Recently released emails from Reuters show that officials in the White House ignored warnings from their counterparts at the Defense and State Department warning that Israel was committing war crimes and creating a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Reuters reviewed emails from the Departments of Defense and State from last October, showing that high-ranking officials warned about supporting Israel as it committed war crimes in Gaza.
“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 outlet reported. “The mass evacuation would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel.”
The warning came from Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East in an Oct. 13 email sent to senior White House aides. She explained an assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross that had left her “chilled to the bone.”
Stroul and other officials were pushing the White House to take a more sympathetic position on the suffering of Palestinians and ask Israel to give Gazans more time to comply with Tel Aviv’s evacuation orders.
While the Biden administration claims that it did pressure Israel early in the onslaught and that did make a difference, Reuters reports that the White House had little impact on Tel Aviv’s military operations.
“But Washington was slow to address the suffering of Palestinians, said three senior U.S. officials involved in the decision-making process,” the article explains. “And while the ground invasion was ultimately delayed by about 10 days, the three officials attributed the pause more to operational preparations by the Israeli military than U.S. pressure.”
Hellbound and Down 