Israel Proposes Rafah Evacuation Despite U.S. Concerns

Israel Proposes Rafah Evacuation Despite U.S. Concerns

TEL AVIV—Israel is proposing the creation of sprawling tent cities in Gaza as part of an evacuation plan to be funded by the U.S. and its Arab Gulf partners ahead of an impending invasion of a city in the strip’s south, where 1.2 million Palestinians are sheltering and which Israel says is the last bastion of Hamas.

The proposal, which was presented to Egypt in recent days, came as the Biden administration warned Israel against going into Rafah without a detailed plan to protect civilians. Israeli officials pushed back, saying they must carry out a ground offensive in Rafah to eradicate Hamas.

Early Monday local time, Israel conducted a rescue operation that freed two hostages in Rafah, where Israel says many of the remaining hostages are being held.

The proposal includes establishing 15 campsites of around 25,000 tents each across the southwestern part of the Gaza Strip, Egyptian officials said. Egypt would be in charge of setting up the camps and field hospitals, the officials said.

The plan indicates that Israel is planning an imminent invasion of Rafah, despite U.S. and Egyptian concerns. Egypt hasn’t commented publicly on the Israeli proposal. Cairo has said that it would suspend a 1979 peace treaty with Israel if Palestinians crossed the border from Rafah to flee an Israeli offensive, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to comment on the proposal. The Egyptian government couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Benny Gantz, a senior Israeli minister in the war cabinet, said that there was “no question” about a broad operation in Rafah and that Israel would do what is needed to allow for its freedom of action there, including evacuating the population and preparing the territory for a ground incursion.

As part of the Israeli proposal, Egypt would be in charge of setting up the camps with temporary sanitation facilities and water supply, Egyptian officials said.

The camps, which are expected to be funded by the U.S., and its Arab partners, would also set up medical field clinics. Egypt would decide in coordination with Israel on how wounded Palestinians could exit Gaza, Egyptian officials said.

The outcome in Rafah is important politically for President Biden, who is facing growing criticism domestically for his backing of Israel. He is locked in a fight for re-election against likely Republican candidate Donald Trump, who also vocally supports Israel and could use any shift in U.S. tone or policy to attack the president.

Even as President Biden has broadly backed Israel, his administration has become increasingly critical of Israel’s prosecution of the war and a potential operation in Rafah, and is instead pushing for a negotiated settlement to the four-month-long conflict.

CIA Director William J. Burns is expected to travel to Cairo on Tuesday to engage in more Hamas hostage talks with senior officials from Egypt, Qatar and Israel, officials said. Burns, who is Biden’s preferred envoy for hostage talks, met last month in Paris with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulrahman al-Thani and intelligence chiefs from Israel and Egypt, all of whom were expected to participate in this week’s meetings as well.

Officials declined to discuss specific goals for the Cairo meeting.

The White House last week said it wouldn’t support military operations in Rafah. But Biden in a phone call with Netanyahu on Sunday shifted his tone, saying Israel should only move ahead with a military operation in Rafah with a credible plan to protect civilians.

Already, about 28,000 Palestinians have died in the fighting in Gaza, a majority of them women and children, according to health authorities in the enclave, whose numbers don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

For Netanyahu, too, the stakes are high. He is under pressure to deliver what he can tout as a victory against Hamas after he was at the helm on Oct. 7 when the militant group launched an attack that Israeli authorities say killed 1,200 people. The assault is now considered to be Israel’s biggest security failure since its founding in 1948, and the Israeli leader has faced calls to resign.

“You have to dismantle Hamas as a [military] force that controls territory,” he said on ABC. “We’re well within reach, and we shouldn’t stop.”

The prime minister scored a political win on Monday with the rescue of the two hostages, Fernando Simon Marman and Louis Har. At roughly 2 a.m. local time on Monday, military forces and a police team broke into a house in Rafah and engaged in a gunfight with Hamas militants while shielding the hostages, before evacuating them to a secure location, the military said.

The Israeli air force provided air cover for the operation, which the military said targeted Hamas’s operations to prevent the group from creating a picture of how Israel carried out the mission.

Israeli airstrikes overnight in Gaza killed 164 people, including dozens in Rafah, health authorities in Gaza said Monday. Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and Israel, said in a statement that Israel had targeted “defenseless civilians and displaced children, women and the elderly.”

Images and videos posted on social media appeared to show explosions in the strip and Palestinians evacuating civilians, including children, to hospitals. The Israeli military said the strikes were focused on Hamas targets that could have disrupted the rescue operation and that it was looking into the deaths of uninvolved civilians.

The early Monday operation is the Israeli military’s second successful hostage extraction since the war broke out. Israel has said it botched at least one previous attempt and mistakenly killed three escaped hostages on the battlefield. Israel privately estimates that as many as 50 of the 130 hostages remaining in Gaza from the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks are dead.

Netanyahu has faced growing pressure from some hostage families to agree to a deal with Hamas to bring home the remaining hostages before they are killed or injured because of fighting. While the rescue operation was a success and sparked hope that others could be found, the families of the hostages have largely supported a negotiated deal to bring them home.

The rescue operation illustrates that Israel should continue operating in Rafah because Hamas has demonstrated it is keeping hostages who are still alive there, said Mitchell Barak, a political analyst at Jerusalem-based Keevoon Global Research.

“You can’t really argue with the logic that the war has to continue in Rafah, because these are the results,” he said. The rescue operation gives Netanyahu more credit in Israel and internationally, and “also gives Israel now a little bit of an upper hand in negotiations,” he added.

The United Nations and aid groups have warned the humanitarian situation around Rafah is already dire. Thousands could die in further violence or because of a lack of essential services, the U.N. said over the weekend.

“Obviously this is a boost for morale in Israel, but the price paid for this operation was quite high on the Palestinian side,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group.

Evgeniia Kozlova, whose son Andrei Kozlov was kidnapped from a music festival on Oct. 7, said Israel should apply military pressure to create leverage for a hostage release deal, but she was against further rescue operations. “It’s very dangerous,” she said. “We will never see our hostages without negotiation.”

Anat Peled and Dustin Volz contributed to this article.

Corrections & AmplificationsBenny Gantz, a senior Israeli minister in the war cabinet, said there was “no question” about a broad operation in Rafah. An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed the comment to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. (Corrected on Feb. 12)

Write to Summer Said at [email protected] and Rory Jones at [email protected]