Biden warns Israel US will halt some arms shipments if Rafah offensive goes ahead
President Joe Biden has publicly warned Israel for the first time that the US would stop supplying it weapons if Israeli forces make a major invasion of Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza that has not been razed in the Israeli offensive.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah …, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Biden said in an interview with CNN.
Biden acknowledged US weapons have been used by Israel to kill civilians in Gaza, where Israel has mounted a seven-month-old offensive aimed at annihilating Hamas. Israel’s campaign has so far killed 34,789 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Israel this week ordered 100,000 Palestinians to leave Rafah, where 1.4 million people are sheltering and attacked the city, but described it as a “limited” operation. Reuters reports further:
A senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Washington had carefully reviewed the delivery of weapons that might be used in Rafah and as a result paused a shipment consisting of 1,800 2,000-pound (907-kg) bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs.
US defence secretary Lloyd Austin said the decision was taken out of concern for Rafah, where Washington opposes a major Israeli invasion without civilian safeguards.
“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.
Biden said the US would continue to provide defensive weapons to Israel, including for its Iron Dome air defence system.
“We’re going to continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks that came out of the Middle East recently,” he said. “But it’s, it’s just wrong. We’re not going to – we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”
Photograph: Reuters
Key events
Israeli authorities destroyed around 50 homes belonging to Bedouins in the Negev desert on Wednesday, AFP reported, with Israel’s far-right national security minister saying they were “illegal constructions”.
Bulldozers flattened the houses in the Wadi al-Khalil village, sparking anger among members of its 500-strong community. Resident Sleiman Abu Asa said:
There are more than 500 people here. (Now) the children and the women have nowhere else to go … They are demolishing our homes, leaving us stranded outside.
We don’t deserve this. We’ve sought a solution for years, hoping for a fair resolution, yet the state has obstructed all our options.
Israel considers the homes built in Wadi al-Khalil to be illegal. Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir reiterated this in remarks posted online Wednesday.
The Wadi al-Khalil homes are “illegal constructions”, he said, warning anyone who “violates the law in the Negev” desert of southern Israel.
The destruction, he said, was “an important step” indicating the government’s authority would not be challenged. “The police will fight anyone who seizes land and tries to build another reality on the ground,” said Ben Gvir.
Before Israel’s creation in 1948, the Negev desert was home to approximately 92,000 Bedouins. But only 11,000 remained within Israel’s borders after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, according to Adalah, an advocacy group for Arab minorities in Israel.
Many of them refused to be resettled in the cities, and Bedouins have continued to face difficulties in Israeli society ever since.
Today there are around 300,000, half of whom live in cities and half in villages not recognised by Israel, according to Adalah. These villages lack most basic services, such as garbage collection.
According to Arab Israeli activist Taleb el-Sana a total of 48 homes were flattened by Israeli bulldozers on Wednesday, “leaving children and women homeless”. He said:
An entire village was wiped out just because its inhabitants are Arab [and] … under the pretext of unlicensed construction …
[Israel] doesn’t allow [Bedouin] citizens to obtain building permits and then demolishes their homes under the pretext of a lack of permits.
Julian Borger
Netanyahu’s repeated defiance of US warnings not to pursue an offensive on Rafah had been based on an assumption that curbing the US weapons supply could inflict more political damage on Biden than on the Israeli prime minister, and that Netanyahu could cause havoc for the president at home at the height of an election year.
The Biden White House is now seeking to turn that assumption on its head. Administration officials are prohibited from using the words “red” and “line” together in a sentence, after Barack Obama’s unfulfilled ultimatum to Syria over chemical weapons. But for Biden, it was a critical juncture: a red line in all but name.
US officials are talking of a hinge point in the relationship, in which this suspended arms package could be just the first manifestation, depending on how Israel now acts in Rafah.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) do not need these bombs to invade Rafah. They have more than enough stockpiles to reduce it to rubble. The significance of Biden’s move is symbolic – all the more so because such actions towards Israel are exceedingly rare. The last US president to put an arms shipment on hold was Ronald Reagan.
Joe Biden was also asked about the anti-war protests that have consumed US campuses in recent weeks. Protesters have accused Biden of funding a genocide in Gaza and called on universities to divest from Israeli companies and companies that supply the Israeli military.
Asked about the demonstrations, Biden told CNN: “Absolutely, I hear the message.”
But he warned against protests that veer into hate speech or antisemitism. He said:
There is a legitimate right to free speech and protest. There’s a legitimate right to do that, and they have a right to do that. But there’s not a lesson legit legitimate right to use hate speech. There’s not a legitimate right to threaten Jewish students. There is not a legitimate right to block people’s access to class. That’s against the law.
Some initial reaction to Biden’s statement from Jonathan Conricus, the former Israeli military spokesman:
Ironclad. I guess the word means something different than what I thought.
