Biden Backs Israel's Right to Stop Gaza-bound Ships

US Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday backed Israle's right to board ships bound for Gaza to prevent weapons smuggling, but said Washington remained concerned about the plight of Palestinians there.

Israeli commandos boarded a flotilla of six aid vessels trying to break Israel's three-year-old naval blockade of the Palestinian enclave on Monday. Nine activists were killed in the assault and dozens injured, including some commandos.

"Israel has an absolute right to deal with its security interest," Biden said in an interview on PBS's "Charlie Rose" show, while reiterating the Obama administration's support for a transparent, impartial investigation of what happened.

"They (Israel) have said, 'Here you go. You're in the Mediterranean. This ship - if you divert slightly north you can unload it and we'll get the stuff into Gaza." So what's the big deal here?" Biden said. "What's the big deal of insisting it go straight to Gaza?" he asked.

"Well, it's legitimate for Israel to say, 'I don't know what's on that ship. These guys are dropping eight - 3,000 rockets on my people,'" he said, referring to Hamas, the Islamist movement which rejects interim peace terms with Israel and has regularly fired rockets into the Jewish state reports www.ynetnews.com.

But Biden said the United States also needed to "put as much pressure and as much cajoling on Israel as we can" to allow in aid shipments such as building materials, adding that US supported an Israeli investigation of the incident with international involvement, similar to South Korea's recent probe into the torpedoing of one of its warships.

The US vice president also played down any suggestion of a rift between Israel and the US.

"Do we have disagreements on the tactical way in which this (Israeli) government acts and some of the comments that some of the ministers of this government, the things that they say ... that we think are counter-productive, yeah, but we always have," Biden said.

But no US administration in history "has been as up-front and supportive of Israel's security as this administration," he added.