Rafah hosts around 1.4 million Palestinians (File)
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday that Israel lacks a “credible plan” to protect some 1.4 million Palestinian civilians in Rafah and warned that an Israeli strike could create an insurgency by failing to kill all Hamas fighters in the southern city of Gaza.
“Israel is on a trajectory to potentially inherit an insurgency with many armed Hamas fighters remaining or be left with a vacuum filled by chaos, filled by anarchy and likely replenished by Hamas,” Blinken said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Hamas fighters, he said, are already returning to areas of northern Gaza that Israel claims it has vacated.
Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah helped fuel the deepest tensions in relations between Israel and its main ally for generations.
NBC and CBS News aired interviews with Blinken dominated by President Joe Biden’s decision to halt a shipment of bombs to Israel over fears of large civilian casualties in Rafah and a State Department report that the use of U.S.-supplied weapons by Israel may have violated international law.
The report, which was unrelated to the bomb shipment, found no specific violations that would justify withholding U.S. military aid, stating that the chaos of the war prevented verification of alleged individual violations.
Hamas’ use of civilian infrastructure and tunnels “makes it very difficult to determine, especially in the midst of war,” what happened in specific cases, Blinken said, defending the report criticized by some lawmakers in Biden’s Democratic Party and human rights groups. .
Defending the pause in sending 3,500 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs, Blinken said Israel lacks a “credible plan” to protect some 1.4 million civilians sheltering in Rafah.
He told CBS that the shipment was the only U.S. weapons package held.
But that could change, he said, if Israel launches a full-scale attack on Rafah, which Israel says it plans to invade to root out entrenched Hamas fighters.
If Israel “launches this major military operation in Rafah, then there are certain systems that we will not support and provide for that operation,” Blinken said.
Israel needs to “have a clear and credible plan to protect civilians, which we have not seen,” he said.
Rafah is home to around 1.4 million Palestinians, most of them displaced from other parts of Gaza due to Israeli fighting and bombing that has devastated the coastal enclave.
Israel also has not developed a post-war plan for the security, governance and reconstruction of Gaza, Blinken said, adding to CBS that the United States is working with Arab governments and others on such a plan.
“We have the same goals as Israel,” he said. “We want to make sure that Hamas cannot rule Gaza again.”
The death toll from Israel’s military operation in Gaza has exceeded at least 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.
The war was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, in which around 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, according to Israeli data.
Israel says 620 soldiers were killed in the fighting.
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