John Kirby

Watching the White House press briefing today. Retired admiral John Kirby was answering reporters' questions.

As you can imagine, most of the questions were about the fire in the tent camp in Rafah a couple of days ago. The reporters were all very critical of Israel, many (most) seeming to assume that the Israelis had actually called in an airstrike on the camp. They were unconvinced that the Israelis were really doing an investigation into the incident.

About halfway through the briefing, Admiral Kirby lost patience with a reporter who wanted to know why we don't condemn Israel, why the US is givng them weapons when civilians have died (in the above video, it starts around 26: 07).

Admiral Kirby said aloud what I had been thinking during the whole press conference ...

I know what you want me to say. I get it. There should be no civilians killed. I'm not going to stand up here and make an excuse for any single individual civilian being killed. There is no excuse for it. It should not happen.

Now, it does happen in war. It happens sometimes deliberately, sometimes it happens by tragic mistake. We will find out soon what was the case here on Sunday, and then we'll go from there. But no civilian casualty should be acceptable .....

We'll see what the investigation says. Let's see what the investigation comes up with. If we had done this, I think we would want the benefit of having the opportunity to investigate it and to figure out what happened.

(reporter: but we're giving them billions of dollars in weapoms)

We're giving them the kind of capabilities they need to defend themselves. Maybe some people have forgotten what happened on the 7th of October, but we haven't. 1200 Israelis, innocent Israelis, slaughtered, mutilated, raped, tortured. And they're living right next to that kind of threat, still a viable threat in Rafah, by the way. You think Hamas is just gone? It's not gone from Rafah or from Gaza. You think they've abandoned their genocidal intent towards the nation of Israerl? Think again. They haven't. So Israel has every right to not want to live next to that kind of threat. And yes, we're going to continue to provide them the capabilities to go after them.