Biden Officials Now Claim to Oppose Israel’s Famine in Gaza That They Enabled

Top Biden administration officials have begun rewriting their ironclad support of Israel throughout the end of President Joe Biden’s term, now claiming to oppose Israel’s starvation policy in Gaza as it’s officially tipped into famine — a famine that they fully laid the groundwork for over the first 16 months of the genocide.

In an interview with “The Bulwark” published Wednesday, former national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that he now supposedly supports withholding weapons from Israel because, he claims, the situation in Gaza is different than it was last year.

“I have in fact told a number of members [of Congress] who were thinking about the votes on these resolutions that the situation as it stands today, following the breakdown of the ceasefire in March, means that a vote to withhold weapons from Israel is a totally credible position. That is a position that I would support,” Sullivan said, likely in reference to resolutions introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to block the sale of certain weapons to Israel.

He claims that, throughout 2024, Israel was facing threats from other countries that it doesn’t face today, and that a hallmark moment was when Israel showed its obstinance in unilaterally ending the ceasefire deal in March. He also points to the UN-backed declaration of famine in Gaza last week as a sign of conditions being worse. These changes mean that current pro-Israel policies are less legitimate than the Biden administration’s stance, he said.

“My view is that people who, you know, thought this was wrong from the start didn’t stare squarely at October 7th. And people who think it’s just and righteous today are not staring squarely at what is happening in Gaza right now, you know, with the killing and the starving of innocent people,” Sullivan said. He ignores the fact that Israel was killing and starving innocent Palestinians immediately after the October 7, 2023, attack — with the stated intention of doing so.

Sullivan’s claims are dubious for numerous reasons. For instance, he touts the Biden administration’s supposed success in holding off a famine declaration in Gaza due to pressure on Israel to allow in humanitarian aid.

But the famine declaration last week has been forewarned for over a year, with Israel having used starvation as a weapon of war from the beginning of the genocide with little to no pushback from the Biden administration.

In fact, reports found in December of last year that the Biden administration had pressured the U.S.-backed Famine Early Warning System Network to retract a report warning of imminent famine in northern Gaza. Far from pressuring Israel to ease its humanitarian catastrophe, officials in the Biden administration would often say in public statements that they opposed the starvation campaign, but would do nothing in practice to stop it. Other times, they would outright lie about Israel’s blocking of humanitarian aid.

For instance, in October of 2024, Biden officials sent Israel an ultimatum demanding that it increase the amount of aid entering Gaza, or else the U.S. may end its military support. Israel, in turn, actually decreased the aid flow to record lows — and the administration said that it has not assessed that Israel was in violation of its ultimatum.

Sullivan’s argument that military aid to Israel was legitimate last year is also completely undercut by the International Court of Justice’s opinion in January of 2024 that it was “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide and ordered it to end the siege and lift the humanitarian blockade.

Other former Biden officials have attempted to backtrack in recent weeks. In an interview with The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner published Tuesday, Biden’s ambassador to Israel, Jacob Lew, said that the situation now is “very, very different” from what it was under Biden with regards to starvation in Gaza — even as experts had warned countless times that there were potentially thousands of deaths to starvation and other causes not being counted in the official death toll.

Like Sullivan, Lew also defended the genocide as it was conducted under Biden. In comments that garnered outrage, he said that Israel’s pattern of killing children in Gaza was justified and legitimate. When pressed, he said that the children killed in strikes on schools and shelters were acceptable collateral damage because they were often found to be family members of Hamas fighters.

“We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places,” Lew said.

“​​It is not the simple question that it originally appears to be when the initial report makes it sound like the target was just an empty school that families took cover in,” he went on.