State Secretary Anthony Blinken on Sunday refused to identify the Biden administration’s “red line” with Israel, despite the president Joe BidenIsrael’s comments earlier this week that the US will withhold certain military assistance if Israel launches an offensive against Rafah.
“What we’ve seen over the last few months is a deep concern on our part about the possibility of a major military operation in Rafah, given the harm it would cause to civilians there,” Blinken said Sunday during an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press .”
He added: “In the absence of a credible plan to get them out of danger and support them, the president made it clear some time ago that we could not and would not support a major military operation in Rafah.”
Your comments come days later Biden told CNN that if Israel enters Rafah, “I will not provide the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, that deal with the cities, that deal with this problem.”
Blinken told moderator Kristen Welker that the Biden administration does not have a red line, but is “in active conversations with Israel about providing heavy weapons or high payloads – big bombs – because of the concern we have about the effect of these weapons.” may have when used in a dense urban environment like Rafah.”
Blinken’s latest remarks came after the State Department on Friday released a report to Congress that concluded that it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel violated international law in Gaza.
Still, the report concluded that Israel did not violate the terms of U.S. arms deals and Blinken defended the report’s ambiguity, saying it “makes clear that this is an incredibly complex military environment.”
“There is an enemy that intentionally incorporates civilians,” he added. “It is very, very difficult in the heat of war to make a definitive assessment of any individual incident.”
Last week, before the report was published, the Biden administration disrupted a planned shipment of 2,000-pound bombs and 500-pound bombs to Israel over concerns about a possible military invasion of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where more than a million refugees are sheltering.
The administration continued to send other military assistance to the country at war with Hamas, but Biden‘The decision exposed a new flaw lines in your own partywith Israel supporters questioning the decision and Palestinian supporters condemning the president for not doing enough or doing too little, too late.
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who has called for a ceasefire in Gaza, said Sunday on “Meet the Press” that he thinks “a lot of people are very disappointed. …It hurts [Biden] politically, of course it is.”
“Israel should not receive another penny in US military aid,” Sanders added.
Moments later, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. rejected Sanders’ call to suspend aid to Israel, comparing the war in Gaza with the US decision to drop atomic bombs in Japan during World War II.
“Give Israel the bombs it needs to end the war. They can’t afford to lose,” Graham told Welker.
Just a few weeks ago, Biden signed into law a package of bills with $26 billion for additional assistance to Israel and humanitarian aid in Gaza.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
