“My memory is fine, look at what I’ve done since I’ve been president.” She said it Joe Biden at the White House responding to a question from Fox. The president then joked with the reporter that “I have a bad memory because I made you ask the question.”
The White House’s irritation with Israel’s management of the conflict with Hamas is increasingly explicit: last night US President Joe Biden defined the military operations in Gaza in response to the October 7 attack as “exaggerated” and recalled that ” too many innocent people are dying: this must stop.” After yet another flop in his Foreign Minister’s latest mission Antony Blinken in the region, in a surprise press conference the American commander in chief reiterated that he wanted “a ceasefire with the release of the hostages”.
Even though the meeting with journalists had been called to respond to his adversaries’ attacks on memory problems linked to his advanced age, Biden was unable to avoid questions on the burning issue of the Middle East, and the president was unable to do so either. to avoid a gaffe, confusing Egypt and Mexico. “As you know, initially the president of Mexico, Sisi, did not want to open the doors to let in humanitarian material,” he said, referring to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, president of Egypt. «I spoke to him. I convinced him to open and I spoke with Bibi so that the doors would also be opened on the Israeli side”, he added, using the nickname by which he is called in Israel for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Only two days ago, 4 months after the start of the war and just after having listened to US pressure directly from Blinken, Netanyahu ruled out taking Hamas’s truce proposal into consideration, announcing, on the contrary, new attacks on the south of Strip, in Rafah. Biden then considered it “not unreasonable to suspect that Hamas understood what was about to happen and wanted to stop it before it happened”, while stating that he “did not have the evidence” to support this thesis on the origin of the October 7 attack.
Meanwhile, during the night, Israeli attacks in the center and south of the Strip and in particular on Rafah caused at least 9 victims, including women and children according to the Ministry of Health in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. More than half of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million people have been displaced in Rafah in accordance with evacuation orders issued by Israel since the conflict began four months ago. The UN highlighted that “a military advance in Rafah could be disastrous”.