On Oct. 27, three weeks into Israel’s punishing counterattack in Gaza, top Biden officials privately told a small group assembled at the White House what they would not say in public: Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets.

The group — top foreign policy officials from the Biden administration and previous ones — also discussed the apparent lack of an Israeli plan for defeating Hamas despite repeated U.S. prodding, according to three people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private exchange.

“We never had a clear sense that the Israelis had a definable and achievable military objective,” said one of those familiar with the meeting. “From the very beginning, there’s been a sense of us not knowing how the Israelis were going to do what they said they were going to do.”

Publicly, however, the Biden administration was providing Israel unfettered support in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, when Hamas militants murdered 1,200 people and took about 250 others hostage. On the same day as the private meeting, White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters that the U.S. was imposing no “red lines” on Israel’s military campaign.

The previously unreported meeting shows that discrepancies were emerging far earlier than publicly known between the Biden team’s internal doubts about Israel’s conduct and its ironclad external support. At nearly every turn, President Joe Biden and his aides defended the Jewish state, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defied the U.S. on everything from protecting civilians to allowing aid delivery to accepting a Palestinian state.

The Israeli Embassy in Washington denied claims that Israel Defense Forces hit targets with insufficient intelligence, saying the IDF is committed to “international law” and “applies a thorough legal process in the selection of targets and invests significant resources to minimize harm to civilians.”

This article, based on interviews with 20 administration officials and outside advisers, examines how Biden, more than five months after the Oct. 7 attacks, has found himself deeply entangled in a war he does not want and that threatens to become a defining element of his tenure. His allies privately acknowledge that it has done him significant damage domestically and globally and could easily become his biggest foreign policy cataclysm.

Biden’s strategy from the outset rested on a central trade-off: that if he showed Israel unequivocal, even defiant, support early on, he could ultimately influence its conduct of the war. Some administration officials now concede the strategy is heading toward failure, and in private talks, they voice a striking frustration and uncertainty about how the war will end.

Biden officials argue that they have influenced Israel at key moments. They say they persuaded Israel to reduce the number of troops in Gaza, to allow in a limited amount of aid and to refrain from attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon. They note that the average daily death toll in Gaza has dropped below 100 in recent weeks, even while saying it remains unacceptably high; experts say the war is among the deadliest and most destructive in modern history.

Israel argues that a high proportion of those killed have been Hamas militants or allies. The Israeli Embassy said the Netanyahu government has been “very attentive to U.S. concerns and insights” and that a thorough analysis of casualties “would show a ratio between terrorists and civilians unparalleled by any army fighting terrorists in modern history.”

Biden, who has been criticizing Israel more sharply in recent weeks, now faces a potentially decisive moment. Netanyahu has declared his intent to invade the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where about 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering, a move that Kirby has said would be a “disaster” and Biden told MSNBC would cross a “red line” if Israel does not adopt a credible plan to protect civilians. Yet Israel has signaled its determination to push ahead.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said he agreed with Biden’s decision to fly to Israel immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks to demonstrate U.S. support, but that at this point Netanyahu’s ability to rebuff the United States with impunity has made America look weak.

“I supported the president’s decision to go to Israel, in that moment of trauma, to let the Israeli people know the United States stood with them. But the strategy beyond that, which was this constant private jawboning of Netanyahu, has produced very few meaningful results,” Van Hollen said in an interview. “There have been some incremental changes, but the gap between what the president has called on the Netanyahu government to do and what they’ve actually delivered is huge. It’s a chasm.”

If Netanyahu moves on Rafah without consequences, Van Hollen said, the United States will look “feckless.” He added, “It’s good to see the president’s tougher comments. But the question will be whether the president uses the leverage he has to demand accountability and enforce his requests.”

A deadly raid on a hospital

Biden, who has a long-standing and visceral attachment to Israel, responded with unusual emotion in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks. Noting that Oct. 7 was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, he vocally supported Israel’s right to take hard-hitting action to destroy Hamas.

Still, even in those early days, he urged the Israelis to show restraint. Flying to Tel Aviv in mid-October, Biden and his aides wrote a speech on Air Force One seeking to balance empathy with warnings against blind revenge. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” Biden cautioned. “After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

But Netanyahu, in the eyes of human rights activists and many foreign leaders, showed little restraint. Israel’s sweeping bombardment of Gaza, combined with its sharp limits on aid, has resulted in catastrophic conditions. Military strikes have killed more than 31,000 Palestinians in the enclave of 2.3 million, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; meanwhile, the United Nations says children have begun dying of hunger amid the risk of a severe famine.

