The Biden administration does not view Israel's killings of Palestinians in Gaza as genocide, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday, ignoring global outrage over U.S. complicity and support for Israel's massacres.
Sullivan, speaking to reporters at the White House, said the United States wants to see Hamas defeated, that Palestinians caught in the middle of the war were in "hell," and that a major military operation by Israel in Rafah would be a mistake.
"We do not believe what is happening in Gaza is a genocide. We have been firmly on record rejecting that proposition," Sullivan said.
Biden, who is running for reelection this year, has faced heavy criticism from his own supporters domestically for his support of Israel; some of those critics have accused Israel of committing genocide. University students, who have been holding protests against U.S. policies, have called Biden "genocide Joe" for his complicity in genocide. More than 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza were killed in Israel's attacks, and vital infrastructure, including hospitals, was destroyed, amid an ongoing blockade that prevents critical humanitarian aid from reaching starving Palestinians.
The United States is working urgently for a cease-fire and hostage release deal, Sullivan said. He said he could not predict when or if such a deal would be sealed.
In January the International Court of Justice (ICJ) called on Israel to prevent acts of genocide following a South African request for international action.
In its most recent appeal to the ICJ on Friday, South Africa again accused Israel of "continuing violations of the Genocide Convention" and of being "contemptuous" of international law.
In March, a top U.N. rights expert accused Israel of committing several acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in its brutal war on Gaza.
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories, said Monday there were clear indications that Israel had violated three of the five acts listed under the U.N. Genocide Convention.
"The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel's assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group," she said in a report, which was immediately rejected by Israel as an "obscene inversion of reality."
Albanese, an independent expert appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council but who does not speak on behalf of the United Nations, said she had found "reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of ... acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met."
The report, entitled "Anatomy of a Genocide," listed those acts as: "killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group's members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
