President Biden’s national security adviser said Monday that while the United States was committed to defending Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government had not yet provided the White House with a plan to remove nearly a million residents. from Gaza safely from Rafah before any invasion of the city.
In a lengthy presentation to reporters, adviser Jake Sullivan also said Israel had yet to “connect its military operations” with a political plan for the future governance of the Palestinian territory.
Sullivan, who has been at the center of the administration’s response to the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel and its aftermath, described in detail the administration’s goals in intervening to achieve a ceasefire and the return of the hostages, including Americans. still in the hands of Hamas. But behind repeated expressions of support for Israel, he made clear Biden’s frustration in dealings with Netanyahu, after a series of heated conversations between the two men.
Sullivan insisted that the only weapons Biden was hiding from the Israelis were 2,000-pound bombs, fearing that Israel would employ American munitions, which can level entire city blocks, in its effort to oust Hamas leaders from their territories. network of tunnels, deep in the city.
The United States, he noted, was still sending defensive weapons and a variety of offensive weapons that did not risk causing large civilian casualties.
“We continue to believe that it would be a mistake to launch a major military operation in the heart of Rafah that would put large numbers of civilians at risk with no clear strategic gain,” Sullivan said. “The president was clear that he would not provide certain offensive weapons for such an operation, should it occur.”
But he insisted that “has not happened yet,” despite intense bombing around the city, and said the United States “is still working with Israel on a better way to ensure the defeat of Hamas throughout Gaza. even in Rafah.”
However, House Republicans plan to push a bill that would reprimand Biden for halting shipments of the 2,000-pound bombs. It would be a symbolic move (there’s no way the bill would pass the Democratic-controlled Senate), but it appeared to be part of an effort to make gun grabs an election-year issue; Many Democrats had been urging Biden to suspend or limit arms sales to Israel.
The vote is designed to divide Democrats on an issue that has been dividing the party and serve as another way for Republicans to present themselves as Israel’s true friends.
Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas and chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, called Biden’s gun grab a “disastrous political decision” that was also “deliberately hidden from Congress and the American people.”
Just eight days ago, the State Department was still arguing that the weapons seizure was a technical issue. But after the news leaked, Biden himself acknowledged, in an interview on CNN, that he had made the decision.
When Sullivan said the United States was still working with Israel to find a way to deal with the terrorists in Rafah, he appeared to be referring to a series of tense interactions with the Israelis over alternatives to a full-scale invasion. These largely focus on targeted counterterrorism operations, similar to how Israel went about hunting down the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack.
Sullivan declined to discuss recent reports that U.S. intelligence officials suspected that Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ top official in Gaza, was no longer in Rafah. But he acknowledged that if Sinwar had moved his base of operations elsewhere, the attack on the southern city would make even less sense.
He was very scorching about Israel’s inability, seven months after the initial terrorist attack, to develop a plan for how Gaza would be administered once the war was over, or how to link its military attacks on Gaza to political objectives.
“We are talking to Israel about how to connect its military operations with a clear strategic endgame, about a holistic and integrated strategy to ensure the lasting defeat of Hamas and a better alternative future for Gaza and for the Palestinian people,” he said. .
The failure of Israel’s current approach, he said, was made evident by the fact that areas in the North that were previously bombed have seen the return of Hamas, which ruled Gaza, albeit often corruptly, for many years. He suggested that the administration feared the same thing would happen in Rafah and elsewhere unless military action was linked to a credible plan for the Palestinian government.
Annie Karni contributed with reports.