State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday that the U.S. shares the goal of “degrading” Hamas — avoiding the use of the word “defeating,” in an apparent shift of U.S. policy on the Gaza war.
On Monday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters that President Joe Biden shared Israel’s goal of “defeating” Hamas, but believed it was not necessary for Israel to attack Hamas in the last stronghold of Rafah to do so:
The President told the Prime Minister again today that we share the goal of defeating Hamas, but we just believe you need a coherent and sustainable strategy to make that happen.
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Now, the President has rejected — and did again today — the strawman that raising questions about Rafah is the same as raising questions about defeating Hamas. That’s just nonsense.
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And from the U.S. perspective, this is not a question of defeating Hamas. And anytime I hear an argument that says, “If you don’t smash into Rafah, you can’t defeat Hamas,” I say, “That is a strawman.”
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[T]he President is not focused on what’s popular, what’s not popular, how do you shape public opinion. He’s interested in how do we get to the right result, and the right result is the enduring defeat of Hamas, a two-state solution that has a secure Israel and a Palestinian state that vindicates the aspirations of the Palestinian people, and a broader normalization of relations so that Israel also has peace with all of its Arab neighbors.
On Tuesday, as Breitbart News reported, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his view that while he was happy to talk to the Biden Administration about it, there was no way to defeat Hamas without entering Rafah.
Later, on Tuesday, Patel was asked to respond to Netanyahu’s statement. Patel said that the Biden Administration was looking forward to discussions with Israeli officials in Washington about “alternative approaches” to “target key elements of Hamas, help secure the Egypt-Gaza border, and do so without a major ground operation in Rafah.”
Patel then referred to “our shared goal of degrading Hamas,” which is significantly different from “defeating” Hamas.
Patel also objected to reported Israeli plans to create a one-kilometer-wide buffer zone inside Gaza along the border with Israel to prevent future terror attacks. “There can be no reduction in territory in Gaza,” Patel told reporters.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
