President Joe Biden has privately denigrated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aversion to a cease-fire deal with Hamas, according to officials familiar with Biden’s comments, NBC News reported on Monday.
Netanyahu is “giving him hell,” Biden reportedly said, over a potential cease-fire deal. Although the president’s administration has remained relatively supportive of America’s close ally compared to international sentiment, Biden has grown increasingly impatient with Israel’s counteroffensive against Hamas, which Gaza’s Hamas-compromised health ministry claims has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.
“[Biden] did say Bibi started off great, but ‘he’s been a pain in my ass lately’ or ‘he’s been killing me lately’ — one of those things,” an informant told NBC. “He goes, ‘But he’s doing a disservice . . . of late.'”
Biden has also called Netanyahu an “asshole” at least three times, sources told NBC, and has referred to the prime minister disparagingly as “this guy.” A spokesman for the National Security Agency said that “the president has been clear where he disagrees with Prime Minister Netanyahu, but this is a decades-long relationship that is respectful in public and in private.”
The report was released the same weekend that Israel launched a military operation in Rafah and rescued two hostages from the city in Gaza. Biden said on Sunday that Israel’s “military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there,” days after the president expressed his concern that Israel’s “response in the Gaza Strip has been over the top.” Netanyahu said that he has not spoken to Biden since the president made the latter remark.
White House officials still express unequivocal support for Israel and have also supplied more humanitarian aid to Gazan civilians. Some of Biden’s frustrations come from Netanyahu’s public denunciation of a hostage deal that Secretary of State Antony Blinken was negotiating this month. Israel will continue to pursue “total victory,” Netanyahu said, the complete elimination of Hamas, and will not “surrender to the ludicrous demands of Hamas.”
“I’m pushing very hard now to deal with this hostage ceasefire,” Biden said last week. “There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s gotta stop.”
Blinken agreed last week in a press conference, adding that the civilian death toll in Gaza “remains” too high. Blinken and Biden’s recent comments are some of the most significant rebukes of Israel’s military campaign since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.