Biden flies into inflamed Middle East after deadly Gaza hospital explosion
Amman canceled a planned summit with Biden, Egypt, Jordan and Palestinian leaders after deadly Gaza hospital explosion as Biden flew to Israel.
A trip by President Biden this week that was meant to show solidarity with Israel after the shocking massacre by Hamas terrorists of over 1,300 Israelis this month, as well as cooperation with Arab partners to unlock humanitarian aid and safe corridors for besieged Palestinian residents of Gaza was coming apart before Biden’s plane took off tonight from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.
The precipitating incident was an explosion at a hospital in Gaza today that reportedly killed several hundred people. Initial media reports citing local Palestinian authorities claimed the explosion at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza was caused by an Israeli air strike. Israeli defense officials, after investigating, eventually said their assessment was that the explosion was caused by a failed rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian militant faction in the Gaza strip.
But by then, much of the region was aflame, with angry demonstrations from Iran to Morocco, as well as protests at the Israeli embassy in the Jordanian capital Amman and Israeli consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul, and at the US embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, among others.
Even close U.S. Arab partners like the United Arab Emirates, which in 2020 normalized relations with Israel, officially condemned the Gaza hospital strike and blamed it on Israel in a statement from the foreign ministry tonight, as did Saudi Arabia, which had been exploring possibly normalizing ties with Israel before the Hamas massacre and Israeli campaign in Gaza this month.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ office announced that he was returning from Jordan to the West Bank capital of Ramallah to observe three days of mourning for the victims at the Ahli hospital, and would not be participating in a planned summit in Amman Wednesday with President Biden, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Then the Jordanian government announced the summit was canceled.
As Air Force One was preparing to roll for take-off, the White House confirmed that the Amman part of Biden’s planned one day trip to Israel and Jordan was off.
“After consulting with King Abdullah II of Jordan and in light of the days of mourning announced by President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, President Biden will postpone his travel to Jordan and the planned meeting with these two leaders and President Sisi of Egypt,” a White House official said in a statement.
“The President sent his deepest condolences for the innocent lives lost in the hospital explosion in Gaza, and wished a speedy recovery to the wounded,” the White House official continued. “He looks forward to consulting in person with these leaders soon, and agreed to remain regularly and directly engaged with each of them over the coming days.”
What is evident is that Biden is flying into an extremely volatile situation, and that his administration’s repeated top goal of trying to prevent the Israeli-Hamas fighting from spreading into a wider conflict and causing further destabilization in the region is going to become increasingly difficult, and possibly untenable, as the Israeli military campaign against Hamas in Gaza continues. And all this before the anticipated Israeli ground invasion of Gaza has even begun.
While Biden and European leaders have largely expressed understanding for, and sought to give cover for, Israeli plans to conduct an extensive military campaign to attempt to uproot Hamas in Gaza, while urging respect for international law to protect civilian life, Arab countries are increasingly pressing for a ceasefire, or warning the region could experience more upheaval and violence.
The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs “stressed the need for an immediate cessation of hostilities and to ensure that civilians and civilian institutions are not targeted,” the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement tonight (Oct. 16) said.
“The United Arab Emirates called on the international community to intensify efforts to reach an immediate ceasefire to prevent further loss of life, to avoid further fueling the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, and to advance all efforts to achieve a comprehensive and just peace, while preventing the region from being pulled into new levels of violence, tension and instability.”
President Biden has received widespread gratitude and appreciation from Israelis and the U.S. Jewish community for his heartfelt, vocal and rapid response hugging Israel close and offering moral and material support for Israel after the shocking and barbaric Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7.
But American officials have also stressed that their number one goal in helping manage the aftermath of the Hamas massacre and Israel’s military retaliation is to try to prevent the conflict from spreading beyond the Israel vs. Hamas axis to other fronts, in particular to deter Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah and other Iran proxies and even Iran itself from joining the fight.
So there was a growing, and ominous sense of discordance with the disparate U.S. aims—on the one hand, showing solidarity and moral support for Israel amid its shock and trauma, and on the other preventing the war from expanding beyond the Israel/Hamas front--in a zoom call the White House held today with U.S. Jewish community members. As the Arab and Muslim world was aflame over what many believed to be an Israeli strike on the Gaza hospital that killed hundreds of civilians, U.S. administration officials on the call sought to communicate to the Jewish community audience how the Biden administration has Israel’s back.
“President Biden’s been really clear from the beginning about what our policy is and what our focus is, in terms of helping Israel have the capabilities to defend itself,” a top Pentagon official, acting Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Dr. Mara Karlin, said on the call, describing a trip with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Israel last week in which they met with Israeli leaders and then went to an airfield receiving a U.S. military C-17 cargo aircraft “filled with ammunition for Israel’s military. And it was one of a couple tranches of assistance that the U.S. has been surging to get there as quickly as possible. …Picture a whole lot of sand, and then the airplane comes down, opens up, with all the things that Israel’s military needs, and then Israeli and American flags in the background.”
“We all know that we are living in this really terrible, historic moment right now,” Karlin said on the call. “Having spent literally decades working on U.S. Middle East issues, you can feel all of that. And as Secretary Austin landed, and then we started walking to these meetings and in every single meeting, you have the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, the IDF Chief of Staff saying, ‘thank you.’ And…it was so powerful about how critical the U.S. Israel relationship is, and for our partners in Israel to know that we’re standing by them at this really, really difficult time.”
It is a message that Biden will surely make again in person in Israel on Wednesday. But it is one that much of the Arab world and beyond increasingly sees as the United States giving cover for what some see as Israeli brutality, even atrocities against Palestinian civilians who have nowhere safe to shelter. And one that seems likely could blow back on the United States, encourage Israel to commit itself to a military quagmire in Gaza, and that could lead to further upheaval and conflict in the region.
“Today's developments…underscored an unfortunate pattern in the history of the modern Middle East,” former State Department diplomat and Council of Foreign Relations president Richard Haass wrote on Twitter. “That things tend to get worse before they get even worse.”
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