Updated September 27, 2026 at 5:00 AM EDT
Akbar Shahid Ahmed had spent years covering what Washington promised the world, and what it delivered.
At HuffPost, he had covered Joe Biden's pledge to make Saudi Arabia a pariah and, in 2019, reported from Israel and Gaza. After the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the devastating Israeli military campaign in Gaza, he traced the decisions back to Washington — where he says experts raised objections, dissent went into memos and a small circle around the president decided what to heed.
Those accounts, he said, helped persuade him that the story needed to become a book. Ahmed later moved to The Washington Sun, where he is a diplomatic correspondent.
In Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel's War in Gaza, Ahmed draws on interviews with more than 150 officials and others involved in U.S. policy to examine the decisions behind the Biden administration's support for Israel — and how those choices helped shape the war in Gaza today.
One example he shared with Morning Edition came from the period after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, when senior officials, including Biden, discussed whether the United States was complicit in war crimes. Ahmed said those discussions included Cabinet members, Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk and Jack Lew, then the U.S. ambassador to Israel. He said the discussion showed that the administration understood Israel intended to keep expanding its campaign even as officials publicly suggested it would become more restrained, including before the offensive reached Rafah.
For the author, it epitomized a broader pattern: Even relatively minor decisions often had to reach the highest levels of the White House, delaying action and missing opportunities to pressure Israel to scale back its campaign.
He also pointed to a former State Department official's phrase, "herd impunity," to describe a culture in which senior officials avoided clear findings on possible Israeli war crimes, then cited the absence of those findings as a reason not to act.
"The idea that everyone is in the clear if no one says, 'Yes, this one instance was a war crime,'" Ahmed said.
The scrutiny continued after Biden left office. In September 2025, an independent U.N. commission of inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel rejected the finding. It also denies committing war crimes and says it investigates allegations of misconduct.
Biden did not respond to NPR's request for comment on Ahmed's argument that his Gaza policy made the world more dangerous. Lew did not respond to questions about discussions of possible U.S. complicity in war crimes. McGurk, asked about the same discussions, declined to comment.
Ahmed's book centers on the Biden administration, but the forces and policies he traces did not begin — or end — there. Washington is again proposing a plan for Gaza's future, while U.S. military support for Israel continues. The U.S. provides Israel with $3.8 billion in annual military aid. When the Gaza war broke out in 2023, the U.S. provided an additional $8.7 billion in military aid. This month, The Associated Press reported a planned $2.8 billion weapons sale under President Trump, including 40,000 2,000-pound bombs.
That continuity also extends to the officials who helped shape Biden's foreign policy and how they are now accounting for their time in government. Biden, Blinken and McGurk all have books in the works.
Ahmed argues there is still more to learn about the administration's private deliberations: what doubts senior officials expressed, what alternatives they considered and how they understood their own responsibility for the consequences of U.S. policy in the Middle East and beyond.
This Q&A is adapted from Akbar Shahid Ahmed's interview with Leila Fadel and was edited for length and clarity. The introduction above includes additional reporting.
Leila Fadel: Did President Biden have a red line?
Akbar Shahid Ahmed: President Biden made clear that Israel's treatment of the town of Rafah, where by that point 1.4 million Palestinians were sheltering, would represent a red line. He said it repeatedly, arguing that if Israel treated Rafah the way it had other parts of Gaza, he would cut off some level of American weaponry.
Very quickly, as Israel openly, flagrantly violated Biden's red line, the administration not only didn't chastise them — they started to support the Israeli narrative that the red line wasn't being crossed.
Fadel: Why did the policy play out this way?
Ahmed: The impact of careerism in Washington, D.C., on this policy just can't be overstated. For instance, a State Department lawyer who I talked to, involved in multiple war crimes investigations, who said to me, "We had all worked together in the Obama administration. We are working together now in the Biden [administration]. We will probably work together again in the future, so no one wanted to be the person to rock the boat." Of course, there's other factors like the president's own doubt of the Palestinian experience. We saw this when he came out and talked about not trusting the Palestinian death toll.
Fadel: What would you say to somebody like Brett McGurk and others who will say this book doesn't take into account the level of Hamas' culpability here?
Ahmed: Look, certainly, Hamas has repeatedly, by human rights organizations, been found to have violated the laws of war, international law, in its treatment of fighters, military equipment, Israelis, civilians and military personnel.
Fadel: Right. And it's accused of war crimes on Oct. 7 at the minimum.
Ahmed: Absolutely, including hostage-taking. All of that said, of course, the U.S. doesn't arm Hamas, right? The U.S. arms Israel. And none of this kind of Israeli offensive would have been possible without that constant pipeline of American weaponry.
So if we think about this question [of] whether Hamas has created a situation in which mass civilian casualties are happening, you also have to think about President Biden's own warning to the Israelis not to fuel mass violence and potential backlash. So I'd say that that's really about holding the U.S. and Israel to their own stated standards of the laws of war and of accurate investigations.
Fadel: People you interviewed talk about this — that maybe the administration didn't see the suffering of Palestinians as equal to the suffering of Israelis.
Ahmed: I reveal in this book for the first time that national security adviser Jake Sullivan personally questioned whether Palestinians were starving in Gaza. His spokesperson has denied that. I also report that I was told by a senior State Department official that at this period in the Biden era, there were fewer than five U.S. officials who were regularly in contact with Palestinians.
Fadel: I'm thinking of a line that you had kind of near the end of your book. And you wrote, "In less than two years, Joe Biden irreversibly changed America's role in Israel-Palestine and may have permanently altered America's approach to foreign affairs." Say more.
Ahmed: The Biden administration's Gaza policy created a more dangerous world for us all. It's a period that reshapes the standards of warfare. It becomes a question not only of danger and influence globally, but a question of democratic accountability to what Americans want their country to be doing on the world stage.
Fadel: Right, because all of the leading officials that were involved are still successfully employed.
Ahmed: And positioning themselves for future administrations. Lots of these officials are now saying, "Well, in retrospect, I would've done things differently, but under President Biden, it wasn't possible." My book makes the argument and offers significant evidence that we shouldn't let that line be sufficient, that we actually should hold these officials responsible for their choices at junctures where they could have saved Palestinian lives and also Israeli lives — and gotten us off a path, I really feel, a path from enabling Israeli escalation in Gaza, consistent escalation then into Lebanon, into now the Iran war and real risk to American lives and many others.
The radio interview was edited by Adriana Gallardo. Majd Al-Waheidi adapted it for the web.
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