Israel Gaza war live updates: Biden warns Netanyahu he will stop some weapon supplies if Rafah assault goes ahead

This is not the first time that military aid to Israel has been paused. In 1982, president Ronald Reagan imposed a six-year ban on cluster weapons sales to Israel after a Congressional investigation found that Israel had used them in populated areas during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Israel’s use of American cluster bombs was also reviewed under president George W Bush over concerns that they were used during a 2006 war with Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.

The use of large bombs like 2,000-pound bombs is a matter of heated debate.

International humanitarian law does not explicitly ban aerial bombing in densely populated areas, however, civilians cannot be targets and a specific military aim must be proportionate to possible civilian casualties or damage.

The statute of the International Criminal Court, which is investigating Israel’s war on Gaza lists as a war crime intentionally launching an attack when it is known that civilian death or damage will be “clearly excessive” compared to any direct military advantage.

Israel has denied targeting Palestinian civilians, claiming its sole aim was to annihilate Hamas and that it took all precautions to avoid unnecessary deaths.

After the news broke on Tuesday, a senior Israeli official declined to confirm the report.

“If we have to fight with our fingernails, then we’ll do what we have to do,” the official said.

A military spokesperson said any disagreements with the US were resolved in private.

A 2,000-pound bomb impacts a wide area. “The pressure from the explosion can rupture lungs, burst sinus cavities and tear off limbs hundreds of meters from the blast site,” according to the United Nations.

The International Commission for the Red Cross in a 2022 report stated that the use of wide-area explosives in a densely populated area “is very likely to have indiscriminate effects or violate the principle of proportionality”.

The decision to halt weapon supplies to Israel was made last week, US officials told Reuters. Joe Biden was directly involved. Mr Biden confirmed the pause personally in a CNN interview Wednesday.

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” he said when asked about 2,000-pound bombs sent to Israel.

Washington has paused a shipment of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and another of 1,700 500-pound bombs, according to US officials.

Sources said the shipments, which have been delayed for at least two weeks, include Boeing-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions, which convert dumb bombs into precision-guided ones, as well as Small Diameter Bombs.

The latter is a precision-guided glide bomb that packs 250 pounds of explosives. They were part of an earlier approved shipment to Israel, not the recent $95bn supplemental aid package the US Congress passed in April.

The United States has suspended a shipment of weapons to Israel, including heavy bombs the US ally used in its campaign against Hamas militants in Gaza which has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians.

The suspension comes as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues a military assault on the Palestinian city of Rafah, over the objections of US president Joe Biden.

The US is reviewing “near term security assistance,” defense secretary Lloyd Austin told a Senate hearing yesterday “in the context of unfolding events in Rafah”.

“We’ve been very clear…from the very beginning that Israel shouldn’t launch a major attack into Rafah without accounting for and protecting the civilians that are in that battlespace,” Mr Austin said. More than one million Palestinian civilians have sought shelter in Rafah, many previously displaced from other parts of Gaza following Israel’s orders to evacuate from there.

The US decision was taken due to concerns about the “end-use of the 2,000-pound bombs and the impact they could have in dense urban settings as we have seen in other parts of Gaza,” said a US official speaking on condition of anonymity. The US had carefully reviewed the delivery of weapons that might be used in Rafah, the official said.

Meanwhile, a US official told the Washington Post that the weapons shipment could still be delivered at White House’s discretion, adding that a “final” decision on how to proceed has not been made.

In any case, the official added, the Israeli military has enough weapons supplied by the US and other Western nations to conduct the Rafah operation if it chooses to cast aside the White House’s objections.

Unicef has urged Israel’s government to agree a ceasefire deal as the UN agency expressed concern for displaced Palestinian children.

“There’s 600,000 children that are seeking shelter in Rafah and that many of them have been displaced multiple times already,” Unicef spokesperson Tess Ingram told The Intercept. “They’re exhausted, traumatised, sick, hungry, and their ability to safely evacuate is limited.”

“The area that they’re being directed to evacuate to is not safe. It’s not safe because there aren’t the services there to meet their basic needs, water, toilets, shelter,” she told the outlet. “But it’s also not safe because we know that that area has been subject to strikes despite being a so-called safe zone. So we’re really concerned about that impact of a ground offensive on one of the most densely populated areas in the world.”

The Israeli military yesterday said it reopened the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza after days of closure but the UN said no humanitarian aid entered and there was no one to receive it on the Palestinian side since workers had fled during the military’s incursion into the area.

The Kerem Shalom crossing between Gaza and Israel was closed over the weekend after a Hamas rocket attack killed four Israeli soldiers nearby. On Tuesday, an Israeli tank brigade seized the nearby Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, forcing its closure.

The two crossings are the main terminals for entry of food, medicine and other supplies essential for the survival of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million Palestinians.

The Israeli foray did not appear to be the start of the full-scale invasion of the city of Rafah that Israel has repeatedly threatened. But aid officials warned that the prolonged closure of the two crossings could cause the collapse of aid operations, worsening the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where the UN says a “full-blown famine” is already underway in the north.

Hamas said its fighters yesterday were battling Israeli forces in Rafah’s east and Islamic Jihad’s fighters attacked Israeli soldiers and military vehicles with heavy artillery near the city’s long abandoned airport.Israeli tank shells landed in the middle of Rafah wounding at least 25 people, medics said. Residents said an Israeli air strike killed four people and wounded 16 others in western Rafah.

The Israeli military said its troops had discovered Hamas infrastructure in several places in eastern Rafah and were conducting targeted raids in Rafah and airstrikes across the Gaza Strip.

The UN, Gaza residents and humanitarian groups say further Israeli incursion into Rafah will result in a humanitarian catastrophe.

A UN official said no fuel or aid had entered the Gaza Strip due to the military operation, a situation “disastrous for the humanitarian response” in Gaza where more than half the population is suffering catastrophic hunger.

Palestinians have crammed into tented camps and makeshift shelters, suffering from shortages of food, water and medicine.

“The streets of the city echo with the cries of innocent lives lost, families torn apart, and homes reduced to rubble,” Rafah mayor Ahmed Al-Sofi said, appealing to the international community to intervene.