Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security adviser who is now the Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order at the Harvard Kennedy School, takes to the pages of the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. "Israel’s leaders are pursuing an open-ended military campaign that is returning negligible, essentially imperceptible, operational gains at the cost of inflicting an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe—grievous death and suffering—on innocent Palestinians. Israel’s international isolation is spreading, deepening and solidifying—a compounding harm to Israel’s long-term security and vitality. And the continuing war stands in the way of a positive regional vision of normalization and stability." [...] "...the complexities that Israel confronts on the battlefield do not justify the horrific reality of innocent people starving—nothing does. The continuation of the war has meant the extreme exacerbation of the humanitarian crisis."

Just spoke with an administration official about the President’s decision to fire the BLS commissioner. Some takeaways: 1. The firing was due to what the White House sees as a “pattern of incompetence.” The possibility of firing her had been on the President’s radar for months.