On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lamented President Joe Biden not pushing Israel “to target Hamas more directly with fewer civilian casualties.” And that Israel learned that “you can create enough pain on civilians, it trickles through to the government, and it will lead to more prudence beyond the road.”
Kristof said, “President Biden, at this point, has just enormous resonance and popularity in Israel. I wish that he was using his political capital a little more forcefully to try to encourage Israel to allow fuel to get in to run generators in hospitals and to target Hamas more directly with fewer civilian casualties.”
He added that “everybody understands that Israel has to hit Hamas targets, and there is going to be some collateral damage. But it is happening at a level that it’s hard to see how this advances Israeli security when you have so many people who are losing their parents, who are losing their kids. I was interviewing one Gaza family who were in Jerusalem to get medical care. I was interviewing the mom, and an eight-year-old child was a few feet away playing with the mom’s phone, so I looked to see what the boy was doing, he was watching TikToks on his mom’s phone of his neighborhood being bombed. And what is that child going to grow up to want to be? I just have — I’ve seen this script before, and I think it’s hard to bomb your way in ways that hit a lot of civilians and build security in that path.”
He concluded, “I think that there certainly is discussion among Israeli officials about the last war with Hezbollah, and there was a sense that…the head of Hezbollah, that once he was hit that hard that he spoke — he said publicly that he wished that he had not actually engaged in that war. And I think that the lesson that Israel learned is, well, you can create enough pain on civilians, it trickles through to the government, and it will lead to more prudence beyond the road. But at such a price — and I’m just deeply skeptical that this is actually going to achieve the result.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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