It’s fine that President Joe Biden is taking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli military to task over the killing last week of seven humanitarian workers, including one American, in Gaza.
The dead also included three British nationals, an Australian, a citizen of Poland and a Palestinian.
Biden said he was “outraged and heartbroken” over the Israeli Defense Force airstrike that took the lives of the humanitarian World Central Kitchen workers who provided food to an untold number of hungry Palestinians, many of them children.
Biden, succumbing to political pressure from the left as Palestinian civilian casualties have risen, has walked back his initial full-throated support for Israel in its war against Hamas that began following the massacre of some 1,200 Israelis by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7.
The killing of the aid workers with an airstrike appears to have been a tipping point. “Israel is not doing enough to protect civilians,” Biden said.
Biden is now demanding an immediate cease-fire and the implementation of a policy of providing humanitarian aid to the Palestinians or face the consequences.
Those consequences were spelled out in a brief statement by Secretary of State Antony Blinken who said, “If we don’t see changes that we need to see, there will be changes in our policy.”
Israel, to its credit, took immediate responsibility for the deaths and, in a matter of days investigated the deadly incident. It led to the firing of two military commanders and the reprimand of a third.
Israel’s overall response to the killing of innocent people is a far cry from the pathetic response — or non-response — of Biden and the US military to the 2021 drone strike that mistakenly wiped out an entire family of innocent Afghans — one of whom was a humanitarian aid worker — during Biden’s precipitous and botched pullout from Afghanistan.
Biden initially called the strike a success. He said it showed the US could reach far and wide.
But when it was revealed that innocent people had been killed, he could not be found for comment, so nobody knows if he was “outraged and heartbroken” over their deaths as he was over the deaths in Gaza.
And there was no Benjamin Netanyahu to call. Besides, the Taliban who were now running the country Biden handed over to them were too busy celebrating their windfall to take any calls.
Gen. Mark Milley, the former woke Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it was “a righteous strike” based on “very good intelligence.”
Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said, “This was not a rushed strike “and that US intelligence believed that there was “an imminent threat” involved.
The Hellcat missile strike in Kabul was ordered by the US military in retaliation for the killing of 13 US service members by a suicide ISIS-K terrorist outside the Kabul airport during Biden’s chaotic pullout.
Like in Gaza, innocent people were killed when the US military targeted the wrong white Toyota in which innocent Afghans were riding.
Unlike in Gaza, however, seven of those killed in Kabul were children, one of which was two and another just three years old.
The seven children were riding with Zemari Ahmadi, who was also killed. Ahmadi was a humanitarian aid worker for Nutrition & Education International, a California-based charity that provided food for hungry Afghans. He also had a pending application to move to the U.S. as a refugee.
While McKenzie ordered a formal investigation of the deadly incident, nobody was blamed, nobody was held accountable, nobody lost their job, and nobody was punished, unlike in Israel.
Instead, Gen. McKenzie, now retired, threw himself under the bus and at least admitted that the Kabul airstrike “was a mistake.”
“I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed,” he said.
Similarly, Netanyahu has apologized for the killing of the unintentional seven aid workers in Gaza.
So it is good that Biden showed such concern and compassion over the killing of the innocent civilian aid workers in Gaza.
It is just too bad he could not have done the same for those children in Kabul.
Peter Lucas is a veteran political reporter. Email him at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com
