Ex-top Biden official: Israel not perpetrating genocide, but without a doubt committed war crimes in Gaza

A former senior Biden administration official says, “It is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes” in Gaza.

Matthew Miller, who served as State Department spokesperson for the last two years of former US president Joe Biden’s term, clarifies during a podcast interview with Sky News that he doesn’t believe Israel is perpetrating a genocide in Gaza.

“There are two ways to think about the commission of war crimes,” Miller says. “One is if the state has pursued a policy of deliberately committing war crimes or is acting recklessly in a way that aids and abets war crimes. Is the state committing war crimes?

“That, I think, is an open question. I think what is almost certainly not an open question is that there have been individual incidents that have been war crimes where Israeli soldiers, members of the Israeli military, have committed war crimes,” he adds.

Israel has long denied that it is committing war crimes in Gaza, asserting that it takes steps to avoid civilian casualties, while Hamas operates among civilians in order to maximize such figures.

Miller acknowledges that there had been disagreements within the Biden administration about its Gaza war policy, including on whether to withhold weapons from Israel. However, he argues that doing so might have led Hamas to refrain from agreeing to a ceasefire.

“It was clear to us in that period that there was a time when our public discussion of withholding weapons from Israel, as well as the protests on college campuses in the United States and the movement of some European countries to recognize the state of Palestine… All of those things together were leading the leadership of Hamas to conclude that they didn’t need to agree to a ceasefire, they just needed to hold out for a little bit longer, and they could get what they always wanted,” he says.

“The thing that I look back on… is in that intervening period between the end of May and the middle of January [2025], when thousands of Palestinians, innocent civilians were killed… was there more that we could have done to pressure the Israeli government to agree to that ceasefire? I think at times there probably was,” Miller says.