White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan reportedly told Israeli leaders Thursday that they should end the “intense” phase of fighting against Hamas in Gaza in the next few weeks — meaning right before the start of the 2024 presidential election.
Biden is known to be suffering politically because of the war, which has split the Democratic Party. Republicans also contend that the war would never have broken out if not for Biden’s weak foreign policy; there were no such wars by Hamas against Israel during Donald Trump’s four-year tenure.
According to the Times of Israel:
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who is in Israel today and tomorrow, tells Channel 12 that he and his team held “intense, detailed conversations” with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the war cabinet on when the IDF will transition away from high-intensity fighting in Gaza to focus on lower intensity fighting that would include targeting Hamas’s top leaders.
“Israel is going to continue to conduct its military efforts to get after Hamas for some time because, for example, they’re going to continue to hunt the top leaders of Hamas, Sinwar and Deif and Issa, and we don’t know exactly how long that will take,” Sullivan says. “So the issue really is when does Israel shift from the high-intensity military operations that are underway today to a different phase of this conflict, one that’s more precise, more targeted, more driven towards things like those high-value individuals?… We had a very constructive conversation about these phases.”
Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant had a different approach, telling Sullivan publicly that the war would last several more months to ensure Hamas was destroyed, at least militarily and administratively.
White House national security aide John Kirby would not confirm the substance of conversations between Kirby and Israeli officials, but told reporters that Sullivan “did talk about the possible transitioning from what we would call high intensity operations — which is what we’re seeing them do now — to lower intensity operations sometime in the near future.”
Biden has been criticized for adopting a political calendar for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, which he moved to the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, before moving the deadline a few weeks earlier. His former boss, President Barack Obama, was criticized for adopting a timeline for withdrawals from Iraq, rather than withdrawing based on the achievement of military goals.
Israeli officials have said that a more careful approach to war that avoids civilian casualties would also take more time, and that the White House cannot have it both ways — i.e. a fast war and one that avoids more civilian casualties.
Sullivan is a former political operative who played a key role in the dissemination of the “Russia collusion” hoax in 2016-2017.
The first Democratic Party presidential primary will be held on February 3 in South Carolina, and Republicans will hold caucuses in Iowa on January 15.
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 new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent 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.
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