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By: Fern Sidman
In an address to the nation that was replete with palpable emotion on Tuesday afternoon, President Joe Biden denounced the Iranian backed terror organization Hamas for launching a ruthless attack against Israel early on Saturday morning that has currently left over 1000 people dead. Biden called the heinous murders “an act of sheer evil,” and emphasized unflagging U.S. support for the one and only Jewish State during these challenging times.
The president also voiced concern for Americans being held hostage by Hamas, according to a Reuters report. Biden also said that Hamas’ stated purpose is to “kill Jews.” He called for Israel to follow the “law of war” in its response.
“There are moments in this life, and I mean this literally, when the pure unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world. The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend,” Biden told reporters at the White House, as was noted in the Reuters report.
Biden described what he called “stomach turning” reports of “parents butchered,” “babies being killed,” “entire families slain” and “women raped, assaulted and paraded as trophies.”
He added that “families hid their fear for hours and hours, desperately trying to keep their children quiet to avoid drawing attention. And thousands of wounded, alive but carrying with them the bullet holes and the shrapnel wounds and the memory of what they endured. You all know these traumas never go away.”
Addressing the tragic plight of families in Israel who have not been provided with information about missing loved ones, Biden said that they desperately waiting to hear of their fate, not knowing if they’re alive or dead or hostages. Infants in their mothers’ arms, grandparents in wheelchairs, Holocaust survivors abducted and held hostage — hostages whom Hamas has now threatened to execute in violation of every code of human morality. It’s abhorrent.”
He also spoke of the “brutality of Hamas — this bloodthirstiness — brings to mind the worst — the worst rampages of ISIS. This is terrorism.”
At least 14 Americans died in the attack. Reuters also reported that National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters at a separate briefing that the U.S. believed 20 Americans were missing but it remained unclear if they were being held hostage.
Biden said Hamas had threatened to execute hostages, including survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, in violation of “every code of human morality.” He said the group’s brutality and “blood thirstiness” was a reminder of the “worst rampages of ISIS.”
“This is terrorism, but sadly for the Jewish people, it’s not new,” Biden said, Reuters reported.
The incident had brought to the surface memories of anti-Semitism and the genocide of the Jewish people, he added.
In an apparent reference to Iran and Iranian-backed groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Biden said he had a message for any country or organization thinking of taking advantage of the situation – “I have one word: don’t.”
The 10-minute speech appeared designed to ensure there is little daylight between the US and Israel at a moment of deep crisis. CNN reported that the president made no equivocation about the attacks and made no call for restraint by Israel as it responds, apart from insisting it follow the rule of law.
Biden, who spoke earlier with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, offered his own view of what the country’s response might look like.
“I told him that if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming,” Biden said from the State Dining Room, according to the CNN report.
Biden also said during his speech that he was “directing my team to share intelligence and deploy additional experts from across the United States government to consult with and advise Israeli counterparts on hostage recovery efforts.
“As president, I have no higher priority than the safety of Americans being a hostage around the world,” he said.
The president also said he intends to ask Congress to approve more funding for Israel to help it defend its territory and people, as was noted in the CNN report. He promised his administration would not allow Israel to run out of ammunition and interceptors for its Iron Dome air defense system, which is intended to shoot rockets out of the air before they strike Israeli territory.
“This is not about party or politics, it’s about the security of our world, the security of the United States of America,” he said.
The remarks Tuesday, where he was flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, were Biden’s most substantive since the outbreak of violence early Saturday, CNN reported, Within hours of the deadly Hamas attack on Israel that left hundreds of people dead, the president was on the phone with Netanyahu. He has spoken with him three times since the violence began, the report added.
When Biden’s counterpart – reeling from one of the worst attacks on his country in decades – has brought up the possibility of going into Gaza, the president has not offered warnings to him against doing so, a US official briefed on the conversation told CNN.
That decision by the president to hold back from urging Netanyahu to exercise restraint in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in no small part reflects the sheer shock and breadth of Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel that makes this moment different, officials say.
