A former senior US official has said Israel has “without a doubt” committed war crimes in Gaza, revealing internal disagreements within the Biden administration over Washington’s handling of the conflict.
In an interview with the Trump 100 podcast, Matthew Miller, who served as the State Department spokesperson under President Joe Biden, offered an unusually candid assessment of the administration’s foreign policy challenges, particularly surrounding Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
“It is without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes,” Mr Miller said, adding that Israeli soldiers were not being held accountable and that there were ongoing policy disagreements inside the administration over the US-Israel relationship.
Mr Miller served from 2023 until the end of Mr Biden’s term and was responsible for publicly defending US foreign policy decisions, including during the Israel-Gaza conflict and the war in Ukraine.
Speaking after leaving office, Mr Miller disclosed that there were both “small and big” disagreements over how to manage relations with Israel, especially during the 2024 escalation in Gaza.
He noted that while the US paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs in 2024 over concerns about their use in Gaza, the administration stopped short of fully suspending arms transfers.
“There were debates about whether to suspend other arms deliveries… but we found ourselves in this really tough position,” he said, pointing to Hamas’s apparent calculation that growing global criticism of Israel meant it could delay ceasefire talks.
Mr Miller admitted that more could have been done to pressure Israel toward a ceasefire during a deadly period in late 2024 and early 2025. “Thousands of Palestinians were killed… was there more that we could have done? I think at times there probably was,” he said.
When asked whether he considered Israel’s actions a genocide, Mr Miller rejected the label but reiterated his war crimes assessment. He stressed the distinction between individual incidents and state policy:
“What is almost certainly not an open question is that there have been individual incidents that have been war crimes,” he said, while stopping short of accusing the Israeli state of systematically pursuing such acts.
