Middle East CrisisBiden Warns U.S. Deliveries of Some Weapons Will Halt if Israel Invades Rafah

The interview was broadcast hours after Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III acknowledged publicly that Mr. Biden’s decision last week to hold up delivery of thousands of heavy bombs was linked to Israel’s plans for a large offensive in Rafah, one of Hamas’s last bastions in Gaza, where more than a million Palestinians have taken refuge.

Israel and Hamas have been at war in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched a devastating raid on Israel that left some 1,200 people dead, according to Israeli authorities. Mr. Biden has since struggled to both support Israel in the war on Hamas, and to press to limit civilian casualties. More than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza, many of them women and children, according to the territory’s health authorities, and Mr. Biden’s pressure on Israel has grown as the numbers have risen.

But in recent days, Israel ordered the evacuation of 110,000 civilians in Rafah, conducted airstrikes against targets on the edges of the city, sent in tanks and seized the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.

In the interview, Mr. Biden also acknowledged in a way that he has rarely done that American bombs have killed innocent Palestinians. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Mr. Biden said.

The president has objected to Israel’s planned Rafah operation out of fear that widespread civilian casualties could be caused by American bombs. He said on Wednesday that he would also block the delivery of artillery shells that could be fired into the urban neighborhoods of Rafah.

“I’ve made it clear to Bibi and the war cabinet, they’re not going to get our support if in fact they go on these population centers,” the president said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname.

In the CNN interview, Mr. Biden said that he had warned Mr. Netanyahu against sending the Israeli military into civilian areas of Rafah. “It’s just wrong,” Mr. Biden said. “We’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells. I’ve made it clear to Bibi and the war cabinet that they’re not going to get our support if in fact they go into these population centers.”

While the president and other administration officials have publicly criticized the Israeli conduct of the war for months, it has often been in muted terms, saving the harshest assessment for private conversations. Mr. Austin’s comments on Wednesday were the bluntest public statement to date that the disagreement carries consequences and a signal of the kind of leverage the United States can use to influence Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

The United States and other allies have warned that an all-out assault in Rafah could lead to a humanitarian disaster for hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans living in tents and temporary lodgings there. On Monday, Israeli tanks and troops made an incursion to take control of the border crossing into Egypt.

With the scale and timing of their plans still unknown, Israeli officials have downplayed any dispute with the United States over weaponry and the war in Gaza, while also continuing to negotiate on a potential cease-fire that could lead to the return of Israeli hostages taken during the Hamas-led attack in October.

Experts on the U.S.-Israeli relationship say the pause in delivering the munitions, which the White House confirmed on Tuesday, showed that the alliance had hit a significant divide, with more ruptures possibly to come amid declining American public support for the Israeli war effort.

“It’s pent-up frustration on Biden’s part, which eventually broke,” Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel, said on Wednesday. “The administration has been walking a tightrope between its very strong support for Israel and domestic pressure.”

This week in particular, two opposing elements of President Biden’s approach to military support for Israel are converging and competing for global attention.

With his approval of fresh U.S. aid involving weapons and equipment worth $827 million — along with an assertive speech against antisemitism at a Holocaust remembrance service — President Biden has made clear that he remains deeply committed to Israel.

At the same time, he has signaled that there are limits to American aid and patience, suspending delivery of the heaviest of munitions — 1,800 2,000-pound and 1,700 500-pound bombs — over concerns they will be used in a possible full-scale assault on the city of Rafah in southern Gaza.

In public comments, Israeli officials have mostly promoted America’s long-term support and ignored the pause in deliveries of weapons.

Speaking at a conference Tuesday night hosted by a local newspaper, the military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, described coordination between Israel and the United States as reaching “a scope without precedent,” while insisting that any disagreements were handled “behind closed doors.”

Sidestepping questions about the airing of American frustrations and the potential risk to future arms shipments, he stressed the importance of day-to-day coordination and “operational assistance.”

Israel has a large arsenal to draw on and many options for how to proceed in Gaza that would not necessarily include the bombs Washington has delayed, military analysts said.

Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, said that the U.S. decision was motivated by skyrocketing American frustration with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as pressure from some Congressional Democrats to more closely supervise Israel’s use of U.S. arms. And, he added, it was an attempt to warn Israel that more consequences could be in the offing.

“The logic behind this is a warning: If you don’t get your act together, there’s a lot more obstructions that could happen,” Mr. Pinkas said.

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

Israel said that the Kerem Shalom crossing reopened on Wednesday, but did not indicate when the Rafah crossing would reopen. The U.N. disputed Israel’s claim.