“We are not urging restraint right now,” one official said, as was reported by CNN.
“Terrorists purposely target civilians, kill them. We uphold the laws of war. It matters. There’s a difference,” Biden said.
CNN also reported that later in the day, Sullivan told reporters the two men “had the opportunity to talk through the difference between going full bore against Hamas terrorists and how we distinguish between terrorists and innocent civilians.”
The president and his national security team are keenly aware of what appears to be a growing likelihood of Israel making a ground incursion into Gaza. CNN also noted that over the past 72 hours, officials have acknowledged what a deeply tenuous position that possibility puts the administration in. As a general matter, the US has historically urged for a ceasefire on all sides when conflicts have broken out in the region.
The Biden administration has usually been very intent on handling those kinds of discussions very privately, and officials said this time will be no different. Biden’s first written statement over the weekend did not include the term “ceasefire” – an omission that struck current and former administration officials alike.
During his speech, Biden said the violence unleashed by Hamas was reminiscent of some of the worst attacks by ISIS in the previous decade, the CNN report said.
“This attack has brought to the surface painful memories and the scars left by millennia of anti-Semitism and genocide of the Jewish people, so in this moment, we must be crystal clear, we stand with Israel,” Biden said.
Biden spoke after his third phone call in four days with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The president said he told Netanyahu “our response would be swift, decisive and overwhelming” if the U.S. had been attacked this way but that democracies also uphold the rule of law in wartime.
Domestically, Biden said, law enforcement officials “have stepped up security around centers of Jewish life,” while “working closely with state local law enforcement and Jewish community partners to identify and disrupt any domestic threat that could emerge in connection to these horrific attacks.”
Without making specific mention of it, the president was referencing reports from media outlets on Tuesday that said that Hamas terrorists slaughtered at least 40 babies and young children — decapitating some of them — at a kibbutz near the Gaza border, according to a New York Post report. The announcement was made by shaken Israeli officials.
“It’s hard to even explain exactly just the mass casualties that happened right here,” visibly distraught i24 News correspondent Nicole Zedek said during a broadcast from Kibbutz Kfar Aza near Sderot about a quarter-mile from the Gaza Strip, the NYP reported.
“Babies with their heads cut off, that’s what the soldiers said. Gunned down. Families gunned down, completely gunned down in their beds,” Zedek said of the “sheer horror.”
“This is nothing that anyone would have even imagined,” she said.
Top CNN reporter Nic Robertson, dressed in a military helmet and flak jacket, said, “There were so many murdered members of this Kibbutz, according to the Post report. “Men, women, children, hands bound, shot, executed, heads cut,” he said.
French journalist Margot Haddat added in a translated tweet, “It’s so macabre that no one wanted to reveal it until they had 100 percent confirmation.”
Around 70 Hamas terrorists are believed to have carried out the atrocities at Kfar Aza with guns, grenades and knives, i24 News said.
“It’s not a war,” said Gen. Itai Veruv, head of the IDF’s Depth Command, to reporters, as was reported by the NYP. “It’s not a battlefield. You see the babies, the mothers, the fathers in their bedrooms, in their protection rooms, and how the terrorists kill them. It’s not a war. … It’s a massacre.”
“They killed babies in front of their parents, and then killed the parents. They killed parents, and we found babies between the dogs and the family killed before him. They cut heads of the people,” he added.
“It is something that I never saw in my life,” the military leader said, the Post reported “It’s something that we used to imagine from our grandfathers, grandmothers in the pogrom in Europe and other places. It’s not something that happens in new history.”
As of Tuesday evening local time, the death count in Israel is believed to hover around 1,100, with more than 2,000 people injured.
Early on Saturday morning, Hamas terrorists targeted the Super Nova outdoor music festival in southern Israel as they sexually assaulted women next to the corpses of their friends, a survivor said, according to a report on the World Israel News web site.
The shooting attack against attendees at the event is likely the deadliest massacre of Jews since World War II, with at least 260 people killed at the party and the recovery and identification of bodies still ongoing.
