When the Israel-Hamas war began on October 7, the immediate priority of United States President Joe Biden was to prevent the conflict from widening into a regional war involving Israel and its rivals. Mr. Biden adopted a two-fold strategy. He offered unconditional support for Israel’s war on Gaza, launched after Hamas’s attack on October 7, in which at least 1,200 people were killed, and unleashed a diplomatic effort to keep tensions low between Tel Aviv and its neighbours. But when the war raged on for months, with huge civilian casualties in Gaza, the Biden policy started falling apart. Today, as the war is set to enter its eighth month, Mr. Biden looks increasingly vulnerable to its regional and domestic consequences. Over 34,000 people, a vast majority of them women and children, have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza; Israel vows to invade Rafah, the southernmost town in Gaza where more than 1.4 million Palestinians have taken refuge, despite Mr. Biden’s warning against such a move; with Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea and strikes and counterstrikes between Israel and Iran, the conflict has already spread beyond the borders of Palestinian territories and Israel, though a full-scale regional war has been avoided so far; the conflict has triggered massive protests by university students in the U.S., piling up pressure on Mr. Biden to reconsider his policy towards Israel.
