The rhetoric from the US is spectacular. Schumer tells Israelis to elect someone else when Bibi's popular and his competitors for PM are equally hawkish. WTF? He's clearly out of line and out of touch with reality. Meanwhile, he never suggests we should stop sending money and military hardware to enable Israel's ineffective and catastrophic Gaza campaign.
Then I need to hear Trump explain that if I don't vote for him I'm a bad Jew. Hey Donald FU!
How about simply telling Israel we think they're making a terrible mistake, one that will destabilize the Middle East and put their nation in harm's way over the long haul? And we aren't going to participate in this fool's errand? Oops that's too simple.
Netanyahu Rebuffs Biden and Vows to Press Ahead With Rafah Invasion
March 21, 2024
The NY Times
The Israeli leader shrugged off White House warnings and said sending troops into Rafah, in southern Gaza, was necessary to eliminate Hamas.
Netanyahu acknowledges a dispute with the U.S., but says Israel will press on into Rafah.
The White House says a meeting with Israeli officials on Rafah is expected early next week.
How Gazans have fared after Israel has asked them to flee.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel brushed aside disagreement with the Biden administration over a planned ground invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, saying Tuesday that his government would press ahead despite pleas for restraint from the United States and key allies.
Mr. Netanyahu made the remarks to Israeli lawmakers a day after speaking by phone with Mr. Biden, who the White House said had reiterated concerns that invading Rafah would be “a mistake.” Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said that Israel’s objectives in Rafah “can be done by other means,” and that Mr. Netanyahu had agreed to send a team of Israeli officials to Washington to hear U.S. concerns and to discuss alternatives.
But on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu insisted that sending troops into Rafah was necessary to eliminate what he said were Hamas battalions in the city.
“I made it as clear as possible to the president that we are determined to complete the elimination of these battalions in Rafah, and there is no way to do this without a ground incursion,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
Given the forum where the Israeli leader was speaking — a committee of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset — it was unclear whether the intended audience for his comments was primarily domestic, and whether the divisions might be smoothed at the meetings planned in Washington.
But Mr. Netanyahu acknowledged the dispute with the Biden administration over invading Rafah, saying “we all know this.” The United States has expressed increasing concern over civilian deaths in Gaza, but Mr. Netanyahu emphasized on Tuesday that he and Mr. Biden remained on the same page about the main objectives of the war.
“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,” he told the lawmakers.
He said that “out of respect for the president,” he had agreed to send a team to Washington so that the U.S. officials could “present us with their ideas, especially on the humanitarian side.”
Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, told reporters at a news briefing on Tuesday that the U.S. and Israel were “just squarely in a different place” on the expected invasion of Rafah.
“We have a different strategic viewpoint on what we believe is necessary to help target the key elements of Hamas,” he added.
The Biden administration has repeatedly warned Israel against sending ground troops into Rafah without a plan to get the more than one million Palestinians sheltering there out of harm’s way.
On Monday, Mr. Sullivan said that no such plan had been presented.
Many Palestinians who have fled from fighting in other parts of the Gaza Strip have sought safety in Rafah, obeying Israeli directives to move south. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people are crammed into temporary shelters.
“They went from Gaza City to Khan Younis and then to Rafah,” Mr. Sullivan told reporters. “They have nowhere else to go.”
And Rafah’s limited resources have been exhausted as the population has multiplied. Many people in the city spend their days trying to secure basic needs: finding clean water for drinking and bathing, getting enough food and calming their children when Israeli strikes hit nearby.
— Cassandra Vinograd
The White House is expected to meet with an Israeli delegation early next week to discuss Israel’s plans for an invasion of Rafah, a point of tension between President Biden and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One on Tuesday that the Biden administration expected the Israeli officials to arrive in Washington “likely” early next week.
The leaders are at odds over how to proceed in Rafah. The White House said that Mr. Biden told Mr. Netanyahu on Monday that sending Israeli forces into Rafah, which has become the last refuge for more than half of Gaza’s population, would be disastrous when there are other ways to defeat Hamas.
But Mr. Netanyahu has not moved from his position that he must send troops into Rafah to defeat Hamas, the Palestinian faction that led the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, even though about 1.5 million civilians are currently seeking shelter in the southern city.
“Our view is that there are ways for Israel to prevail in this conflict, to secure its long-term future, to end the terror threat from Gaza, and not smash into Rafah,” Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said on Monday. “That’s what we’re going to present in this integrated way when this team comes.”
He also said the face-to-face meetings would be necessary to make progress in negotiations between Israel and Hamas on a deal to release Israeli hostages held by Hamas and a cease-fire to the fighting in Gaza.
