As Israeli forces pushed into Rafah just days after an airstrike caused a major fire that killed dozens of Palestinians, the White House said its ally had not crossed the Biden administration’s “red line.”
Israeli tanks were seen entering the center of Rafah for the first time on Tuesday, as global condemnation mounted over the deaths in an overcrowded tent camp for displaced civilians and as US aid deliveries to Gaza by sea were suspended after damage to the temporary pier.
But National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters at a briefing that the United States is not “turning a blind eye” to Israeli operations in southern Gaza city, from which about 1 million Palestinians have fled in recent weeks.
He said the Biden administration did not believe that Israeli actions in Rafah so far represented a “major ground operation” that would violate President Joe Biden’s warnings and trigger a change in U.S. policy, including a threatened freeze on arms shipments .
“A major ground operation consists of thousands and thousands of troops moving in a maneuvered, concentrated and coordinated manner against a variety of targets on the ground,” he said.
A US official similarly told NBC News that while America believed the deadly attack was a “horrific incident,” it appeared to be the result of an airstrike that had gone “terribly wrong” and did not represent Israel “smashing into Rafah ”.
Biden told CNN earlier this month: “I’ve made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t been into Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not providing the weapons that have been used historically to take on Rafah. , to deal with the cities – who deal with that problem.”
Asked by Gabe Gutierrez of NBC News how Israeli tanks appearing near central Gaza did not represent a large-scale ground operation, Kirby said Israeli officials had maintained that their tanks were moving along the Philadelphi Corridor, a key strategic strip of land that runs along the Gaza Strip runs. Border between Egypt and Gaza, and ‘not in the city proper’.
“That’s what the Israelis said,” Kirby replied. “We rely as best we can on what the Israelis tell us and what they say in public and what we can discern.”
Kirby’s comments came just days after the Israeli airstrike caused the fire that tore through the tent camp in Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan neighborhood, killing at least 45 people, including children, according to local health officials.
Hala Rharrit, a U.S. diplomat and veteran Foreign Service officer who resigned from the State Department last month in protest at Washington’s policy on Israel’s war in Gaza, said she felt the administration Biden now tried to “talk his way out of this latest shift” on what a “red line” is.
“The point of the president saying that population centers are a ‘red line’ is to prevent massive civilian casualties,” she said in a telephone interview with NBC News on Wednesday. “Whether they come in with tanks or whether it’s done through bombs coming from the sky, are we really trying to put pressure on things?”
The attack on the tent camp has increased international pressure after the United Nations Supreme Court ordered Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah. According to The Associated Press, the UN Security Council could vote as early as Wednesday on a draft resolution circulated by Algeria ordering Israel to immediately halt its offensive and demand a ceasefire in Gaza.
Israel submitted a new ceasefire proposal to Qatari, Egyptian and American mediators on Monday, an Israeli official told NBC News. The proposal offered a “lasting calm” but not a complete end to the war as demanded by Hamas.
Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, told NBC News on Tuesday that Hamas had not received any proposal from the mediators.
In a briefing Tuesday, Israeli army spokesman Admiral Daniel Hagari said Israel was still investigating the attack in Rafah, including the cause of the fire that he said “led to this tragic loss of life.”
He said the IDF had fired two 17-kilogram nuclear warheads at two high-ranking Hamas militants, but he said a fire had somehow started, adding that the fire was “unexpected and unintentional.”
He suggested the possibility that weapons stored in the targeted area could have started the fire, but said this was an “assumption” at this point. An Israeli official and a U.S. official separately told NBC News that it was possible that a fuel tank was hit, sparking the fire.
The images of the strike have put pressure on the US to take action.
When asked during Tuesday’s White House briefing how many “charred bodies” Biden needed to see before changing policy, Kirby said he took “offence” at the question and said, “We don’t want another innocent life is taken.’
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the IDF has waged a months-long ground offensive in Gaza, killing more than 36,000 people.
Israel launched the offensive after Hamas terror attacks on October 7, which Israeli officials said killed about 1,200 people and took some 250 others hostage. About 125 people are believed to still be held in Gaza, with at least a third presumed dead.
Biden’s warning about the US ‘red line’ is reminiscent of former President Barack Obama’s own use of the term in August 2012, when he warned about the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war.
Critics accused Obama of allowing that line to be crossed without US action, with political opponent John McCain saying the Obama administration’s red line “seemed to be written in disappearing ink.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