One survivor of the massacre told the American-Jewish news outlet Tablet that they had witnessed female revelers being sexually assaulted by terrorists.
“Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends’ bodies, dead bodies,” the survivor recounted, as was noted in the WIN report.
The witness added that some of the victims were immediately executed afterward the assaults, while others were whisked away and presumably taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip, they said.
“I felt like they were shooting right above our heads,” another survivor told Tablet, as was reported by World Israel News. “I dove into a bush … It felt like the shooting was coming from 180 degrees, all around us.
“I understood we’re going to be there for at least a couple of hours. And I had nothing on me. And I was like, the only thing I want is a weapon. I want something to protect us.”
Meanwhile, Israel pounded the Gaza Strip on Tuesday with the fiercest air strikes in its 75-year-old conflict with the Palestinians, razing whole districts despite a threat from Hamas militants to execute a captive for each home hit without warning, as was reported by Reuters.
Also weighing in on the war that Hamas launched against Israel was celebrated author, orator and Middle East analyst was Professor Phyllis Chesler. In a statement sent to the Jewish Voice on Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Chesler said, “There are no moral equivalencies. Arab Palestinian prisoners with blood on their hands are not equal or equivalent to Israeli civilians, including babies and toddlers. Committing a pogrom-like and ISIS-like terrorist atrocity on innocent civilians is not equal or equivalent to attempting to end the reign of just such evil so that it can never happen again. One must stop looking at who is more or less powerful and focus on who is committing crimes against humanity and who is not.
She added that, “In my view, Israel cannot stop its military action, no matter the cost, not until Hamas is leveled, Hamas operatives and their indoctrinated supporters are all eliminated. America has to back Israel in all ways until that is accomplished. We know that both Iran and Qatar are behind both Hamas and Hezbollah. What does NATO and the United States plan to do about these two nation states that are state sponsors of terror that will and has already reached far beyond Israel-only borders? “
As to the question of Israel sustaining a massive intelligence failure which allowed this well planned attack to take place, on Monday, a WIN report said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed back on claims that his government had received advanced warning of Hamas’ invasion over the weekend and chose to ignore the warnings.
An Egyptian intelligence officer who spoke with The Associated Press said that Cairo had warned Israel about “something big” in the offing, adding that Jerusalem ignored the warning.
Instead, the officer said, Israeli officials focused their concerns on terrorist activities in Judea and Samaria, rather than the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, as was noted in the WIN report.
“We have warned them an explosion of the situation is coming, and very soon, and it would be big. But they underestimated such warnings,” the official said.
Also speaking with the Jewish Voice on Monday evening was central New Jersey resident Michael Nussbaum, 76, who just returned from a three-week visit to Israel with this wife Joyce to attend a family event.
Recalling the moment the sirens began to blaze near Jerusalem on Saturday morning, Nussbaum said, “My nephew told us to get to the sake room where we watched television coverage of the events that were unfolding in the south of Israel. We saw images on television of rockets landing in Ashkelon, Hadera, Sderot and other places.”
By approximately three in the afternoon, his 38-year old nephew, who is a cyber specialist was called to his reserve unit where he holds the rank of captain, Nussbaum recalled.
As a veteran of the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, Nussbaum ruefully observed, “War is no place anyone would want to be in. I would not recommend it.”
On the topic of the massive intelligence failure on Israel’s part in order to prevent such a catastrophic occurrence, Nussbaum’s perspective differed with pundits and other military experts who have predicted that this could possibly mark the final chapter in Netanyahu’s long political career.
“Yes, it is true that the buck stops at the Prime Minister’s desk, but no verifiable information has emerged saying that Netanyahu had knowledge of a possible attack and did nothing about it. I personally think that perhaps his intelligence departments and officials therein might be responsible, but I do not believe Netanyahu was,” Nussbaum said most emphatically.
He added that, “If anything, this war and how Netanyahu conducts it will make him even stronger and more appreciated by the Israeli people. I think he is in a very good position and will be in an even better one in the future.”
