Matthew Miller, the former US State Department spokesperson under President Joe Biden, said in an interview published Monday that Israeli forces have committed war crimes in the war against Hamas in Gaza.
“It is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes,” Miller, who served as spokesperson during the last two years of the Biden administration, told Sky News in a podcast interview.
However, he clarified that he does not believe Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza.
“There are two ways to think about the commission of war crimes,” Miller said. “One is if the state has pursued a policy of deliberately committing war crimes or is acting recklessly in a way that aids and abets war crimes. Is the state committing war crimes?
“That, I think, is an open question [in regard to Gaza]. I think what is almost certainly not an open question is that there have been individual incidents that have been war crimes where Israeli soldiers, members of the Israeli military, have committed war crimes,” he said.
Israel has long denied such accusations, asserting that it takes steps to avoid civilian casualties while fighting terror groups that operate among civilians.
The international community has challenged this, saying the high number of reported civilian casualties and Israeli limitations on the entry of food into Gaza cast doubt on its commitment to protecting innocents.
“In almost every major conflict, including conflicts prosecuted by democracies, you will see individual members of the military commit war crimes, and the way you judge a democracy is whether they hold those people accountable,” Miller said.
“We have not yet seen them hold sufficient numbers of the military accountable, and I think it’s an open question whether they’re going to.”
Miller acknowledged that there had been disagreements within the Biden administration about Gaza war policy, including on whether to withhold weapons from Israel. However, he argued that doing so might have led Hamas to refrain from agreeing to a ceasefire.
“It was clear to us in that period that there was a time when our public discussion of withholding weapons from Israel, as well as the protests on college campuses in the United States and the movement of some European countries to recognize the state of Palestine… All of those things together were leading the leadership of Hamas to conclude that they didn’t need to agree to a ceasefire, they just needed to hold out for a little bit longer, and they could get what they always wanted,” he said. “And maybe a widening of the war where Hezbollah could come in, where Iran could come in.”
The Biden administration withheld shipments of 2,000-pound bombs from Israel in the spring of 2024 “because we did not believe they would use those in a way that was appropriate in Gaza,” Miller said. The Trump administration reversed the policy.
“The thing that I look back on… is in that intervening period between the end of May [2024] and the middle of January [2025], when thousands of Palestinians, innocent civilians, were killed… was there more that we could have done to pressure the Israeli government to agree to that ceasefire? I think at times there probably was,” Miller said.
“Israel was not the only party to this negotiation. You saw Hamas repeatedly move the goalposts, but you saw [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] move the goalposts as well, and I do think there are times we should’ve been tougher on them,” he added.
Multiple Biden administration officials asserted during that period that it was mainly Hamas’ intransigence that was holding up an agreement.
The war broke out on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 251.
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 53,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools and mosques.
Terror groups in the Gaza Strip are holding 58 hostages, including 57 of the 251 abducted by Hamas-led terrorists on October 7, 2023. They include the bodies of at least 35 confirmed dead by the IDF, and 20 are believed to be alive. There are grave concerns for the well-being of three others, Israeli officials have said.