Kirby to reporter who questions U.S. assistance to Israel: “You want us to hang some sort of condition over their neck.”
The National Security Council’s John Kirby got into an exchange with ABC News reporter Selina Wang over U.S. assistance to Israel following the IDF airstrike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza.
“How can the U.S. continue to send aid to Israel without any conditions?” Wang asked at the White House press briefing Tuesday.
“We’re not sending aid to Israel. We’re sending aid into Gaza,” Kirby responded.
“Weapons,” Wang clarified. “How can the U.S. continue to send military aid to Israel without any conditions? Is there no red line?”
“You know, we’ve had this discussion, you and me, quite a bit from up here,” Kirby replied. “They’re still under a viable threat of Hamas. We’re still going to make sure that they can defend themselves and that the 7th of October doesn’t happen again. That doesn’t mean that it’s a free pass, that we look the other way when something like this happens, or that we aren’t — and haven’t since the beginning of the conflict — urged the Israelis to be more precise, to be more careful, and quite frankly, to increase the amount of humanitarian assistance that gets in.”
“I haven’t been asked about it yet, but I expected I would be — there was a discussion just yesterday with our Israeli counterparts about Rafah. Now, this one was done virtually. We expect there’ll be an in-person meeting here in a week’s time or so. But the whole reason to have that meeting was to talk about our concerns over a major ground operation in Rafah and to present viable alternatives for them to be more precise and more targeted,” Kirby continued. “So the idea that we’re some plastic graveyard here, we’re not paying attention to the civilian casualties or the civilian suffering, is just not true.”
“Right, but these are verbal urgings, verbal commitments. There’s no other incentive besides the urgency of the discussion yesterday,” Wang pushed back.
“I know. You want us to hang some sort of condition over their neck,” Kirby snapped back. “And what I’m telling you is that we continue to work with the Israelis to make sure that they are as precise as they can be and that more aid is getting in, and we’re going to continue to take that approach.”
