President Joe Biden, 80, appeared to lose his train of thought during his opening meeting Wednesday in Tel Aviv with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Biden expressed solidarity with Israel after Hamas killed more than a thousand Israelis, including 31 Americans, on October 7.
He noted to Netanyahu that “Hamas does not represent the entire Palestinian people and has brought them nothing but suffering,” before botching a quote from Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“You know, years ago I asked the secretary of state, when he and I were working in the Senate, to write something for me and he wrote a sentence that I thought was appropriate,” Biden began.
‘He said, “It’s not us leading, not just…” uhhh, I won’t go into that. I’ll wait until later. It takes too much time,” the president continued.
President Joe Biden, 80, appeared to lose his train of thought during his opening meeting Wednesday in Tel Aviv with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
‘Ehh, I’m not going to get into it. I’ll wait until later. It takes too much time,” President Joe Biden (left) said Wednesday at his opening meeting in Tel Aviv alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right), trashing a quote from Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The president often moves on to the next topic in a similar manner, cutting himself off for talking too long, but forgetting the quote he wanted to say will play into the narrative that the octogenarian is too old to to start a second term.
An AP-NORC poll from August found that 77 percent of Americans believe Biden will be ineffective over the next four years, including 69 percent of Democrats surveyed.
He turns 81 next month and will be 82 by the time he is sworn in for a second term if he wins next year’s general election in November.
Biden’s whirlwind trip to Israel Wednesday is a high-stakes gamble on the world stage.
While on the ground, Biden had bipartisan demands.
He urged help to enter Gaza, while urging the terrorist group Hamas, which rules Gaza, to allow the Red Cross to enter and see the Israelis who were held hostage during the terrorist attack of October 7.
Biden also reiterated his support for a “two-state solution” to resolve peace in the Middle East.
President Joe Biden (left) on Wednesday botched a quote that he said was told to him by now Secretary of State Antony Blinken (right), who was also an aide to Biden when he served in the US Senate
But he also said he believed Israel was not responsible for Tuesday’s horrific hospital explosion, which was responsible for hundreds of deaths.
“The point is that I was deeply saddened and outraged by the Gaza hospital explosion yesterday, and from what I saw it seems like it was done by the other team, not by you, but there is a lot of people not sure, so we have a lot – we have a lot of things to overcome,” Biden told Netanyahu.
At the end of his remarks, the president was bombarded with questions, which he refused to answer.
‘Nothing changes. The same in Washington,” he told Netanyahu.
He later answered a question asking how he could determine that the hospital explosion was not caused by the Israeli army.
“The data shown to me by my Department of Defense,” the president responded.
Biden’s acceptance of the Israeli statement – which the Israeli government supported using intercepts of conversations they say Hamas terrorists were having with each other – was strongly criticized by a top Palestinian official.
“You know, with all due respect, I see that President Biden only cares about one thing, which is getting re-elected, and that is why he is siding with Israel,” Mustafa Barghouti, the general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, said Wednesday on CNN.
“He believes Israeli lies, like the lie about child beheading, which has never been verified, or the lie about raping women, which has never been verified, and they continue – and now this lie about Palestinians committing suicide,” Barghouti added.
Israelis say the deadly explosion at the hospital occurred when a rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad misfired.