President Joe Biden arrived in Israel Wednesday, vowing solidarity in its war against Hamas and saying that the explosion that killed a massive number of Palestinians at a Gaza hospital appeared to have been caused by a Palestinian group, Reuters reports. Gaza officials accused Israel of launching an air strike, which they projected killed as many as 500 people, on the Al-Ahli Arabi hospital. Israel denied responsibility, blaming a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, which also denied responsibility.
"I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion of the hospital in Gaza yesterday, and based on what I've seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you," Biden said, speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "But there's a lot of people out there not sure, so we’ve got a lot, we’ve got to overcome a lot of things," he added. "The world is looking. Israel has a value set like the United States does, and other democracies, and they are looking to see what we are going to do." Biden later attributed his confidence about who is to blame on "data I was shown by my Defense Department."
The president's planned diplomatic trip to the Middle East was intended to calm the region even as the United States extended support for its ally Israel, which has vowed to wipe out Hamas after its fighters killed 1,400 Israelis in an attack on Oct. 7. But after the fireball ravaged the hospital on Tuesday evening, Jordan's leaders canceled the planned summit in Amman between them, leaders of Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, and Biden. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz traveled to Cairo on Wednesday and stressed that “we still do not know exactly what happened," calling for the incident to be "investigated very thoroughly.” French President Emmanuel Macron similarly called for “all the light must be shed on the circumstances.”
