United States President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a phone call Thursday evening widely expected to be difficult, with the president fuming over the Israeli attack that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza, US media reported.
The two leaders began speaking around 7 p.m. and talked for some 45 minutes.
The White House has described Biden, who has a close personal relationship with WCK founder Jose Andres, as heartbroken by the attack. Israel has called the incident a “grave mistake” and vowed an in-depth investigation into how it occurred. But Netanyahu also said that “these things happen in war.”
“Biden is pissed. The temperature regarding Bibi is very high,” a US official told the Axios news site before the call, using Netanyahu’s nickname. A second official confirmed the tense atmosphere.
Another official told the site that Biden’s call to Andres after the strike was a “difficult moment” for the president.
US and Israeli officials told Axios they are concerned progress on securing increases in humanitarian aid to the Strip will be reversed due to the incident.
The latest incident appeared on track to force a shift in the war — similar to the one sparked by a mass casualty incident involving another aid convoy, which desperate Palestinians swarmed in northern Gaza on February 29. The dozens killed in the ensuing stampede and gunfire, including by the Israeli army, led to furious international reactions and an announcement by Biden that he was done waiting for Israel to facilitate the delivery of more aid and was instead establishing a new maritime corridor to flood the Strip with food.
The Monday incident, in which three British nationals, an Australian, a Pole, an American-Canadian dual citizen and a Palestinian aid worker were killed in a convoy that had been closely coordinated with the army triggered even fiercer reactions from world leaders, with Biden saying it wasn’t an isolated incident, and that Israel had long failed to protect aid workers and Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also “expressed his outrage” over the attack in a phone call with his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, urging him “to immediately take concrete steps to protect aid workers and Palestinian civilians in Gaza after repeated coordination failures with foreign aid groups.”
White House national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters Wednesday that the Biden administration continues to support Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. But Kirby said Israel must do more to prevent the killing and wounding of innocent civilians and aid workers as it carries out its operations in Gaza.
“As a modern military and a democracy, they have obligations to the innocent people of Gaza and they have not always met those obligations,” Kirby said. “We are concerned about the methods too.”
The Israeli investigation into the deadly IDF strike on the WCK convoy is progressing, Israeli officials told The Times of Israel on Wednesday night. The Southern Command has completed its probe, which it presented to IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, who will add to it and then pass it up the chain to the political leadership.
The war cabinet convened virtually on Wednesday to hear an update on the IDF investigation, said one of the officials.
Halevi apologized for the incident on Tuesday: “It was a mistake that followed a misidentification, at night, during a war, in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened,” he clarified, adding that there was no “intention of harming WCK aid workers.”
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said Thursday that more than 33,037 Palestinians have been killed and 75,668 have been injured since the start of the war, an unverified figure that does not differentiate between civilians and combatants, including the more than 13,000 Hamas operatives Israel says it has killed in fighting.
Israel launched a war on Hamas in Gaza after the terror group’s deadly October 7 assault on southern Israel, in which close to 1,200 people were killed and 253 taken hostage to the Strip, more than half of whom remain there. Amid the war, 256 IDF soldiers have been killed during the ground operation in Gaza.
Reuters contributed to this report.