The White House on Thursday responded to US President Joe Biden's statement linking the India-Middle East corridor (IMEC) to the Hamas attack on Israel and said that his quote was "misunderstood". On the question of IMEC precipitating the Hamas terror attack on Israel, National Security Council's Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby told the reporter that "you misunderstood what he actually said".
"I think you misunderstood him. What he said was that he believed that the normalization process and the agreement that we were trying to reach between Israel and Saudi Arabia for normalization, which we believe is an important stepping stone to getting to a two-state solution, was what may have motivated Hamas to — to conduct those attacks," Kirby clarified.
Biden on Thursday said that he was convinced that one of the reasons why Hamas launched a terrorist attack on Israel was because of the recent announcement during the G-20 Summit in New Delhi on the ambitious India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor that integrates the entire region with a network of railroad.
"I'm convinced one of the reasons Hamas attacked when they did, and I have no proof of this, just my instinct tells me, is because of the progress we were making towards regional integration for Israel, and regional integration overall. We can’t leave that work behind," Biden said.
This was the second time when Biden mentioned the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEEC) as a potential reason for the terrorist attack by Hamas.
The new economic corridor, launched during the G20 Summit in Delhi, is being seen as an alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative. It was jointly announced by the leaders of the US, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, Italy and the European Union on the sidelines of the G20 summit in September.
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