Did Biden really mean to blame the Gaza hospital horror on ‘the other team’?

As Rishi Sunak so rightly put it: ‘Words matter’. So what was the US president thinking when he used a sports analogy to describe the violent death of hundreds of people? Or, asks John Rentoul, wasn’t he thinking at all?

‘The words we say have an impact and we should be careful with them’ (Getty/Reuters)

Joe Biden used a surprisingly casual phrase when he spoke to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, about the explosion at the hospital in Gaza, saying for the benefit of the TV cameras: “Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you.”

It is impossible to say whether this was a deliberate use of the folksy register for which Biden has long been known, or a spontaneous simplification by a president unsure of whether he could say “Hamas or one of its affiliates” without mangling it.

President Biden appeared to be reading part of his comments from prompt cards, which hardly inspired confidence that he was across the detail.