US President Joe Biden and his top aides have engaged in an increasingly bizarre dance in recent days, as described by The New York Times, urging Israel to change its tactics in the war in the Gaza Strip while still offering it strong public support.

Joe Biden said last week that Israel was losing international support because of its “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza, a far more critical assessment than his previous public statements. The previous Monday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, on his second visit to Israel since the attacks, sought October 7th, to what the newspaper described as “a drop in temperature by a few degrees.”

In his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Army Minister Yoav Gallant, and other senior Israeli officials, Lloyd Austin discussed in detail how the occupation forces will move to the next phase of the war, a shift that American officials believe will “reduce risks to civilians.”

Speaking to reporters after daylong meetings, Austin described US support for the occupation as “unwavering” and endorsed its campaign to “destroy the ability of Hamas,” which controls Gaza, to launch military operations in difficult urban areas. But he also increasingly repeated a message he had recently made, saying: “Israel will become less secure if its combat operations turn more Palestinians into Hamas supporters.”

Austin's visit was part of a sweeping pressure campaign by the Biden administration to urge Israeli officials to end the "high-intensity" phase of the war and begin carrying out more targeted, intelligence-driven missions to "find and kill Hamas leaders."

While US officials have not publicly discussed a timeline, they privately say Joe Biden wants Israel to shift to more precise tactics within about three weeks.

When asked about the timetable for the Israeli war, the subject of intense discussions among American officials in recent days, Lloyd Austin demurred. He said: "This is an Israeli process, and I am not here to dictate timetables or conditions."

Yoav Galant claims that Israeli officials take American concerns “seriously,” and that as the occupation army achieves its goals in various parts of Gaza, “it may be able to allow Gazans to begin returning to their homes.”

Lloyd Austin seems to be leaning towards this response, as if he is trying to bridge the gap, according to the New York Times, noting that every “major military campaign has phases.”

But at the same time, Lloyd Austin constantly hinted to Israeli leaders in closed meetings that they must be as precise and disciplined as possible as they “dismantle Hamas and its infrastructure,” a senior Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told the New York Times.

The newspaper said that Lloyd Austin is fully aware of “the painful lessons that the American armed forces learned in the past two decades when they moved from major ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to more targeted operations,” and he said that he shared those lessons with Israeli officials, adding: “We also have some Great ideas on how to move from high-intensity surgeries to less-intensive surgeries and more surgeries.”

American officials admitted that although they were encouraged by Yoav Gallant's suggestion that Israel was close to the point of transitioning to a less dense phase in northern Gaza, "the road ahead is still very difficult."

The newspaper revealed that Lloyd Austin shook Gallant's hand at the end of his visit, and told him: "Keep your head down, Mr. Secretary."