Jehad Alshrafi/AP Photo
Displaced Palestinians inspect their tents destroyed by Israel’s bombardment, near an UNRWA facility west of Rafah city, Gaza Strip, May 28, 2024.
Back on May 8, President Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett that if Israel invaded Rafah—a small, extremely dense city within the Gaza Strip that has become crammed with perhaps a million refugees because Israel had previously declared parts of the city a safe zone—he would cut off their supply of American weapons. “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,” he said. “We’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”
Fast-forward to this week, and Israel has indeed attacked and invaded the city. On Sunday, an airstrike hit a mass of tents in the city, reportedly killing 45 people. On Tuesday, Reuters reported witness testimony that “tanks and armoured vehicles mounted with machine guns were spotted near Al-Awda mosque” in central Rafah.
Yet as of this week, Axios reported that the White House is “still assessing” whether the red line had been crossed, and at the time of writing the weapons had not been cut off. I ask: What else is there to assess? Do they think they could be someone else’s tanks? (Perhaps Bugs Bunny got lost taking his armored regiment to Palm Springs.)
The Guardian also reported Tuesday that Yossi Cohen, former head of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, “allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation.”
What more is it going to take for Biden to stop enabling this rogue state?
It should be emphasized that the Rafah attack was no outlier. From the very start of the campaign, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” to quote Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, from back in October. And it was only a few weeks ago that Israeli forces killed several World Central Kitchen aid workers, including an American citizen, with repeated precision airstrikes.
In international law, there is an important distinction between collateral damage—civilians killed by accident in a conflict—and deliberately killing civilians because you claim there might be a military target among them. That is a war crime. Stopping shipments of food and medical supplies—in an obvious, undisguised attempt to create famine in Gaza, which Israel has been doing for months—is also a war crime.
Yet this has been the story of the Biden administration and the war in Gaza. Biden makes some timid requests for Israeli forces to cool it a little bit; Netanyahu spits in his face, blows up another hospital, and then demands more free weapons.
I’d argue that a true friend of Israel—one who does not want it to end up as a North Korea–style pariah state—would have long since put maximum pressure on it to end this war and accept a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, either with their own state or as one state with equal rights for all. That’s the only thing that will protect Israeli security in the long run.
But it seems Joe Biden is not such a friend.
