As part of these clashes, Israel twice launched significant air strikes on Iran—the second time ravaging Iran’s air defenses. Several Biden Administration officials told me that Netanyahu tried to go further. He sought American support for additional attacks on Iranian infrastructure, and he backed down only reluctantly. But Netanyahu had been asking the U.S. to help him attack Iran for more than fifteen years, and Biden’s team felt certain that he’d try again. A former senior Pentagon official told me that, after Trump won the 2024 election, Biden advisers warned their successors that, with Iran the most “vulnerable” it had been in decades, “the Israelis were not going to let this opportunity go.” (A former Trump transition official disputed this account.)
Trump went along with Netanyahu. In June, 2025, the Israelis conducted an extended assault that appeared partly aimed at overturning the Iranian government. After about a week, Trump directed the U.S. military to join in a night of air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, perhaps because he feared missing out on a chance to take credit for the blow. But when Trump and Netanyahu launched a surprise attack eight months later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that, this time, the President had decided to strike Iran “preëmptively,” because “there was going to be an Israeli action” that “would precipitate an attack against American forces.” Trump later claimed, unconvincingly, that he’d taken the lead with the Israelis and might even “have forced their hand”; Rubio’s account more credibly suggested that the Trump Administration had believed it couldn’t stop Israel from launching an attack but would nonetheless shoulder any backlash—a pattern painfully familiar to the Biden White House. Indeed, in retrospect, Biden and his closest advisers seem to have been perversely passive about Israel’s dissembling and defiance, especially when it came to the protection of Palestinian civilians.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s former national-security adviser, told me that Biden and his advisers had often privately debated ways to restrain Israel. Inside the Oval Office, Sullivan said, “we repeatedly raised and discussed options for withholding weapons,” but, excluding the suspension of one shipment of bombs, “the President always deferred on that decision, because we kept thinking that we were close to getting a deal” for a hostage release and a ceasefire. Sullivan said, “When you look back at it in the cold light of day, the trap in that kind of thinking is easier to recognize.” He added, “I will say straightforwardly—we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.”
The Israel Defense Forces say that they always follow the laws of armed conflict and try to minimize civilian harm. But alarms about potential war crimes began ringing inside the Biden Administration soon after Israel began its counterattack on Gaza. By November 1, 2023, the Palestinian death toll was at least eighty-eight hundred, including more than fifty-eight hundred women and children. Israeli jets were conducting as many as eight hundred strikes a day on northern Gaza, and Administration officials who were closely tracking the war told me that Israeli military planners could not possibly have preselected or so quickly identified that many legitimate military targets, such as tunnel entrances, rocket launchers, and Hamas leaders. Nor could the Israelis have carefully weighed whether the risk to civilian lives and infrastructure was proportionate to the military value of each target. Startlingly, the strikes appeared to move in a geographical line from the northeast to the southwest, flattening whole neighborhoods in a way that suggested little differentiation between civilian and military structures. Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, anxiously asked his staff how Israel could justify this scale of destruction. A senior State Department official told me, “We were all shocked at how aggressive and deadly it was, and asking, ‘What the fuck are they doing?’ ”
The Times later reported that, on the day of the Hamas massacre, the Israeli military formally revised its “rules of engagement” so that mid-level officers could authorize strikes that risked killing up to twenty civilians in order to take out a rank-and-file Hamas fighter. Previous rules had allowed strikes that risked up to five civilian deaths, or in certain cases ten. Former U.S. officials pointed me to an article in the Tel Aviv-based news site +972 about the war’s first weeks, which they said was consistent with intelligence reports. According to the article, during this period Israeli war planes deliberately targeted civilian structures such as office towers, apartment buildings, government ministries, utility companies, banks, and universities. Israel used phone calls, texts, and air-dropped flyers to warn civilians to evacuate, but, the article reported, it appeared to be more lax about those precautions than it had been during previous conflicts. These “power targets,” which were attacked in an effort to terrorize Palestinians into pressuring Hamas to capitulate, accounted for about half the strikes in the first five days of Israel’s air campaign. (A spokesman for the I.D.F. denied to me that it had hit civilian targets to pressure the population.)
