President Joe Biden has said that he had seen “data” from the US Defense Department backing his assertion that Palestinian fighters, not Israel, were to blame for a devastating strike on a Gaza hospital, AFP reports.
Asked by reporters in Tel Aviv what made him sure that Israel was not responsible for the strike that killed hundreds on Tuesday, Biden replied, “The data I was shown by my defense department”.
“Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting. But Biden said there were “a lot of people out there” who weren’t sure what caused the blast.
He added that Washington would provide Israel with everything it needed to defend itself as it wages war against the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Biden said Hamas was worse than Daesh for its killings of Israeli civilians in a surprise attack on Oct. 7 which sparked the latest Isra el-Palestinian violence.
The US president said he was “sad and outraged” by an explosion at a hospital in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday which Hamas said killed hundreds of people. Biden said 31 Americans were among the more than 1,300 Israelis killed in Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
Netanyahu told Biden that Israel would try to avoid civilian casualties in its Gaza war, which he described as challenging due to the tactics of Hamas.
“This will be a different kind of war because Hamas is a different kind of enemy,” Netanyahu said in televised remarks. “As we proceed in this war, Israel will do everything it can to keep civilians out of harm’s way.”
