The White House believes Israel is "making an effort" to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Sunday, reported the AFP news agency.
Speaking on the US Sunday talk shows, Kirby also insisted that US intelligence was unaware of any secret, advance Hamas blueprint for its brutal October 7 attack on Israel that triggered the conflict.
The New York Times reported last week that Israeli authorities had obtained such a document a year before the attack occurred.
Kirby toldABC's "This Week" that Israel had responded to US appeals to protect civilians.
"We believe they have been receptive to our messages here of trying to minimalize civilian casualties," he said, including by publishing online a map of places where Gazans could go to find safety.
"There's not a whole lot of modern militaries that would do that... to telegraph their punches in that way. So they are making an effort," he added.
In a separate interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Kirby said top American officials have begun publicly offering stark warnings to Israel about the consequences of the rising civilian death toll in Gaza and Israel is listening.
“What I can tell you is that in our conversations with them they have said that they agree with our idea here that the approach they take matters, that the reduction of civilian casualties and, quite frankly, minimizing damage to civilian infrastructure is important to them, that they understand that,” he said.
In the ABC interview, Kirby was asked about the New York Times report on the Hamas attack plan, which the newspaper said Israeli officials had dismissed as beyond Hamas’ ability to carry out.
"Our intelligence community is taking a look into that," Kirby said, while adding that there were "no indications that we, the United States intelligence community, had any knowledge of that document beforehand or any visibility into it."
Israel announced on Friday morning the renewal of fighting in Gaza, after the Hamas terror organization violated the terms of the operational pause.
The announcement came after the original ceasefire ended at 7:00 a.m. and after Hamas failed to provide a new list of hostages that would have been freed on Friday evening. In addition, Hamas fired rocket barrages towards southern Israel early in the morning.