'Other team responsible for hospital strike'

US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday the US stands with Israel, Americans are grieving at Hamas's "slaughter" of over 1300 people, and indicated it was the "other team", not Israel, that was responsible for the bombing of a hospital in Gaza that killed hundreds of civilians, even as he announced Israel had agreed to allow humanitarian assistance to move into Gaza from Egypt.

- Prashant Jha

During a visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, a day after an attack on the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, which Palestinian officials claimed was a result of an Israeli strike and Israel claimed was a result of a failed rocket launch by the Islamic Jihad, Biden told Israel's PM Benjamin Netanyahu, "I was deeply saddened and outraged by the plosion the hospital in Gaza yesterday. And based on what I have seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you. But there's a lot of people out there who are not sure. So, we got to overcome a lot of things."

Biden travelled to Tel Aviv on a rapid visit to offer staunch US support in the aftermath of the October 7 attack on Israeli villages and military bases by Gaza-based Palestinian Hamas gunmen who killed close to 1,400 people and took about 200 hostages.

Later, speaking at an event, Biden said, "I caution this while you feel that rage, don't be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice we also made mistakes," Biden said on a visit to Tel Aviv.

But as concerns mount about Israel's retaliatory strikes in Gaza extracting an enormous humanitarian cost, Biden added that Hamas did not represent the Palestinian people, encouraged "lifesaving capacity" to ensure that innocent Palestinians were caught in the middle, and warned Netanyahu that the world was watching.