US President Joe Biden says it is “not realistic” to expect Israel to stop its ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, given that the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has already announced that it will not stop attacking the regime.
Biden made the remarks on Thursday, following a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco.
“Hamas has already said publicly that they plan on attacking Israel again like they did before… So the idea that they’re going to just stop and not do anything is not realistic,” he said.
The US president further noted that Israeli forces had switched from aerial bombardment to more targeted ground operations in Gaza.
“It is not carpet bombing. This is a different thing. They’re going through these tunnels, they’re going into the hospital… So this is a different story than I believe it was occurring before, the indiscriminate bombing,” he said.
Israel is continuing its attacks in Gaza despite a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution calling for “humanitarian pauses” in the besieged enclave.
The occupying regime waged the war on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas carried out the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm into the occupied territories in response to intensified Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people.
According to the Gaza-based health ministry, at least 11,500 Palestinians have been killed in the strikes, most of them women and children, and around 32,000 others have been wounded.
Tel Aviv has also imposed a “complete siege” on Gaza, cutting off fuel, electricity, food and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
The United States has backed Tel Aviv’s relentless attacks on the Palestinian territory as an instance of “self-defense,” and has provided the regime with thousands of arms consignments since the onset of the war.
The US even voted against a nonbinding resolution calling for an “immediate humanitarian truce” in the war, which was passed on October 27 at the UN General Assembly, where Washington does not wield a veto power.
