U.S., Israel Rift Widens Over Rafah Assault

WASHINGTON—The Biden administration’s intensive public and private campaign to forestall Israel’s assault on Rafah has become its toughest test to date with its Middle East ally.

Hours after President Biden on Monday warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against a full-scale assault on Rafah, Israel’s military conducted what it called targeted airstrikes in the eastern part of the city.

The Israeli attack signaled the wide gulf between Biden and Netanyahu over a strategy for securing the release of hostages held by Hamas and ultimately bringing the fighting to an end.

So far the White House has neither achieved a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel nor persuaded Netanyahu to defer the Rafah offensive.

Hamas said Monday that it had accepted a temporary cease-fire. The U.S. said it was reviewing the Hamas response while Israel complained the group had introduced new conditions.

Since his wartime trip to Israel following Hamas’s Oct. 7 surprise attack, President Biden has emerged as one of the country’s strongest supporters.

Billions of dollars in American weaponry have flowed to Israel, and the U.S. has repeatedly defended Israel’s right to defend itself—a “bear hug” strategy that U.S. officials hoped would enable Washington to work behind the scenes to influence Israeli leaders’ calculations.

For the past several weeks, the Biden administration has progressively stepped up pressure on Israel and Hamas to try to secure a six-week cease-fire, which U.S. officials hoped they might find a way to extend through further diplomacy.

A pause, U.S. officials say, is needed to secure the release of hostages, including American citizens, and provide an opportunity for diplomatic efforts to encourage the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

“If we’re able to get the deal, get the cease-fire, get the hostages out, we’ll look for ways to build on that and have something that’s sustainable over time,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday following a meeting earlier in the day in Jerusalem with Netanyahu.

Netanyahu, in contrast, has emphasized the imperative of taking the fight to the four Hamas battalions and the group’s leadership that are ensconced in Rafah, even if that operation needs to await the conclusion of a yet-to-be-negotiated cease-fire.

“The idea that we will stop the war before achieving all of its goals is out of the question,” Netanyahu said last week, according to a statement from his office. He added that Israel would go into Rafah to destroy the Hamas battalions there “with or without a deal.”

Even if a cease-fire proves elusive, the U.S. has said for weeks that it wouldn’t support a major Israeli ground incursion on Rafah unless Israel presented an effective plan to ensure that more than one million Palestinians who have taken shelter in the city aren’t in harm’s way or cut off from humanitarian assistance—a goal that some U.S. officials say might not be feasible.

“The U.S. will not support the Rafah offensive currently envisioned by Israel,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday. “Such an offensive would dramatically increase the suffering of the Palestinian people.”

On Monday, the Israelis dropped leaflets telling 100,000 people to evacuate eastern Rafah for the coastal area of al-Mawasi and warned it would use “extreme force against the terrorist organizations in the areas where you live.”

That Israeli move has spurred speculation that Israel’s plan might be to avoid the major ground assault the U.S. has warned against, at least for now, by conducting a series of more limited operations while establishing control over the border between Gaza and Egypt.

At the same time, Israel’s war cabinet also said it was sending a delegation back to the still-fraught cease-fire talks but was continuing its Rafah operation to put pressure on Hamas to release its hostages and advance “the other goals of the war,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.

“It looks like they plan to do it incrementally. It is not going to be what the Biden administration has railed against,” said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. peace negotiator who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Netanyahu’s calculation is much more focused on maintaining his coalition than he is on keeping Joe Biden happy.”

Netanyahu’s popularity is beginning to recover after it plunged following Israel’s worst-ever security failure on Oct. 7, when lapses allowed Hamas to attack southern Israel and kill 1,200 people. But his survival as prime minister depends on keeping his narrow parliamentary majority intact and on not alienating far-right members of his government who oppose halting the war until Hamas’s last bastion in Rafah is taken.

In Biden’s 30-minute call Monday with Netanyahu, the president discussed negotiations for a cease-fire and hostage deal. The White House said Israel agreed to reopen the Kerem Shalom border crossing that is used to funnel aid to Gaza, which was closed after a Hamas rocket attack killed four Israeli soldiers in the area on Sunday.

A worry for the Biden administration is that even a limited operation might spur hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee, overwhelming the shelter, food and medical care that could be mustered for the displaced Rafah population.

With the two sides at odds over the potential Rafah operation, the Biden administration has delayed the sale of thousands of precision weapons to Israel, marking at least the second time in recent months the U.S. has held up an arms deal to its closest Middle East ally amid the war in Gaza.

The move affects up to 6,500 Joint Direct Attack Munitions—kits that enable unguided bombs to be directed to a target using satellite guidance.

The White House neither confirmed nor denied the move, but the timing suggested it was part of its strategy for pressuring Israel not to rush ahead with an assault on Rafah.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at [email protected]