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Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Israel would launch a ground assault on Rafah, despite pressure from the US not to carry out a large operation in the Gazan city where hundreds of thousands of people are sheltering.
In an address to a parliamentary committee on Tuesday, Israel’s prime minister acknowledged US President Joe Biden’s opposition to a ground operation into Rafah but said there was no other way for Israel to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas.
“We have a debate with the Americans over the need to enter Rafah, not over the need to eliminate Hamas, but the need to enter Rafah,” Netanyahu said at a sitting of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee.
“I made it as clear as possible to the president that we are determined to complete the elimination of [the Hamas] battalions in Rafah, and there is no way to do this without a ground incursion.”
Netanyahu has agreed to send senior officials to Washington as soon as this week to hear the Biden administration’s suggestions to achieve its goals in Rafah without a ground invasion.
But his comments are the latest sign of the growing tensions between the White House and Israel over the course of the war, and come a day after the US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that a major ground operation in Rafah would be a “mistake”.
“It would lead to more innocent civilian deaths, worsen the already dire humanitarian crisis, deepen the anarchy in Gaza and further isolate Israel internationally,” Sullivan said in a press briefing.
General Charles Brown, chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he could not offer an alternative to Israel’s Rafah offensive having not seen its plans, but that Washington would carry on advising Israel based on its own lessons in urban warfare.
“I can say from personal experience, having led parts of the air campaign in the ‘defeat Isis effort’, our focus on how do you protect civilians and minimise any type of collateral damage is a continued conversation,” he said after a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Germany.
The comments came amid mounting international concern at the humanitarian toll of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which it launched in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack during which militants killed 1,200 people and took a further 250 hostage, according to Israeli officials.
Israel’s retaliatory assault in Gaza has so far killed more than 31,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, displacing the vast majority of its 2.3mn inhabitants and fuelling a humanitarian catastrophe.
The UN has warned of an “imminent famine” in northern Gaza, adding that 1.1mn people across the besieged strip were projected to face “catastrophic levels of food insecurity”. It warned last week of a “staggering escalation” in the number of children suffering from acute malnutrition, with almost a third of under-twos in the north of the strip now affected.
Chuck Schumer, a Biden ally, said last week that Netanyahu’s coalition had been “too willing to tolerate the civilian toll” in Gaza, in an unusually blunt intervention from the most senior Democrat in the US Senate. Schumer said the US should use its leverage over Israel to force it to adopt a more moderate course.
US secretary of state Antony Blinken said on Tuesday that he would visit Saudi Arabia and Egypt this week to discuss a deal to secure a truce and the release of the hostages still held in Gaza, as well as ways to increase humanitarian assistance to Gaza’s population.
“It is . . . absolutely incumbent on Israel, as it acts to defend itself and prevent October 7 from happening again, to make it a priority to protect civilians — those who are caught in harm’s way — and to provide for those who desperately need humanitarian assistance,” he said.
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