The fighting in the Rafah area and the closure of the crossings set aid efforts back, at least temporarily, to the conditions of the first weeks of the war, when an Israeli and Egyptian blockade prevented anything from entering Gaza, producing desperate shortages of food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies. Israel has described the military action it began on Monday as a limited incursion into Rafah that seized control of the border crossing, not the full-fledged offensive it has vowed to carry out, despite warnings from the United States and aid groups that it would be a humanitarian catastrophe.

U.N. officials said the conditions threaten to halt all its humanitarian operations in Gaza.

As many as a million people displaced from other parts of Gaza, more than half of them children, have sought refuge there, living in squalid conditions and relying on international aid efforts.

“Rafah is the epicenter of humanitarian operations in Gaza,” António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, said on Tuesday. “Attacking Rafah will further upend our efforts to support people in dire humanitarian straits as famine looms.”

Before the war began last October, about 500 aid trucks and additional commercial trucks a day carried supplies into Gaza, home to some 2.3 million people. Even after deliveries resumed, they were a fraction of the prewar level, as Israel kept most crossings closed, insisted on close inspection of every load, and barred some supplies.

After intense international pressure on Israel, including from the United States, the average rose to more than 200 humanitarian aid trucks a day in second half of April and the first days of May, according to the United Nations, still well below what aid agencies said was needed and what the Biden administration had called for. No commercial trucks have entered Gaza since the war started in October.

For months the United Nations and aid groups have also struggled to gain access and safe passage for their staff to work in Gaza, despite intense negotiations with Israel.

Now, U.N. officials say that the limited progress they had made is in jeopardy.

“We are managing the whole aid operation opportunistically as opposed to holistically — if there is something we can grab we will grab it,” said Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, in an interview on Wednesday.

“We want the ability to work without being in the middle of a conflict zone and people we are trying to help being terrified,” he added.

A day earlier the leader of the U.N.’s humanitarian office for the Palestinian territories, Andrea De Domenico, said from Jerusalem in a video briefing with reporters that fuel would run out in days, cutting off communications, shuttering hospitals and halting distribution of food and other essential aid.

Gaza’s electrical grid stopped working early in the war. The only power available now comes from generators, making fuel essential.

The presence of Israeli tanks and fighting around Rafah’s border had made it impossible for the U.N. to access fuel in storage facilities in the area, Mr. De Domenico said. He added that people are fleeing Rafah to areas where there was no shelter, clean water and drainage.

“It is impossible to improve the situation existing in the new displacement sites without the entry of supplies and without the fuel to transport them to the location where the people are concentrating,” said Mr. De Domenico.

If the area around the Rafah crossing becomes a battle zone, U.N. officials said, it would be nearly impossible to deliver and distribute the aid.

What happened after Oct. 7?

Since Oct. 7, the United States has sent tens of thousands of weapons to Israel. For the most part, it accelerated supplies that were already committed under contracts, many of which were approved by Congress and the State Department long ago, according to Bradley Bowman, a military expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

“What the U.S. started to do almost immediately was send an extraordinary flow of weapons,” Mr. Bowman, a former U.S. Army officer, said.

According to a report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, there were so many arms shipments to Israel that a senior Pentagon official said the Department of Defense sometimes struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver them.

Pete Nguyen, a Pentagon spokesman, said in an email that recent assistance has included precision-guided munitions, artillery ammunition, medical supplies and “other categories of critical equipment.”

He added that “the United States has surged billions of dollars in security assistance to Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks.”

How much has been made public?

Lawmakers and news media have recently criticized the lack of public information about the sales. The Defense Department so far has only published two news releases, on Dec. 9 and 29, about the approval of emergency military sales to Israel, while it lists much of the military equipment sent to Ukraine in a regularly updated fact sheet.

As laid out in those news releases, the aid sent to Israel from Oct. 7 to Dec. 29 included 52,229 M795 155-millimeter artillery shells, 30,000 M4 propelling charges for howitzers, 4,792 M107 155-mm artillery shells and 13,981 M830A1 120-mm tank rounds.

But the State Department can legally refrain from telling Congress and the public about some new arms orders placed by Israel since Oct. 7 because they fall below a certain dollar amount.

The Washington Post reported that the United States had approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since Oct. 7.

What did they send?

One sale approved in late October allows for the sale to Israel of $320 million in kits for converting unguided “dumb” bombs into GPS-guided munitions, on top of a previous, $403 million order for the same guidance kits.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies compiled a list of news reports and official information available about the weapons delivered. According to the reports, that included air defense systems, precision-guided munitions, artillery shells, tank rounds, small arms, Hellfire missiles used by drones, 30-mm cannon ammunition, PVS-14 night vision devices and disposable shoulder-fired rockets.

