of impartiality has been blown out the window, just as people were blown into body parts yesterday during the Israeli-American joint operation in Nuseirat.