The bombing of the Al-Ahli Christian hospital threatens to make much of the trip useless. Joe Biden started this Wednesday in the Middle East. This morning it landed in Israel. Shortly after the president of the United States had taken off from Andrews Air Force Base, outside of WashingtonCourse to Israel, Jordan announced the cancellation of the ‘summit’ that Biden was going to hold in that country with the presidents of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al Sisi and from Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas. The meeting, in which the king of Jordan, Abdullahwas going to be the host, was going to focus on the entry of humanitarian aid for the two million inhabitants of Gaza, who are trapped in a region whose area is approximately half that of the municipality of Madrid without water or electricity. Several capitals of the Middle East have experienced a night of demonstrations in front of the United States embassies.
The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has thanked the American president for his visit during the war with the militias in the Gaza Strip and said that this shows “his deep commitment to Israel, to the future of the Jewish people and to the Jewish State.” For his part, Biden has advised Israel, as he later told reporters, not to be carried away by “rage” in its response to the attacks launched by the Islamist movement Hamas.
In this context, the American president has made reference to his own country’s reaction after the 9/11 attacks. “I ask you that while you feel that anger, do not let yourself be consumed by it. After September 11, in the United States we felt anger. And while we sought justice and obtained justice, we also made mistakes,” were Biden’s words during his visit to Tel Aviv.
Biden supports the version of the Israeli authorities that blame Hamas for what happened at the Gaza hospital. “I was deeply saddened and shocked by the explosion at the Gaza hospital yesterday [el martes]. And based on what I saw, it appears that it was carried out by the opposing side,” the US president declared.
The cancellation of the summit is a consequence of the destruction in a bombing of the Al-Ahli hospital, in which 500 Palestinian civilians could have died. Arab governments unanimously blame Israel, whose air force, they say, intentionally attacked the building. Tel-Aviv has responded by stating that the cause of the catastrophe is a consequence of a missile from the terrorist group Islamic Jihad that deviated from its path. Judging by the tremendous destruction of the building, it seems unlikely that a projectile like those used by terrorist groups operating in Gaza would have been capable of causing this humanitarian catastrophe. The British weekly The Economist has cited the possibility that it was a Palestinian missile that had been intercepted by the anti-aircraft defense of the Jewish State what caused the tragedy.