Some find it telling—and disturbing—that it took the killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers, including one American citizen, for President Joe Biden to declare that further U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza will depend on how carefully Israel protects Palestinian civilians caught up in the crossfire.

Biden has urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to minimize civilian casualties ever since the war began six months ago and has continued to do so as estimated deaths in Gaza climbed to more than 30,000, with hunger and sickness among refugees nearing catastrophic levels.

But the WCK incident prodded Biden, for the first time, to tie U.S. policy to Israel’s behavior. As White House spokesman John Kirby put it at a news conference Thursday, speaking about Israel, “If we don’t see changes from their side, there’ll have to be changes from our side.” This is new. Until now, Biden, Kirby, and other officials have said U.S. policy would not change, regardless of Israeli excesses.

Kirby was summarizing a half-hour phone conversation that Biden held with Netanyahu, in which the president also told the prime minister to push for an “immediate cease-fire,” though aides later emphasized his point that the cease-fire still needed to be tied to the release of some 135 hostages held by Hamas.

It is important to note that this shift did not come entirely as a result of the WCK attack. Biden and his top advisers have felt a growing frustration with Netanyahu’s lax attitude toward civilian casualties. Even more, they have increasingly realized that Israel has no real strategy for winning the war—in which case it is all the more urgent to wrap it up, especially given the growing misery and chaos in Gaza, as well as the looming signs that the conflict may soon widen to inflame the entire region.

WCK’s founder and CEO have charged that the bombing of their convoy was a “targeted attack,” a deliberate attempt to starve Gazans and thus use “food as a weapon.” The Israel Defense Forces strongly deny this and on Friday released video footage purporting to prove its........

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