Biden and his aides declared unflinching support, but other Democrats began growing more upset as the bombing unfolded. On the day Kirby said there were no red lines for Israel, Van Hollen fired off a text to national security adviser Jake Sullivan calling the comment “outrageous.”

White House officials say that privately, they were repeatedly urging Israel to rein in its onslaught. But when those conversations yielded little result, U.S. officials offered few public rebukes and no evident consequences.

As the weeks went on, the calculus of Israel and the U.S. appeared to diverge. In early November, Israel bombed the densely packed Jabalya refugee camp several times, saying it had eliminated a senior Hamas commander, Ibrahim Biari, but dozens of civilians were also killed. “That was the first time that everybody was focusing on the size of the bombs Israel was dropping and how little they seemed to care,” one White House ally said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

Israel and its allies reject the notion that they do not care about innocents. The killing of civilians at Jabalya was the “unintended, tragic consequence of Hamas’s systematic embedding of terror infrastructure within a civilian population,” the Israeli Embassy said in a statement. “The structure that was hit in the strike collapsed largely due to the Hamas terror tunnel network that was built underneath it, which also led to the collapse of several other buildings in the vicinity, the killing of Ibrahim Biari and his terrorist subordinates, as well as some civilian casualties.”

But Israel’s conduct of its military campaign was increasingly prompting skepticism in the U.S. In early November, Israel began warning that al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, where thousands of civilians were sheltering, was being used by Hamas as a major command center.

That prompted a vigorous debate among Biden officials over whether to publicly support Israel’s claim, according to three senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions. Some worried that Israel would see such a statement as a green light to raid the hospital, while others wanted to use the information to show the public how Hamas embedded itself among civilians to underline the complexities Israel faced.

On Nov. 14, the White House decided to publicly back Israel on the matter. “We have information that confirms that Hamas is using that particular hospital for a command-and-control mode,” Kirby told reporters aboard Air Force One, citing declassified intelligence. “That is a war crime.”

Kirby added that the White House did not “want to see a firefight in the hospital where innocent people, helpless people, sick people are simply trying to get the medical care that they deserve.”

Hours later, the IDF began its raid of al-Shifa, drawing condemnation from the World Health Organization and human rights groups. The hospital’s operations collapsed, resulting in the death of least 40 patients, including four premature babies, according to the United Nations.

Van Hollen, who had received a classified briefing about the U.S. intelligence on al-Shifa, said there were “important and subtle differences” between what Biden officials were saying publicly and what the intelligence actually showed. “I did find there to be some disconnect between the administration’s public statements and the classified findings,” the senator said.

Israel again raided al-Shifa on Monday, citing Israeli intelligence that the complex was being used by senior Hamas militants; the Gaza Health Ministry said communications were cut and reported people killed or injured.

Van Hollen, along with more than a dozen other Democratic senators, met with Sullivan in late November to express their concerns and urge the administration to do more to rein in Israel.

About the same time, the State Department hosted a screening by the Israeli embassy of a video of Hamas’ atrocities on Oct. 7. Some department employees said they were unhappy at the lack of a similar display of the carnage from Israeli airstrikes. But if they did not attend the screening, they said, they worried they would be viewed skeptically inside the department.

A U.S. official defended the showing of the video, saying it was for a small group “across the interagency who work on Middle East issues to watch it and get briefed on its contents by the Israeli government.”

A Biden statement ignites months of anger

At the end of November, White House officials thought they saw an opportunity to significantly change the course of the war. The U.S. helped broker a week-long pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas that included the release of more than 100 hostages, and during that break, Americans tried to persuade Israel to make targeted raids that would minimize civilian casualties.

But when the pause ended on Dec. 1, Israel began attacking the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, where many Palestinians had fled, with little evidence of a more targeted approach. The White House praised some Israeli moves, such as its distribution of a map of the areas it planned to target.

As the new year began, the administration’s patience with Netanyahu was wearing thin, as officials increasingly concluded he was prioritizing his own political survival. That included loudly standing up to Biden to appease far-right members of his government, they believed for example by flatly rejecting a Palestinian state shortly after Biden called for one.

“Bibi’s approach to disagreements in the past has been something along the lines of, ‘Let’s not and say we might.’ In this case, he stopped even pretending or obfuscating,” said Frank Lowenstein, a former State Department official who helped lead Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2014. “He just went out and announced the exact opposite of what we asked them to do.”

Then, on Jan. 14, Biden issued a statement that ignited months of anger toward his handling of Gaza.