The Pentagon leased its two Israeli-made Iron Dome antimissile batteries back to Israel, according to the website Breaking Defense.

The U.S. also gave Israel access to the U.S. military stockpiles in Israel for immediate needs. An American official said that Israel’s recently requested munitions from those stockpiles have included bombs ranging from 250 to 2,000 pounds, and that many have been 500-pound bombs.

How is it funded?

The military aid to Israel is funded under a 2016 agreement known as a memorandum of understanding that committed the United States to giving Israel $38 billion in weapons over 10 years.

Additionally, President Biden last month signed an aid package that will send about $15 billion in additional military aid.

Israel regularly receives arms from the Defense Department and from American weapons makers directly, which included the unguided and guided bombs that Israel has bought from the United States over the years and dropped on Gaza in recent months, and also fighter jets, air defense missiles and helicopters.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. military aid to Israel has amounted to $216 billion since Israel’s founding in 1948.

John Ismay contributed reporting.

The European Union, speakers at the event said, should be demanding a cease-fire and using its leverage to attain it.

“We’re here today because we want to mourn everything that our institutions are facing,” said Faryda Hussein, an E.U. staff member, at the beginning of the march. “For months, we’ve been trying to put pressure internally and externally on our leadership.”

It is unusual for E.U. staff to protest openly because of their contractual obligations to remain impartial and loyal to their institutions. They have held a few smaller protests during the war, but none that have generated as much attention.

Manus Carlisle, an E.U. employee and one of the protest’s organizers, emphasized that the actions did not contradict the institution’s values.

“I want to make it really clear that we are impartial,” he said. “That’s why we’re calling for a complete cease-fire. We are not backing one side over the other.”

But the demonstration clearly reflected opposition to Israel and its conduct of the war. Last autumn, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, angered some E.U. member states, taking what they saw as a pro-Israel stance on her visit to Israel.

Similarly, many employees of the U.S. State Department have objected to the American approach to the war, saying the Biden administration should be much tougher on Israel and press harder for a cease-fire.

At the protest on Wednesday, Marta Guffanti, an Italian staff member of the European Parliament, held a sign with the Palestinian flag that read, “Free Now.”

“It’s very important for us to be here today and manifest and show our presence and our beliefs, especially because personally, I think that the E.U. institutions are not doing as much as they could,” she said.

The demonstrators carried a banner with the words “R.I.P. Never Again,” a pointed use of a phrase commonly used by Jews to refer to the Holocaust. Another banner read, “All eyes on Rafah.”

“We are delighted that European Union officials are mobilizing, which contrasts with the great passivity of the European Commission,” said Gregory Mauzé, of the Belgian-Palestinian Association, which also took part in the protest.

The Israeli military characterized the campaign around the crossing as a limited operation, and did not provide further details about what it called Wednesday “targeted raids.”

Hamas responded defiantly, vowing to combat any challenge to what it called “Palestinian-Egyptian sovereignty” at the crossing, though at least some residents of Rafah were not hearing exchanges of fire.

Israel’s air force said it had struck “over 100 terror targets” across the entire territory in the past 24 hours, including military structures and launching areas for rockets. The Gaza health ministry said Israeli bombardment since Tuesday had led to “a significant increase in the numbers of dead and wounded,” particularly in Rafah.

It did not provide specific numbers for those killed in Rafah, but said Israeli forces killed 55 people and injured 200 more across the entire territory in the preceding 24 hours.

“A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry said in a statement.

The Israeli move into Rafah came the day after the military called on some 110,000 people to evacuate part of the city, which has become home to roughly a million people displaced from elsewhere in the enclave, mostly living in vast tent encampments. That order has led to the closure of some health facilities whose staff members fled, the health ministry said.

Scott Anderson, an official with UNRWA, the U.N. agency that assists Palestinian refugees, said no aid had entered the Gaza Strip since Israel’s seizure of the crossing.

“The Rafah crossing area has ongoing military operations — there have been continued bombardments in this area throughout the day,” he said in a statement posted online. “No fuel or aid has entered into Gaza Strip and this is disastrous for the humanitarian response.”

Majdi Ahmed, 31, spent Wednesday with eight people in a tent in the western part of Rafah, which was not included in Israel’s evacuation order this week.

Since Israel’s incursion began, Mr. Ahmed said, he and the others in the tent had been listening to explosions and watching bombs fall, including one that he said had struck Rafah’s municipal offices. But he said it did not sound like Hamas was putting up much of a fight.

