WASHINGTON – Acknowledging only “an increase” in Israeli military activity, the United States went to great lengths to avoid any suggestion that Israeli forces had crossed a red line set by President Joe Biden in the deepening of the offensive in the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza.
Just last week, Israel strikes that affected displaced families sheltering in tents it drew international condemnation and Israel confirmed that its forces were operating in the city center. Still, Biden administration officials say Israel has avoided massive attacks on the densely packed neighborhoods of Rafah and has kept strikes more limited and targeted than before in its nearly 8-month existence. war with Hamas.
This chorus highlights a growing isolated position of the USA.
Critics blame Biden, who declared early last month that he would not supply offensive weapons if Israel launched a campaign all-out attack on Rafahfaced an internal red line of its own and decided not to cross it: to challenge its ally Israel, which has the support of Republicans and many American voters, in an election year.
Government officials “keep moving the goalposts when it comes to Operation Rafah, saying, ‘You know, we’re not going to let the Israelis do X, Y, or Z,’” said Colin Clarke, an international security expert and director of research at the Soufan Center, a research center. “And then someone says, ‘Well, aren’t they doing that?’”
“So they are playing with the semantics around what constitutes Operation Rafah,” he said. “I think if it weren’t an election year, we would see the president being much more forceful.”
Administration officials insist that Israel has changed its tactics in an effort to reduce civilian deaths as the military sweeps through the city and targets Hamas operatives — even as humanitarian conditions worsen. Around 1 million Palestinians fled the Rafah offensive and are sheltering in squalid tent camps, and help is just arriving in the territory. The United Nations estimates that between 200,000 and 300,000 people remain.
“We have been clear about what this is not, that it is not a major military operation,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said Thursday. He referred to Israeli attacks on the outskirts of the city and seizure of an adjacent border region with Egypt as an “increase”.
Pressed on the issue, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that “there is no mathematical formula” to determine when and whether the attack on Rafah went beyond the conditions set by the Democratic president.
The US would be looking at whether the operation was causing “a lot of death and destruction” or whether it was “more precise and proportionate”, Sullivan said.
Unlike what happened earlier in the Israeli effort to cripple Hamas militants in Gaza, the Israelis have conveyed their specific battlefield objectives and plans to get there in the Rafah offensive, a senior government official said on Friday. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reporters under ground rules set by the White House, said that if those plans change and Israel returns to previous tactics, “it could be a different story.”
Israel launched its war in Gaza after Hamas attacks killed around 1,200 Israelis on October 7. More than 36,000 Palestinians have been killed since then, many of them women and children. Fighting and Israeli restrictions on aid deliveries across borders mean that almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are facing severe hunger. UN officials say hunger has already started In the north.
It was the Israeli operation against Hamas in Rafah that prompted Biden’s strongest warnings last month about the way Israel was conducting the war and that the US could cut off its supply of offensive weapons. Rafah’s population swelled to about 1.3 million as Israeli offensives in the north pushed Palestinian civilians south.
“If they go to Rafah, I will not provide the weapons,” Biden told CNN on May 9. He indicated the red line as an attack on the city’s “population centers.”
At about the same time, U.S. officials confirmed that the administration had suspended a load of heavy bombs to Israel to ensure they were not launched into Rafah.
Republican condemnation of Biden’s move was swift and fierce. Shortly afterwards, the chief prosecutor of the world’s top war crimes court asked for an arrest warrant to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the top UN court ordered Israel to cease operations in Rafah, increasing political pressure on the US and Israel.
Brian Finucane, a former State Department official who is now senior adviser to the International Crisis Group, notes “changes in tone and tenor” in the administration’s public comments about Israel at that time. Biden said the effort to obtain a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest was “outrageous.”
The administration’s warnings and threats to Israel regarding the Rafah campaign have subsided. Biden, in a White House speech on Friday to urge Hamas to accept an Israeli proposal for a cease-fire and hostage release, made only passing mention of the operation there, noting widely circulated images of children killed in an Israeli attack on last Sunday that burned some of the 45 victims alive.
Far more important than whether the U.S. rebukes or merely echoes Israeli talking points, Finucane said, is “what the administration actually does in terms of policy… to bring about a change in what is actually happening on the ground.” in Gaza.”
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Associated Press writers Julia Frankel in Jerusalem and Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.
