Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza by Akbar Shahid Ahmed (W.W. Norton, 368 pages, $31.99, September 2025)
The Biden administration’s Gaza policy, as documented in Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s forthcoming book, was not the product of haplessness. It was a sustained, elaborately managed effort to keep the United States inside a war while evading accountability for it.
That is the conclusion that Ahmed’s own reporting drives a reader toward, even if the author draws back from it himself. W.W. Norton, which is publishing the book in September 2025, describes Ahmed as an award-winning foreign affairs journalist and characterises the volume as ‘a powerful and authoritative account of how the Biden administration fueled atrocities in Gaza.’ The New York Times has framed it as a behind-the-scenes account of the White House in the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks.
Publishers Weekly calls it ‘a highly incriminating report,’ and identifies one of its most damning passages as the account of a short-lived improvement in humanitarian aid following the killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli drones in April 2024, a shift that quickly reversed. The review also records Ahmed’s finding that the administration ‘kept fueling preventable, likely illegal killing’ even after Donald Trump’s reelection.
A Pattern of Deliberate Evasion
Ahmed’s material points to something more purposeful than incompetence. State Department officials deployed bureaucratic tricks and, in one official’s phrase, ‘mental gymnastics’ to avoid accounting for how U.S. weapons were used. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, at a briefing on the dire conditions facing Palestinian civilians, redirected the conversation toward Israeli trauma over October 7. Ambassador Jack Lew blocked embassy cables describing conditions in Gaza, including human remains scattered along roads.
In November 2023, Blinken privately told Israeli officials to ‘help us help you get more time,’ according to Ahmed’s paraphrase. That the population of nearly 2.2 million civilians in Gaza, nearly half of them children, was being cut off from clean water, fuel, electricity, and medical supplies was documented at the time in letters to Blinken from members of Congress. The administration’s response was to micromanage an international aid bureaucracy that kept humanitarian assistance under Israeli control.
The same pattern held when President Joe Biden spoke publicly. He told reporters that ‘innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.’ An administration official summarised colleagues’ attitudes to Ahmed in a single sentence: ‘This is awful, but they did it to themselves.’ National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking at the Israeli Embassy on the first anniversary of October 7, 2024, referred to the ‘enduring strategic gains’ of the preceding year. The American Presidency Project archives the full text of those remarks. Jewish Insider reported at the time that Sullivan also urged Israel to match its military conduct to ‘a clear and sustainable set of objectives,’ a framing that sat uncomfortably alongside the operational praise.
While Sullivan was publicly nudging Israel toward restraint, he was privately acknowledging what his own government’s data showed: that the casualty figures published by the Gaza Health Ministry were accurate. The disconnect was consistent. Biden talked vaguely about limiting the war while ensuring U.S. funding continued. His advisers whispered to journalists that the president genuinely cared about Palestinian lives and was at odds with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu behind closed doors.
Biden Administration Gaza Policy: What the Book Leaves Out
Ahmed is a careful and well-sourced reporter, but the book has gaps. He documents U.S. humanitarian envoy David Satterfield’s role in establishing an aid bureaucracy under Israeli oversight, yet omits relevant context from the war’s first week: Blinken’s attempt to negotiate safe passage for Palestinian civilians into Egypt, a plan he abandoned after Egyptian leaders said it looked like permanent expulsion. The Satterfield episode is presented without that backdrop, which weakens the account of how population-movement options were actually considered.
Ahmed also leaves out Biden’s public confirmation that the administration had promised Iran a Gaza ceasefire was imminent in exchange for Iranian restraint following Israel’s July 2024 assassination of Hamas negotiator Ismail Haniyeh inside Iranian territory. That detail matters: it shows the ceasefire was being deployed as a diplomatic instrument rather than a genuine policy objective.
The book’s framing, that the administration followed ‘choice by choice’ into a disaster rather than a direction, does not sit easily with Ahmed’s own evidence. The 2,600 people killed while seeking food at Trump-era aid distribution points in Gaza are a continuation, not a departure. The mechanisms that produced those deaths were built during the Biden years.
Sullivan’s conduct since leaving office complicates the ‘well-meaning but outmanoeuvred’ narrative further. Footage released after Crossing the Red Line went to press captured Senator Lindsey Graham telling Sullivan, ‘What we’re trying to do is just get a few cities to fall in the next month…and just have almost irreversible momentum,’ apparently with Sullivan’s engagement. The congressional record of warnings sent to Blinken in late 2023 about Gaza’s civilian population makes plain that the administration had ample information and chose its course regardless. That footage did not exist when Ahmed finished writing. His next account of this period may prove harder to characterise as a disaster of omission.
