US president Joe Biden has reportedly called his Israeli counterpart an ‘assh*le’ over Israeli intransigence on Gaza
© Getty Images / Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) / Handout
US President Joe Biden has not modified his Israel policy despite mounting frustration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to compromise in Gaza, which erupted into name-calling in private, NBC reported on Monday, citing multiple sources.
“He just feels like this is enough. It has to stop,” one of the insiders told the news outlet. Biden complains Netanyahu is “giving him hell” by refusing to consider a ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza, the sources said, adding that the president is upset the Israeli leader has rejected several “good deals” Biden put before him.
Biden’s frustration has spilled over into allegedly calling the Israeli PM an “assh*le” on three separate occasions, according to his confidants. “He’s been a pain in my ass lately,” Biden reportedly told a small group of donors at a recent fundraiser, qualifying his frustration by insisting he was still a “Zionist” who believed Hamas must be destroyed and Israel protected.
Last week, Politico reported that Biden had referred to his Israeli counterpart as “a bad f**king guy,” a claim denied by his spokesperson, Andrew Bates. NBC’s sources affirmed that the president had deemed it “counterproductive” to be “too harsh on Netanyahu publicly.”
However, late last week he described Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza as “over the top,” subsequently insisting West Jerusalem refrain from moving forward with a planned ground assault on the southern city of Rafah until it has “a credible and executable plan” to safeguard the Palestinian civilians there.
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Four months of nonstop Israeli bombing have displaced over 85% of Gaza’s residents, many of them more than once. Over a million Palestinians are crowded into a tent city hastily constructed in Rafah, where the Israel Defense Forces have corralled most of the enclave’s inhabitants after all but leveling Gaza City and Khan Younis.
Several Israeli politicians have called for Palestinians to be resettled outside Gaza. While West Jerusalem has officially disavowed this policy, it still plans a ground invasion of Rafah, despite the Palestinians having nowhere left to flee inside the enclave.
The US has unflinchingly backed Israel despite charges of genocide brought against the Jewish state in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. The Biden administration has repeatedly circumvented Congress to supply the IDF with hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry, though officials have since claimed to be weighing potentially halting or slowing the flow of arms sales, to pressure Israel to stop killing so many Palestinian civilians.
Since Hamas attacked it last October, Israel has killed over 28,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the enclave’s health ministry. The militant group’s raid left 1,200 Israelis dead.