The statement expressed sympathy and sadness on the 100th day of captivity for the more than 100 Israeli hostages who remained in Gaza. But it was silent on the Palestinian death toll, which had surpassed 20,000 by that time.

Prominent Arab Americans and Muslims, as well as progressive activists, lambasted the statement as one-sided and tone-deaf, and it was repeatedly cited by Arab Americans and Muslims as evidence of the White House’s callousness toward Palestinians.

One senior administration official said the statement was in response to a request from families of the hostages who wanted to ensure they were not forgotten and was not meant as a statement about the entirety of the war. Two days later, Kirby cited “heartbreaking and painful” images coming out of Gaza.

But across the federal government, the president’s continued embrace of Israel more than three months into the war was increasingly causing strain.

At the U.S. Agency for International Development, where employees had already questioned administrator Samantha Power’s commitment to the humanitarian principles she heralded as a scholar, the protest spread. In January, more than 100 USAID workers sent a letter to Atul Gawande, an acclaimed former New Yorker staff writer and surgeon who holds a senior position in charge of global health.

“We implore you,” the authors wrote, as a “public health leader who has dedicated his entire career to saving lives, to take more direct action to prevent further unjust harm and suffering amongst the civilian population of Gaza.”

Gawande responded that he could not speak out publicly but acknowledged that efforts to protect civilians “have not been sufficient by any means.” He would use “internal channels to advocate for policy directions,” he said.

The Israeli Embassy denied blocking aid to Gaza, saying the government “is making significant efforts to ramp up humanitarian assistance into Gaza from land, air and sea,” a point contested by the United Nations and numerous aid groups who have decried the lack of food, water and medicine in the enclave.

The Biden administration began taking modest steps at this point to distance itself from Netanyahu, though they often involved Israel’s handling of the West Bank, where Jewish settlers have attacked unarmed Palestinians and the government has approved thousands of new settlements, rather than Gaza.

At the same time, the Biden administration has approved more than 100 weapons sales to Israel since Oct. 7.

A political backlash takes shape

By early February, Biden’s support of Israel’s onslaught was clearly having political consequences. A group of Arab American elected officials in Michigan had refused to meet with the president’s campaign manager, and a nascent effort was underway to mount a protest during Michigan’s Feb. 27 Democratic primary.

Biden dispatched a handful of aides — including Power and deputy national security adviser Jon Finer — to meet with Arab American and Muslim leaders in Michigan. The meetings in Dearborn, which is majority Arab American, were emotional, as community leaders told the aides they felt betrayed and dehumanized by the president’s response, according to two people familiar with the meetings.

White House officials say they realized after the meetings that they needed to speak more forcefully about Palestinian suffering, two senior officials said. Biden soon began using casualty figures from the Gaza Health Ministry, which he had earlier dismissed as untrustworthy, and spoke about starvation and civilian deaths in the enclave.

“They seem to have calculated that the war would end quickly and any opposition from progressives, youth and Arab Americans would blow over without any lasting impact,” said Martin Indyk, who represented the U.S. in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks under President Barack Obama and is now a Lowy Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

But as the Michigan primary approached, he said, “they realized they had a problem in Michigan, and if they didn’t deal with it, they could lose the state and therefore the presidential election.”

On the same day as the Michigan meetings, the White House took another step that Van Hollen and other Democrats had long been pushing. Biden issued a memorandum calling for the State Department to obtain written assurances from countries receiving U.S. weapons that they would abide by international law, including facilitating the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

The pace of events surrounding the Israel-Gaza war has only quickened in recent days. More than 100 people died when desperate Gazans rushed an aid convoy in late February, creating a stampede and prompting deadly gunfire from Israeli soldiers. Some in the White House saw it as the most dramatic evidence so far of Israel’s failure to safeguard civilians.

The U.S. intelligence community recently released a skeptical assessment of Netanyahu’s plummeting public support in Israel. “Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections,” read the report, adding that his “viability as a leader” is in “jeopardy.”

Netanyahu’s government hit back angrily, as it did when Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), the highest-ranking Jewish official in the U.S. and a lifetime ally of Israel, last week called for new elections in Israel in a scathing speech about Netanyahu’s leadership.

Israelis, Schumer said, understand “better than anybody that Israel cannot hope to succeed as a pariah opposed by the rest of the world.”

previous coverage

• US military continues airdrops of aid into Gaza
• US attempts to stop arms smuggling to Yemen with limited resources
• Thousands of Gazans have gone missing. No one is accounting for them.
• Humanitarian aid ship completes first food delivery to Gaza by sea