ON the 100-day anniversary of the Oct 7, 2023, attack by Hamas against Israel, and after 25,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israel’s retaliatory strikes, then US president Joe Biden made a shocking statement: “I will never forget the grief and the suffering I have heard in my meetings with the families of the American hostages. No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100.”

His statement did not reference the thousands of slaughtered Palestinians, including women and children, or the intentional targeting of hospitals and journalists. Nor did it acknowledge the International Court of Justice hearings that had begun days prior to investigate allegations of Israeli war crimes. The statement was derided as “shameful” by Barnett Rubin, a US foreign policy expert who knew Biden from their time in the Obama administration.

Biden’s one-sided statement is flagged in a new book, Crossing the Red Line, by award-winning Pakistani journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed, which documents how the Biden administration enabled Israeli atrocities in Gaza, and set the stage for the widening of the Middle East conflict during the current Trump administration.

In a book filled with examples of US........

© Dawn