“Everyone here can hear the strikes on Rafah,” said Mr. Ahmed, who worked as a taxi driver in Jabaliya in northern Gaza before war. “We don’t hear fire exchange though. It is more like a one-sided thing to me.”

He said that several families fleeing the eastern part of Rafah had sent up their tents since the day before, but some had also fled the area to seek safety elsewhere in Gaza, fearing that Israel would soon push into the rest of Rafah.

But Mr. Ahmed and his family stayed put.

That was, in part, because he had paid $7,500 to secure passage through the border crossing for his wife and child this week, and he wanted to see if that would still be possible with the crossing under Israeli control. But they also stayed because Mr. Ahmed said the idea of seeking safety somewhere else seemed pointless.

“I tend to believe this is a safe area,” he said. “Even though I know nowhere is safe.”

Mr. Burns has been shuttling across the region in recent days in an attempt to clinch a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas that would see the release of hostages held in Gaza and Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

The Israeli delegations arrived on Tuesday, hours after Israeli tanks and troops went into the southern Gaza city of Rafah and seized control of the border crossing with Egypt, disrupting the flow of humanitarian aid into the enclave.

The most substantive sticking point in the talks centers on a phrase that appears in both the Israeli- and Hamas-approved proposals: a path to a “sustainable calm.”

In Hamas’s revision, that phrase is clearly defined as a permanent end to the war and a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip. Mr. Netanyahu has consistently opposed any deal that explicitly calls for a permanent cease-fire, saying Israeli forces would not stop fighting in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed and the hostages are released.

Hamas’s revised proposal, Mr. Netanyahu said on Tuesday, was “very far from Israel’s core demands.” In his statement, he added that “military pressure on Hamas is an essential condition to secure the release of our hostages.”

Mr. Netanyahu, who is under pressure from the United States and other allies to agree to a cease-fire, said that while he had sent a midlevel delegation back to the talks, “in tandem, we continue waging the war on Hamas.”

A White House spokesman, John F. Kirby, said on Tuesday that the negotiations were at a “sensitive stage” and that “there should be no reason why they can’t overcome those remaining gaps.” Analysts said Israel’s incursion into Rafah might either ratchet up the pressure on Hamas to make a deal or sabotage the talks.

The Israeli military said it had gone into the city to destroy Hamas infrastructure used in an attack that killed four Israeli soldiers over the weekend near another border crossing, this one from Israel into Gaza.

The move did not appear to be the full ground invasion of Rafah that Israel has long been threatening and its allies working to avert. The Israeli military called it “a very precise” counterterrorism operation.

Last week, President Biden paused an arms shipment to prevent U.S.-made weapons from being used in a long-threatened assault on Rafah, administration officials said on Tuesday night Washington time, an indication of the growing rift with Israel over the conduct of the war. The decision to delay the delivery of 3,500 bombs was the first time that Mr. Biden has used his power to curtail arms to influence Israel’s approach to the war since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack.

Peter Baker contributed reporting from Washington and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.

Israel launched an incursion into the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Monday night and closed the crossing with Egypt there. That crossing is still shut, but on Wednesday, facing calls by the United Nations and several governments to avoid making a dire situation even worse, Israel said it would reopen Kerem Shalom.

Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the U.N. humanitarian office in Geneva, said the United Nations was checking to see how quickly aid shipments could resume. “We can only confirm once a drop has been made and pickup on the other side has begun,” he said. Earlier, COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for coordinating aid deliveries into Gaza, said that aid trucks were arriving at the crossing and would go into Gaza after inspection.

Juliette Touma, the communications director for the main U.N. agency aiding Palestinians in Gaza, known as UNRWA, said that “no supplies have come in yet” through Kerem Shalom.

The amount of aid going into Gaza each day has fluctuated since Oct. 7, but U.N. data shows that overall the number of trucks flowing through Kerem Shalom and Rafah is down about 75 percent from before the war. Part of the problem is that commercial imports have also virtually stopped.

Aid experts also say that the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, which this month is an average of 180 per day through the two main crossing points combined, is inadequate to address the hunger crisis. Achieving that, they say, would require many more trucks, an influx of aid workers, training of Palestinian medical personnel to treat people suffering from malnutrition, the restoration of medical facilities and, above all, an end to the military conflict.

In addition to the southern crossing points, COGAT said on Tuesday that 60 trucks had passed through the Erez crossing into northern Gaza, which Israel reopened under pressure from the Biden administration after an Israeli airstrike last month killed seven aid workers.

But Ms. Touma said that supplies were not coming through Erez on a regular basis, and that overall “much more” aid needs to go into Gaza.