By Trevor Hunnicutt
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Biden The administration said Tuesday it was closely monitoring the investigation into a deadly Israeli airstrike that it called tragic, but that the recent deaths in Rafah there did not constitute a major ground operation that crossed U.S. red lines.
“The Israelis have said this is a tragic mistake,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at the White House, when asked whether the weekend’s events qualified as the kind of “death and destruction” that American officials have warned about this. in withholding more aid to Israel.
The U.S. has no “measuring stick or quota” here, Kirby said.
“We have also said that we do not want to see a major ground operation in Rafah that would make it really difficult for the Israelis to go after Hamas without causing major damage and possibly a large number of deaths. We haven’t seen that yet. he said, noting that Israeli operations were mainly in a corridor on the outskirts of Rafah.
Asked if he meant that the recent ground operations in Rafah would not lead to a U.S. withdrawal of more military aid, Kirby said, “I believe I said that here.”
The recent deaths in Rafah have tested President Joe Biden’s pledge to deny weapons to Israel if the U.S. ally carries out a major invasion of Rafah, endangering displaced people there.
At a ceremonial event in Washington, US Vice President Kamala Harris said: “The word tragic does not even describe” an Israeli airstrike on Sunday that caused a fire in a tent camp in the Gaza city of Rafah, killing 45 Palestinians. .
Harris’ comment, in response to a reporter’s question, also followed what Gaza health authorities described as Israeli tank shelling on a tent camp in an evacuation area west of Rafah that killed at least 21 people on Tuesday.
Israel said that “unfortunately something tragically went wrong” during Sunday’s airstrike, while the army on Tuesday denied shelling the tent camp. Israel said it attacked two senior Hamas operatives during Sunday’s operation and did not intend to cause civilian casualties.
Hamas issued a statement celebrating the martyrdom of two fighters during Sunday’s strike, Kirby said, an indication that Israel was trying to go after Hamas in a “targeted, precise way.”
“The Israelis have said they used 37-pound bombs and precision-guided munitions,” Kirby said. “If that is indeed what they used, it certainly indicates an attempt to be discreet, targeted and precise. This clearly had tragic consequences, and that obviously needs to be investigated.”
Asked whether Israel’s attacks could put Biden in a difficult position, Kirby told reporters on Tuesday that there was instead a real danger that Israel would become further isolated from the international community by the way it conducts its operations. “So this is clearly concerning because it is not in Israel’s best interest,” Kirby said. “And it is not in our best interests for Israel to become increasingly isolated on the world stage.”
The US government’s response was criticized earlier Tuesday by human rights and Arab-American groups.
“Unfortunately, because of President Biden’s insistence on sending more bombs to enable Netanyahu’s war crimes in Rafah, this is now as much an American genocide as it is an Israeli genocide,” said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American- Islamic Relations. .
Israeli and US officials have denounced the use of the term genocide to describe events on the ground in Gaza.
The State Department said Tuesday that Washington, as soon as it saw reports of Sunday’s Rafah incident, expressed deep concern toward Israel and pushed for an investigation, which Israel has promised.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that Washington will closely monitor Israel’s investigation, but that Israel’s military operations so far in Rafah have not been as large as those in central or northern Gaza .
World leaders have expressed horror at the fire in a designated Rafah “humanitarian zone” where families uprooted by fighting elsewhere had sought shelter.
More than 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive, the Gaza Health Ministry says. Israel launched its air and ground war after Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israeli communities on October 7, killing around 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli figures.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Humeyra Pamuk, David Ljunggren and Daphne Psaledakis; additional reporting by Kanishka Singh; Editing by Rami Ayyub, Heather Timmons, Cynthia Osterman, Deepa Babington and Rod Nickel)
