How Netanyahu Pushed Biden to the Edge of His ‘Red Line’

WASHINGTON—It was a decision President Biden didn’t want to make.

He had warned Israel nearly two months ago against a full-scale assault on Rafah, the Gaza city whose population had swelled to more than one million as Palestinians sought shelter from the fighting. Finally, Biden took a step he had long resisted.

Last week, officials say, he put a hold on a pending shipment of 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs to Israel, an almost unheard-of show of displeasure with a Middle East ally that Biden hoped would prompt Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to rethink its approach for bringing the conflict to an end.

By pausing weapons shipments over the Rafah operation, Biden has escalated his disagreement with Netanyahu into one of the severest tests of the U.S.-Israel relationship in decades, with implications not only for the Gaza war but for longer term ties that Biden himself calls “ironclad.”

Reinforcing the policy shift, Biden said Wednesday that he was prepared to withhold additional weapons, including artillery shells, should Israeli forces mount a major ground operation in Rafah.

“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,” Biden said in an interview with CNN, stressing the U.S. would continue to provide defensive systems so Israel could fend off missile attacks.

“I’ve made it clear to Bibi and the war cabinet, they’re not going to get our support, if in fact they go on these population centers,” he added, referring to Netanyahu. “We’re not walking away from Israel’s security; we’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”

Biden’s priority has been to secure a temporary cease-fire and defuse a charged political debate at home over whether his administration has put enough pressure on Netanyahu to limit the heavy civilian casualty toll in Gaza. Israel’s objective has been to crush Hamas’s last stronghold in Rafah, where the group’s leaders and fighters remain.

The groundwork for the decision to withhold arms was laid in April when the administration began a quiet review of arms shipments to Israel after months of resisting calls to put conditions on arms transfers to force Netanyahu’s government to rethink its conduct of the war.

The review was a closely held secret because of the political sensitivity of using its most potent leverage over Israel, one certain to infuriate Netanyahu and prompt Republican attacks on Biden, officials said.

By last weekend, Biden administration officials were still hoping that a break in the fighting could be achieved, redoubling their efforts to secure a six-week pause that might later be extended through additional diplomacy by sending Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns back to the region.

Israel, however, had settled on a strategy of talking and fighting. Even as it sent a delegation to the cease-fire negotiations, it dropped leaflets on Monday urging 100,000 residents in eastern Rafah to flee.

It followed that up the next day by sending forces to seize the Gazan side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, a move that Israeli officials told the U.S. was needed to cut off arms smuggling and deprive Hamas of a revenue stream.

In withholding arms, Biden opted to only halt a single shipment that was due to be flown to Israel in the coming weeks. A U.S. official said that the move was taken because 2,000-pound bombs, in particular, could be especially destructive “in dense urban settings” such as Rafah and noted that other potential sales were also being reviewed.

The decision was initially intended as a confidential signal to Israel that it should focus on trying to cement a temporary cease-fire with Hamas, instead of moving toward a Rafah offensive without a plan to safeguard civilians and ensure they were not cut off from aid.

“We weren’t trying to break this out into the open, we were trying to handle this in a diplomatic way,” said one U.S. official.

But Biden’s decision soon began to leak out from Israeli officials. American officials later confirmed the details, transforming a private move into a high-stakes standoff with a close ally.

Some former Israeli officials say that Biden’s decision was unwarranted because Israel has so far refrained from the large-scale ground operation in Rafah that the U.S. had warned against.

“The U.S. said that they wanted us to limit the operation, to hold back on a wholesale incursion. And Israel has and they are still being penalized,” said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington. He described Biden’s decision as a “pre-emptive strike” against any Israel move to expand its Rafah operation.

During a hearing Wednesday on Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin faced Republican criticism for halting arms while Israel is waging a war.

“Are you worried that if you make a decision to deny weapons that Israel says they need that it would send a signal to Hamas and Iran to keep pushing?” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.,) said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) sent a letter to Biden on Wednesday criticizing the delays in providing weapons to Israel, which they said “call into question your pledge that your commitment to Israel’s security will remain ironclad.”

Critics of Biden’s support of Israel said that the move was too modest to have a lasting effect unless further arms were also withheld.

“Rather than a one-off pause of a shipment as a means of exerting momentary and overdue leverage, this needs to be the start of a sea-change in American policy toward the provision of security assistance to Israel,” said Josh Paul, a State Department official who resigned in October in protest of the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war.

Biden’s decision appeared to have been foreshadowed in a March interview with MSNBC in which the president warned that an Israeli offensive on Rafah would cross a “red line” but quickly added, “There is no red line that I am going to cut off all weapons.”

“[We] cannot have another 30,000 more Palestinians dead,” Biden then said.

At a White House press briefing shortly after the president’s remarks, national security adviser Jake Sullivan refused to answer whether the U.S. would condition military aid if Israel didn’t provide an acceptable Rafah plan, calling it “hypothetical.”

The review of weapons sales to Israel ordered by the White House began the next month. Publicly, administration officials said it hadn’t changed its policy, even amid nationwide college protests about U.S. support for the war.

Privately, a new and uncharted approach had taken shape.

Carrie Keller-Lynn contributed to this article

Write to Nancy A. Youssef at [email protected], Michael R. Gordon at [email protected] and Gordon Lubold at [email protected]