White House says Rafah strike does not violate Biden's warnings to Israel [View all]

[Celerity]

As images circulate of the deadly Israeli strike on civilians, Biden confronts calls to make good on his threat to suspend offensive weapons

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/28/biden-rafah-gaza-civilian-deaths-israel-palestinians/

https://archive.ph/cEkqt

A woman sits with a child as Palestinians flee Rafah to escape the Israeli military operation in southern Gaza. (Hatem Khaled/Reuters)

The White House said Tuesday that Israel had not violated President Biden’s warnings on the conduct of its military campaign in Rafah after an airstrike there over the weekend killed at least 45 Palestinians and injured hundreds more, suggesting the United States would impose no consequences for the Israeli action. The airstrike on a makeshift tent encampment caused a fire to break out in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza, creating one of the most horrifying scenes of the war in the Palestinian enclave. Images of charred bodies and videos of parents burning alive as their children screamed for help ricocheted across social media, prompting renewed global outrage and growing calls for Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah.

Several Biden officials, including Vice President Harris, lamented the “heartbreaking” and “tragic” scenes and loss of life. But they said the mass-casualty event did not cross the “red line” Biden announced this month, when he said the United States would suspend delivery of offensive weapons to Israel if it went into “population centers” in Rafah. White House spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday that Israel had not started a “major ground operation” in the city. State Department spokesman Matt Miller added that Israel had not launched the type of offensive that it carried out in the cities of Gaza City and Khan Younis, where airstrikes leveled entire buildings and hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed in a day.

“We still don’t believe that a major ground operation in Rafah is warranted. We still don’t want to see the Israelis, as we say, smash into Rafah with large units over large pieces of territory,” Kirby said. The weekend tragedy, he said, “speaks very clearly to the challenge of military airstrikes in densely populated areas of Gaza, including Rafah, because of the risk of civilian casualties, which of course happened terribly in this case, a horrible loss of life.” He noted that Israel said it used 37-pound bombs in the attack, aimed at killing Hamas officials it said were holed up in the city. “A 37-pound bomb is not a big bomb,” he said. “If it is in fact what they used, it is indicative of an effort to be precise and targeted.”

Kirby and other officials pointed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments on Monday that the civilian casualties were a “tragic mistake” and said they would wait for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to release the results of an investigation into what went wrong. The IDF said two Hamas militants were killed in the attack, including the commander of Hamas operations in the West Bank. Some experts and Democratic lawmakers said Israel’s airstrike — along with reports of Israeli tanks rolling into the center of Rafah on Tuesday — had clearly crossed Biden’s red line and urged the president to respond accordingly.

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