During an interview with MSNBC aired on Thursday’s broadcast of “The Last Word,” President Joe Biden said that the first time he raised the prospect of a ceasefire to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “was probably when he moved really hard on the Philadelphi line and took out a hospital. Now, it’s true that Sinwar and those guys were hiding beneath the hospital.”
Host Lawrence O’Donnell asked, [relevant exchange begins around 38:45] “When was the first time you said the [word] ‘ceasefire’ to Prime Minister Netanyahu?”
Biden responded, “The first time was probably when he moved really hard on the Philadelphi line and took out a hospital. Now, it’s true that Sinwar and those guys were hiding beneath the hospital. The thing about Hezbollah — about Hamas is they had all their facilities underneath schools, hospitals, churches. So, and to get them, you’ve got to take people out. Let me put it this way: I’ll just say it, when I went to Israel immediately after [the] attack by Hamas, eight days later or whatever it was, and I told them we were going to help. And I said, but Bibi, I said, you can’t be carpet-bombing these communities. And he said to me, well, you did it, you carpet-bombed — not his exact words — but you carpet-bombed Berlin, you dropped a nuclear weapon, you killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war. And I said, but that’s why we came up with the U.N., new deals…on what we would do relative to civilians and military.”
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