Brian McDonald
Tel Aviv – Some of Israel’s most prominent far-right politicians attacked President Biden Thursday after he alerted the White House could withhold more arms shipments to the Israeli military if it launches a major ground military attack on the city of Rafah, in the extreme south of Gaza.
Israel’s ultranationalist and firebrand Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a brief message on social media, suggesting with a heart emoji that the militant group Hamas, with which Israel has been at war for seven devastating months in Gaza, loved Biden for his threat to withhold weapons.
Parliamentarian Dan Illouz, a lawmaker from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Likud party, he said the US leader’s action “not only endangers Israel but the entire free world”.
Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency/Getty
The President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, considered a more moderate politician, who is not a member of the Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government, appeared to castigate his more extremist colleagues on Thursday. Speaking at an event to mark the Allied victory in Europe over Nazi Germany during World War II, Herzog praised “Israel’s greatest ally, the United States of America,” thanking Mr.
“Even when there are disagreements and moments of disappointment among friends and allies, there is a way to clarify disputes and it is up to all of us to avoid baseless, irresponsible and insulting statements and tweets that harm the national security and interests of the State of Israel ” added Herzog.
Speaking on CNN on Wednesday, Biden said it would be “just wrong” if US-supplied weapons were used in attacks that led to the mass deaths of civilians in a large-scale ground offensive in Rafah. If Israel proceeds with such an operation, he said the U.S. “will not supply the weapons and artillery shells used” for it.
US officials confirmed that the Biden administration halted a weapons shipment to Israel last week – 1,800 one-ton bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs – due to concerns that the Israel Defense Forces would drop them on Rafah.
The city in the south of Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet, with around 1.4 million Palestinians who have sought shelter there, from across the decimated territory.
The IDF ordered people in the eastern part of the city to leave this week, triggering a desperate exodus of thousands of people – many of whom had already been forced to flee other locations several times.
FDI Tanks rolled in to take control on the Gaza side of the crucial Rafah border crossing with Egypt on Tuesday, shortly after the evacuation order was issued, and Israel said it was carrying out “a precise counterterrorism operation to eliminate Hamas terrorists and infrastructure ” in the area.
“They will not receive our support if they actually go to these population centers,” Biden said. “We are not moving away from Israel’s security – we are moving away from Israel’s ability to wage war in these areas.”
Biden stressed that the US would “continue to ensure that Israel is secure in terms of the Iron Dome and its ability to respond to attacks that have recently emerged from the Middle East.”
Netanyahu he said in recent days – amid growing pressure from the US and other global partners to limit the scope of operations in Rafah – that if “Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will remain alone.”
He promised to press ahead with Operation Rafah, which he has said for weeks is necessary to destroy hundreds of Hamas fighters hiding in the city. Rafah is considered the last stronghold of the group that ruled Gaza for almost two decades, before triggering the current war with its deadly October 7 terrorist attack against Israel.
Israel says Hamas killed about 1,200 people in that attack and took about 240 others hostage. Around 100 of those captives are believed to still be alive in Gaza, including five US citizens.
Meanwhile, the enclave’s Health Ministry, run by Hamas, says Israel’s retaliatory war has killed nearly 35,000 people. Gaza authorities do not distinguish between combatant and civilian casualties, and the IDF, without providing evidence, claims to have killed around 10,000 terrorists in its response to the October 7 attack.
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Since Israel announced the start of its operations in Rafah this week, frightened Gazans have fled daily from Israeli airstrikes, flooding the city’s last functioning hospital, the Kuwait Hospital, with dead and wounded.
“The health situation in Rafah is now very miserable,” Dr. Jamal Al-Humss, the hospital’s general director, told CBS News. He said around 300,000 people in Rafah now depend on the facility, which he warned is overcrowded and understaffed.
In recent days, Hamas – long considered a terrorist group by the US and Israel – continued to launch rocket and mortar attacks from Rafah. An attack on Sunday killed four Israeli soldiers.
Israeli national security expert Chuck Freilich of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies accepts that there are probably still four Hamas battalions operating in Rafah. But speaking to CBS News on Thursday, he argued that Israel had already won It is lost the war with Hamas.
“If we look at this from a purely military perspective, I think Israel won the war in mid-December,” he said. “We had essentially destroyed Hamas as a military force.”
“At the same time, if we refer to the overall strategic picture of the war, Israel may have lost. Its international position is bad and now we have seen this division emerging with the United States,” Freilich said. “For Hamas, it’s an incredible achievement, and for us, it’s a very serious problem.”
CBS News’ Tucker Reals contributed to this report.
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