President Joe Biden is in Israel this morning and that’s apparently going to be his only stop on this trip. New developments in the war-torn region led to what even the Associated Press was compelled to describe as “massive setbacks” before Air Force One even got off the ground. After meeting with Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, Biden had been scheduled to attend what was being described as “the Amman Summit” in the capital of Jordan. But Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas pulled out of the event, leading the Jordanians to scrap the entire thing. The reason cited was the explosion of a hospital in Gaza, which Hamas is blaming on Israel. It now appears that a misfired Hamas rocket actually detonated a supply of explosives they were storing in the hospital, but the event still doesn’t appear likely to happen.

President Joe Biden’s efforts to tamp down tensions in the escalating war between Israel and Hamas faced massive setbacks even before he departed for the Middle East on Tuesday, as Jordan called off the president’s planned summit with Arab leaders after a deadly explosion at a Gaza hospital killed hundreds.

Biden now will visit only Israel and will postpone his travel to Jordan, a White House official said as Biden departed.

The postponement of the Amman summit comes after Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas withdrew from the scheduled meetings in protest of the attacks, which the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza blamed on an Israeli airstrike. The Israeli military said it had no involvement and pinned the blame on a misfired Palestinian rocket.

The original headlines I saw regarding this schedule change last night seemed to suggest that it was the White House’s decision to cancel the trip to Amman. But the press later confirmed that Jordan finalized the cancellation after Abbas backed out. And Jordan isn’t trying to hide which side they are taking in this dispute. The country’s Foreign Minister said last night that they are not interested in hosting any summit until all parties agree as to what it is they are trying to achieve. Jordan believes the goal must be to “stop the war, respect the humanity of the Palestinians, and deliver the aid they deserve.”

He obviously made no mention of the thousands of Israelis who have been murdered, raped, or kidnapped, the beheaded babies, or anything else. It’s all about preventing Israel from defending itself against the Hamas terrorists and ensuring their future security.

This is one of those rare occasions when the agenda goes off-kilter and it’s really not Joe Biden’s fault. The trip was hastily planned before the hospital in Gaza exploded and that was unforeseeable. The response from Jordan and the Palestinians, while predictable, was made at the last moment when it was too late to cancel the trip. And now that we know the attitude of the Jordanian hosts, what success could Biden really have achieved anyway? He’s well past his days of being some sort of crafty negotiator and he doesn’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of our adversaries.

Although we’ve addressed it here previously, these developments should remind us once again that it was unwise of the White House to announce this trip in advance. Generally, when a President visits a war zone, it’s kept a secret until the mission is over. Advertising this trip ahead of time gives Hamas and other enemies the opportunity to try to cook up a radical plan. If they somehow got lucky with a rocket and took out Air Force One, they would score a huge PR victory while sticking the United States with Kamala Harris as the Commander in Chief in the middle of a potentially spiraling war in the Middle East. Harris is not only less popular than Biden, but she has absolutely zero experience in foreign policy or military matters. It would be a frightening turn of events in every way possible.