— Jonathan Conricus (@jconricus) May 8, 2024
In the CNN interview, Joe Biden said that Israel’s actions in Rafah had not so far crossed a red line, because the military had not yet entered heavily populated areas. He said:
They haven’t gone into the population centres. What they did is right on the border. And it’s causing problems with, right now, in terms of – with Egypt, which I’ve worked very hard to make sure we have a relationship and help.
The Biden administration has been keen to avoid the phrase red line after Barack Obama’s unfulfilled ultimatum to Syria over chemical weapons.
However the Biden administration has repeatedly warned prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to go ahead with an offensive in Rafah without a credible plan to evacuate civilians.
Biden said he had told Netanyahu that US support was limited:
I’ve made it clear to Bibi [Netanyahu] and the war cabinet: They’re not going to get our support, if in fact they go on these population centres.
He also described warning Netanyahu about the risks of becoming bogged down in Gaza, drawing parallels to the American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I said to Bibi, ‘Don’t make the same mistake we made in America. We wanted to get bin Laden. We’ll help you get Sinwar [the Hamas leader in Gaza]. It made sense to get bin Laden; it made no sense to try and unify Afghanistan. It made no sense in my view to engage in thinking that in Iraq they had a nuclear weapon.
Biden warns Israel US will halt some arms shipments if Rafah offensive goes ahead
President Joe Biden has publicly warned Israel for the first time that the US would stop supplying it weapons if Israeli forces make a major invasion of Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza that has not been razed in the Israeli offensive.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah …, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Biden said in an interview with CNN.
Biden acknowledged US weapons have been used by Israel to kill civilians in Gaza, where Israel has mounted a seven-month-old offensive aimed at annihilating Hamas. Israel’s campaign has so far killed 34,789 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Israel this week ordered 100,000 Palestinians to leave Rafah, where 1.4 million people are sheltering and attacked the city, but described it as a “limited” operation. Reuters reports further:
A senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Washington had carefully reviewed the delivery of weapons that might be used in Rafah and as a result paused a shipment consisting of 1,800 2,000-pound (907-kg) bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs.
US defence secretary Lloyd Austin said the decision was taken out of concern for Rafah, where Washington opposes a major Israeli invasion without civilian safeguards.
“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.
Biden said the US would continue to provide defensive weapons to Israel, including for its Iron Dome air defence system.
“We’re going to continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks that came out of the Middle East recently,” he said. “But it’s, it’s just wrong. We’re not going to – we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”
Photograph: Reuters
Opening summary
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the Middle East crisis with me, Helen Livingstone.
US President Joe Biden has said he will halt more US weapons shipments to Israel if prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a large scale invasion of Rafah, the only remaining city in Gaza that has not been raised by Israel’s military assault and where 1.4 million Palestinians have sought shelter.
“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN, in a reference to the 2,000-pound bombs that Biden paused shipments of last week.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Biden said.
More on that soonest.
In other key developments:
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An Israeli official told Reuters that Israel sees no sign of a breakthrough in Egyptian-mediated talks on a truce with Hamas that would free some Gaza hostages, but is keeping its delegation of what it describes as “mid-level” negotiators in Cairo for now.
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Israel will not agree to end the war and leave Hamas in power, an Israeli government spokesperson reiterated on Wednesday.
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Hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip have only three days of fuel left, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday, due to closed border crossings. “The closure of the border crossing continues to prevent the UN from bringing fuel. Without fuel all humanitarian operations will stop. Border closures are also impeding delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X.
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Tedros also said al-Najjar, one of the three hospitals in Rafah, was no longer functioning due to the ongoing hostilities in the vicinity and the military operation in Rafah.
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Qatar called on the international community on Wednesday to prevent a “genocide” in Rafah after Israel’s seizure of the Gaza city’s crossing with Egypt and threats of a wider assault. In a statement the Gulf state appealed “for urgent international action to prevent the city from being invaded and a crime of genocide being committed”.
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The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (Cogat), the Israeli military body in charge of Palestinian civilian affairs, said the Kerem Shalom crossing reopened early on Wednesday. But Juliette Touma, the director of communications for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), said no aid had entered as of midday Wednesday and that the UN agency had been forced to ration fuel, which is imported through Rafah.
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CIA director William Burns was reported to be holding talks with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israeli officials on Wednesday. A source familiar with his travel shared the report with Reuters as Burns was headed to Israel from Cairo, where ceasefire negotiations had been taking place.
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Aid for Gaza was being loaded on to a ship in Cyprus on Wednesday in what was expected to be the first cargo to be delivered using a US pier built to expedite supplies to Gaza. Konstantinos Letymbiotis, a Cyprus government spokesperson, said a US jetty built to handle aid shipments to Gaza had been completed. It was unclear when the vessel would depart.
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António Guterres, the UN secretary general has said that a full-scale assault on Rafah “would be a human catastrophe”. Posting on X on Wednesday, Guterres wrote: “Countless more civilian casualties. Countless more families forced to flee yet again – with nowhere safe to go.”
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The United Arab Emirates said on Wednesday it strongly condemns Israel’s takeover of the Rafah border crossing on the Palestinian side and warned of the consequences of military escalation.
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
