Report Says Biden's 'Empty Threats' on Gaza Fed Israeli Impunity

New reporting published Wednesday details the impotence and insincerity of President Joe Biden's "multiple threats, warnings, and admonishments" to Israel as it annihilated the Gaza Strip, killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians while receiving tens of billions of dollars in U.S. arms and unwavering diplomatic support.

Writing for ProPublica, Brett Murphy showed how multiple "red lines" issued by Biden administration officials were ignored by Israel with impunity. Murphy highlighted Secretary of State Antony Blinken's October 2024 demand that Israel take "urgent and sustained actions" to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza—mainly by allowing far more aid into the embattled strip—within 30 days or face a military aid cutoff.

"Netanyahu's conclusion was that Biden doesn't have enough oomph to make him pay a price."

Thirty days came and went without significant improvement or letup in Israel's onslaught. Yet the Biden administration insisted it found no indication that Israel was using U.S.-supplied weapons illegally. The arms flow continued.

As Murphy reported:

That choice was immediately called into question. On November 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel's methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was "consistent with genocide." Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations.

"Government officials worry Biden's record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity," wrote Murphy.

Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, told Murphy that "Netanyahu's conclusion was that Biden doesn't have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him."

"Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying 'no' to the current president," al-Omari added.

Conversely, Murphy noted: "On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now, and who deserves the most credit, it's plausible that [U.S. President-elect Donald] Trump's imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line."

"Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months," he added, "raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives."

As Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, told Murphy, "It's hard to avoid the conclusion that [Biden's] red lines have all just been a smokescreen."

"The Biden administration decided to be all-in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something," Walt added, as Israel kept killing Palestinians with U.S.-supplied weapons and continued a "complete siege" blamed for widespread starvation and sickness in the Gaza Strip.

Murphy wrote that Trump "will inherit a demoralized State Department" in which many officials who haven't already resignedhave "become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented."

As one senior department official told Murphy, Gaza "is the human rights atrocity of our time."

"I work for the department that's responsible for this policy. I signed up for this," the official added. "I don't deserve sympathy for it."