RUTHFULLY YOURS

How did the president get here? Mr. Biden isn’t “Genocide Joe” any more than he is “pro-Hamas.” He has been boxed in and brought low by his own mistakes.

I have criticized the president’s treatment of Israel since the early days after Oct. 7, when most Israelis were singing his praises. But Mr. Biden’s greatest error in this war lies elsewhere, in his betrayal of Gazan civilians and cruel disregard for their humanity. This set in motion a cascade of problems that have bedeviled the war ever since.

When you hear that Gazans are “trapped,” you are encountering a Biden policy choice. It didn’t have to be this way. Gaza’s Rafah borders Egypt, a U.S. ally that relies on $1.3 billion in U.S. aid a year. In contravention of international law, Egypt has sealed its border to Gazan refugees next door. Mr. Biden hasn’t lifted a finger to stop it.

On the contrary, the administration embraced Egypt’s position early on and demanded that Israel not “displace” civilians into Egypt. “No forcible displacement” became Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s absurd mantra as Gazans were massing at the border and begging to be allowed out.

Along with the United Nations and the NGO complex, Mr. Biden provided Egypt cover as it denied Gazans their human right to flee war. As the Journal’s editorial board noted, “Only when it can damage Israel does it become the liberal position to close the borders and keep refugees penned in a war zone.”

Egypt’s excuses don’t hold water. Rafah, crammed with civilians, borders Egypt’s empty Sinai Peninsula, a desert of nearly 25,000 square miles. The problem of where civilians can flee is entirely artificial. It has always been possible to fence off a few square miles of Egyptian desert, for a limited time, without unleashing Hamas on faraway Cairo or permanently exiling Palestinians.

Having secured U.S. backing, Egypt even threatened to abrogate its peace treaty with Israel should refugees spill over its border. As one senior Israeli official put it to me, “It isn’t over the killing of Palestinians that Egypt threatened to rip up the peace treaty, but over us asking them to save Palestinian lives.”

The ask was never so great. It could have been for women and children only. Other nations would have paid and aid groups would have outfitted the area. But there is no evidence Mr. Biden even tried, let alone exercised leverage. The war would gone very differently if he had.

When Israel invaded Gaza City in late October, hundreds of thousands of civilians fled south. With a true safe haven available, more would likely have gone, and many of those who did flee would have continued south to Sinai. Instead, these Gazans have been used as Hamas’s human shields in city after city, Khan Younis and now Rafah.

Fewer civilians in the war zone means fewer casualties. Thousands of civilian lives could have been saved, while Hamas fighters could have been eliminated more easily. But like Egypt, the Biden administration seemed to think of ordinary Gazans not as humans to be saved but as bearers of a Palestinian nationalism whose interests had to be preserved and pride salved.

It would have been a defeat for Palestine had Gazans fled the strip, their lives saved. The State Department would have protested. Dearborn, Mich., and the campus left would have been outraged.

Yet they haven’t exactly been appeased by Mr. Biden’s course. Forcing civilians to stay in Gaza has yielded a large casualty count and dragged out the war. Israel has had to delay and slow its operations at every stage, and the large civilian presence has led the Biden administration to pressure Israel into using less firepower and fewer troops. Israel offers daily pauses, neighborhood by neighborhood, fighting the worst kind of urban warfare at great risk to its own forces.

Hamas got what it wanted. The longer the war continued, the more Gazans were killed, the more international pressure mounted on Israel, and the more humanitarian aid became a challenge. Of course it did: All the civilians are still in the war zone, where Hamas can hijack aid trucks and draw Israeli fire. The results have been a resource bonanza for Hamas, suffering for other Gazans, accidental Israeli killings of aid workers, and a breach in U.S.-Israel relations that encouraged Hamas to reject hostage deals and Iran to risk a direct strike on Israel.

Aid could have been distributed freely to civilians in the Sinai, away from the fighting. Hamas would have tried to stop people from fleeing there, but it likely would have been overwhelmed by the flow, especially with Israeli help in key spots.

The clash also could have broken Hamas’s control over the population, affecting the war and the day after. Any Hamas men who hid among the refugees would be in for a rude awakening during an Israeli-run readmission process to follow.

Mr. Biden never wanted a long war and is now desperate to end it and stanch the political bleeding. But his own policy error leaves him no good way out.

Supporting an attack on Rafah would, at a political cost, endanger the civilians whom he allows Egypt to trap there, no matter how well Israel plans their evacuation. Opposing an attack, however, has prolonged the war, and imposing a cease-fire would, at greater political cost, ensure Hamas’s victory.

Mr. Biden tries to thread the needle. He admits the goal of a hostage deal is a cease-fire that would lead to the end of the war and a normalization of Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia, a deal so spectacular that everyone forgets about Hamas and remembers the Biden foreign policy as a glittering success.

Brilliant, except that Hamas can hear him talking. Announcing that a cease-fire would clear the path to Riyadh has been a great way to kill a hostage deal. For Hamas, stopping Saudi normalization was half the point of Oct. 7.

Mr. Biden repeats his mistake, coercing Israel instead of using U.S. leverage with the Arab ally that holds the cards. Qatar funds Hamas and hosts its leaders. Yet rather than apply pressure, Mr. Biden quietly extended the U.S. military’s stay at Al Udeid air base in Qatar for another decade, CNN reported in January.

Relocating that base could threaten the Qatari monarchy’s survival, but again there is no sign the Biden administration ever played its card, even while Americans languish in captivity. Mr. Biden could have demanded on Oct. 7 that Qatar expel the Hamas leaders—or better, arrest them and hand them over and then start hostage negotiations.

Instead, Mr. Biden has spent months strong-arming Israel into concessions while Qatar and Egypt play the mediator. Unmoved, Hamas rejects each cease-fire offer and demands total victory. The only way Hamas takes a deal is if Mr. Biden guarantees it victory or Israel leaves it no other choice to stave off defeat. But the president stands in the way of Israel’s military and gives Hamas reason to expect to win even without a deal.

Mr. Biden’s errors have made this war longer and bloodier than it had to be, increasing the suffering of Gazan civilians while keeping Israel from realizing its objectives. He has no one to blame for the political costs he bears but himself.