Joe Biden has condemned the attack by Hamas militants on Israel at the weekend as the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust”, as Israeli jets continued to strike Gaza, an enclave running desperately low on medical supplies, according to the World Health Organization.
The US president told Jewish leaders gathered at the White House on Wednesday: “This attack was a campaign of pure cruelty – not just hate, but pure cruelty – against the Jewish people.”
“Silence is complicity,” Biden said. “I refuse to be silent”. He said he had spoken again to Benjamin Netanyahu and that the US was “surging” additional military assistance to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
He added that the deployment of US military ships and aircraft closer to Israel should be seen as a signal to Iran, which backs Islamist groups Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. “We made it clear to the Iranians: Be careful,” Biden said.
At around 4.30am on Thursday, Israel’s military said it was conducting a “large-scale strike” on targets belonging to Hamas in Gaza. It did not provide details. Israel is expected to launch a ground offensive in Gaza in the coming days, in response to Saturday’s attacks by Hamas that are known so far to have killed 1,200 Israelis. Israel believes Hamas is holding about 150 Israeli hostages inside Gaza.
Nebal Farsakh, spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent, said the strikes had been continuous, compared with previous attacks. “But now, there is not a single minute. That’s why the casualties keep going up and up,” he said.
Gaza’s sole power station has run out of fuel amid a tightening siege, sparking particular concerns for the enclave’s hospitals. “Soon all services vital for the survival of the population, including hospitals, will no longer function,” said the Mezan centre for human rights in Gaza.
Even in ordinary times, Gaza hospitals are poorly supplied, said Richard Brennan, regional director of the World Health Organization (WHO). Now, there is a shortage of everything from bandages to intravenous fluids, beds to essential drugs. “It’s almost as bad as it gets,” said Brennan. “It’s not just the damage, the destruction. It’s that psychological pressure. The constant shelling … the loss of one’s colleagues.”
The death toll in Gaza has risen to 1,200, with about 5,600 wounded, Palestinian media reported, citing Gaza’s health ministry.
The number of Gaza residents displaced by the war has risen to 338,000, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, with around 65% of them seeking safety at shelters or schools. The enclave’s population is 2.3million.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken is heading to the Middle East to show Washington’s enduring support for Israel, seek to secure the release of hostages, including Americans, and prevent a wider war from erupting.
Blinken was expected to arrive in Israel on Thursday and will also visit Jordan. Palestinian officials have said he will meet Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.
Biden spoke after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced an emergency wartime government, joined by Benny Gantz, a senior opposition figure and former defence minister.
Netanyahu, Gantz and Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, are forming a “war cabinet” as Israeli troops continued to build in the south of the country in preparation for an expected ground invasion.
In a televised address late on Wednesday, Netanyahu described atrocities that took place during the weekend attack by Hamas militants, who he said shot children in the head, burned people alive, raped women and beheaded soldiers. “Every Hamas member is a dead man,” he said. “We will crush and destroy it.”
Gantz told Israeli citizens that the newly formed government was “united” and ready to “wipe this thing called Hamas off the face of the Earth”.
Biden said he spoke to Netanyahu again on Wednesday, their fourth conversation in recent days, and told him Israel should follow the rules of war in its response against Hamas.
The number of American citizens known to have been killed in the Hamas attack has risen to 22, the State Department said, with at least 17 more Americans unaccounted for.
The attack has raised questions about whether Iran, the main sponsor of Hamas, played a role. But the US has information that suggests senior Iranian government officials were caught off guard by the multipronged assault, according to a US official who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
That piece of intelligence has informed White House officials publicly asserting that it has not yet seen evidence of direct involvement by Iranians in the planning or execution of the Hamas attack. White House national security spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday: “We haven’t seen anything that tells they have specifically cut checks to support this set of attacks, or that they were involved in the training. And obviously, this required quite a bit of training by these terrorists,” Kirby said, though he added that the US would continue to look at the intelligence “and see if that leads us to different conclusion”.
The chairman of the powerful US House foreign affairs committee has said Israel received a warning from Egypt of potential violence three days before Hamas caught Israeli forces off-guard in a large-scale attack.
“We know that Egypt has warned the Israelis three days prior that an event like this could happen,” Republican Michael McCaul told reporters on Wednesday, after a closed-door intelligence briefing for lawmakers on the crisis.
“I don’t want to get too much into classified [details], but a warning was given,” he said. “I think the question was at what level.”
With Associated Press and Reuters
