US-Israel rift over Gaza deepens
The rift between the US and Israel appears to be deepening after Benjamin Netanyahu once again rejected a plea from Joe Biden to call off a ground invasion of Rafah, where over half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are sheltering.
Netanyahu told lsraeli lawmakers this afternoon that he had made it “supremely clear” to the US president, during their first phone call in a month last night, “that we are determined to complete the elimination of these battalions in Rafah, and there’s no way to do that except by going in on the ground”.
The IDF insists Hamas fighters are holed up in the city of Rafah. But even Israel’s staunchest allies have warned that a ground offensive in the last remaining refuge for over a million displaced Palestinians would provoke humanitarian catastrophe.
Shortly after Biden and Netanyhu’s phone call last night, White House officials stated that the US president told his Israeli counterpart that a Rafah offensive was a “mistake”, and that the two leaders had agreed that an Israeli delegation would travel to Washington to discuss an alternative approach to targeting Hamas in Rafah without a major ground invasion.
Meaning Netanyahu has undermined Washington this afternoon by restating his intentions to press ahead with a ground offensive.
The Israeli leader will no doubt feel bolstered by emerging reports that Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing, was killed in an airstrike on a tunnel complex in central Gaza last week. If confirmed, Issa, one of the key organisers of Hamas’s 7 October attack in Israel, will be the most senior Hamas leader to die since Israel’s resulting offensive in Gaza began.
Washington will welcome the news too. But, as Israel’s bombardment of Gaza approaches its sixth month, tensions over diverging Israel and US war objectives are mounting.
This morning, US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, offered his starkest analysis yet of the humanitarian crisis unravelling in the enclave. “100% of the population in Gaza is at severe levels of acute food insecurity,” Blinken told reporters. “That’s the first time an entire population has been so classified,” he added. Acute food insecurity is when a person’s inability to consume adequate food puts their life in immediate danger.
Blinken is due to visit the Middle East later this week for the sixth time since October where he will meet senior leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia to “discuss the right architecture for a lasting peace”. But this time, there was a noticeable omission: he has made no mention of a stop off in Israel itself.
Biden and Netanyahu are not only clashing over the conduct of the current war, additionally, they remain publicly at odds over the question of who will govern a post-war Gaza.
Washington insists a post-war Gaza cannot be reoccupied by Israel while Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected Washington’s proposal that the Palestinian Authority could return to govern the strip.
In a significant escalation in tensions last Thursday, US Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, a longtime supporter of Israel and the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the US, called for new elections in Israel, declaring Netanyahu an obstacle to peace in the region.
An – unsurprisingly furious – Netanyahu labelled Schumer’s speech “totally inappropriate” and Biden’s evening call to the Israeli President was partly an exercise in damage limitation. Yet Netanyahu’s declaration about Rafah this afternoon may have unwound any progress made over the phone.
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