President Biden stopped a weapons shipment to Israel last week to prevent American-made weapons from being used in a long-threatened assault on the city of Rafah, administration officials said Tuesday night, a sign of the growing gap between Washington and Jerusalem over the conduct of the war.
The president withheld 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs that he feared could be dropped on Rafah, where more than a million Gazans have taken refuge, the officials said. The administration is considering delaying future transfers, including guidance kits that convert so-called dummy bombs into precision-guided munitions.
The decision to delay the delivery of the 3,500 bombs was the first time Biden used his power to restrict weapons as a tool to influence Israel’s approach to the war since the Hamas-led terrorist attack on October 7. Several of Biden’s Democratic allies in Congress have urged him for weeks to limit or stop weapons shipments to Israel, something he had refused to do until now due to his strong support for the war against Hamas.
Israeli officials revealed the weapons pause to Axios earlier this week, but U.S. officials declined to confirm it in briefings or privately until Tuesday evening. The fact that they finally did so was a clear indication of how much frustration is growing among administration officials that their Israeli counterparts are not heeding American warnings against a major operation in Rafah that could lead to numerous civilian casualties. Confirmation of the arms pause came just hours after Israel sent tanks to the city in southern Gaza.
A U.S. official said the administration began reviewing arms shipments last month when it became clear that Israel appeared to be making a decision about an operation in Rafah. Biden initially took the position that Israel should not attack Rafah without a plan to effectively minimize civilian casualties, but in recent weeks the White House has increasingly indicated that it did not believe such a plan was even possible.
Israel has not made clear whether it is about to launch the attack on Rafah, but has taken steps in recent days that seemed to hint that it was moving in that direction. Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of 110,000 civilians from Rafah and launched airstrikes against targets in the city’s border areas in response to Hamas rockets that killed four Israeli soldiers over the weekend.
Israel called the entry of tanks into Rafah and the seizure of the city’s border crossing with Egypt on Tuesday a limited operation to eliminate Hamas fighters and infrastructure linked to the rocket attack. The actions do not appear to be the vanguard of the broader attack Israel has promised. But the evacuation order and limited military movements appeared intended to keep pressure on Hamas as negotiators meet in Cairo to discuss a possible ceasefire deal.
Biden did not mention his decision to withhold the bombs during a speech Tuesday at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony on Capitol Hill, but he reiterated his support for Israel. “My commitment to the security of the Jewish people, the security of Israel and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad even when we disagree,” she said.
The administration is not suspending all weapons to Israel nor, at this time, is it permanently withholding the bombs in question. In fact, officials said the administration had just approved the latest tranche of aid worth $827 million in weapons and equipment. The administration intends to send “every dollar” of the money Congress just appropriated, officials said.
But they said they were especially concerned about the damage the 2,000-pound bombs could cause in a dense urban area like Rafah with so many displaced civilians.