It's time for Biden to tell Netanyahu that enough is enough in Gaza

livemint.com:

The White House described the recent phone call between US President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “tense and challenging." And what else could it have been? For the first time since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October and Israel began retaliating massively against the whole Gaza Strip, Biden demanded an immediate ceasefire. He apparently added an or-else: “If there are no changes in their policy," said a spokesperson, “there will have to be changes in ours." That still seems too little too late to lots of people, even and especially in Biden’s own government.

While Biden was on the phone with Netanyahu, I was talking to Annelle Sheline, who last week resigned very publicly from her mid-level job in the State Department in protest over what she regards as American failures to observe international and US laws in supplying Israel with weapons even as it commits humanitarian crimes in Gaza. Take the ceasefire Biden has demanded.

Wasn’t that already the gist of a resolution by the United Nations Security Council? The US had let it pass by abstaining rather than exercising its veto. But then the White House went out of its way to emphasize that the resolution was “non-binding." Why, wonders Sheline, who has a PhD on political Islam and helped write human-rights reports on the Middle East before resigning.

Security Council resolutions are meant to be binding; that’s the whole point. At the exact same time, moreover, the Biden administration was also readying previously agreed shipments to Israel of huge bombs—the kind that have been flattening much of the Gaza Strip—and even preparing future sales of fighter jets, missiles and other weapons.