“We’ve arrived at a point where each side has been making clear to the other its perspective, its view,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And now we really need to get down to brass tacks and have the chance for a delegation from each side on an integrated basis — everyone sitting around the same table, talking through the way forward.”
— Zolan Kanno-Youngs
For many civilians in Gaza, fleeing from Israeli attacks has become a grim cycle. Israeli evacuation orders have prompted more than a million people to move from one destination to another since October, each time packing belongings and seeking transport — by vehicle, cart or foot — to escape airstrikes and ground fighting between Israel and Hamas.
The latest example is Rafah, in southern Gaza, a city swollen to more than 1.4 million people by forced displacement. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Tuesday that his military would invade the city to root out Hamas but that it would provide humanitarian aid and “facilitate an orderly exit of the population.”
Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, has said that a major ground invasion in Rafah would be a mistake, not least because it would further imperil humanitarian access. Displacement has contributed to a hunger crisis sweeping the territory, and the United Nations has said that an invasion could mean that an already catastrophic situation slides “deeper into the abyss.”
Some civilians say they have fled time and again. As many people face the prospect of being displaced again, here is a look at what happened on a few occasions when Israel has told civilians to evacuate.
Israel began telling more than one million civilians to evacuate northern Gaza about two weeks ahead of its ground invasion on Oct. 27, though the area was pummeled by Israeli airstrikes soon after the Hamas-led attack in Israel on Oct. 7.
“Hamas is using you as a human shield,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said on Oct. 22, calling on civilians still in northern Gaza to move south.
The Israeli military also dropped Arabic-language leaflets over the area, warning that anyone who did not move south “may be considered as a partner in a terrorist organization.”
The United Nations said that the evacuation order was impractical, and the U.S. asked Israel to delay its invasion to give civilians more time. Even so, hundreds of thousands of people obeyed the order and moved to southern Gaza, carrying a few possessions away from an area that had already been shattered by airstrikes before the full-scale invasion began.
The south proved to be no escape from peril. An investigation by The New York Times in December found that Israel had used some of the largest and most destructive bombs in its arsenal in southern Gaza, posing a pervasive threat to civilians.
Mr. Netanyahu says that Israel intends to minimize civilian casualties while fighting Hamas, and Israeli officials said that Hamas fighters had set up checkpoints to prevent people from complying with the orders to move.
In early December, after a one-week cease-fire, Israel launched a major military operation in Khan Younis, southern Gaza’s largest city. Many civilians there had fled to the city from northern Gaza.
The Israeli military again warned civilians to leave parts of Khan Younis for Rafah and other places farther south, though residents said that they sometimes had mere hours of notice. Israel also dropped leaflets over Khan Younis and broadcast information about which parts of the city were safe at any given moment.
Several Palestinians said, however, that the orders to leave Khan Younis, or to move within it, were confusing, not least because they appeared to shift over time and left little opportunity to gather possessions. In addition, obeying the orders meant carting relatives — many of whom had been displaced several times previously — to a new place where the prospects for shelter and basic essentials were uncertain.
Civilians also said that when they fled as instructed, they sometimes found themselves at locations engulfed in fighting or subject to airstrikes.
The most recent designated large scale safe zone is Rafah, which lies against the closed Egyptian border and has been immensely swollen by displacement. Without sufficient accommodations, many of its new residents have pitched makeshift tents.
Rafah has been subject to airstrikes and fighting in recent weeks. In one example, the health authorities in Gaza said on Feb. 12 that at least 67 people had been killed overnight in airstrikes in the city. Israel’s military had launched an operation to rescue two people held hostage in Gaza since the Oct. 7 attack.
The Israeli authorities have asked people at least twice to head to Al-Mawasi, a coastal village in southern Gaza that could be a destination for people asked to leave Rafah. Aid officials have said that the village lacks shelter, humanitarian aid and basic infrastructure.
— Matthew Mpoke Bigg
The Israeli military said its forces were pressing on with a raid of Al-Shifa Hospital and had detained scores of people there, in an operation that has drawn condemnation from Gazan health officials and raised questions about how much control Israeli forces have over northern Gaza.
The latest raid of Al-Shifa began on Monday in what Israeli officials said was an operation targeting senior Hamas officials who had regrouped there, setting off a battle that both sides said had resulted in casualties.
On Tuesday, Israel’s military said its troops were “continuing precise operations” in the sprawling complex of the hospital, which is Gaza’s largest. It said it had killed dozens of militants, though its account of the fighting could not be independently verified.
The Al Jazeera news network said that one of its journalists had been detained for 12 hours. It said the journalist, Ismail al-Ghoul, had been severely beaten. Israel’s military has not responded to the allegations, which drew outrage from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The Gazan Health Ministry condemned the raid as a “crime against health institutions,” and humanitarian organizations expressed alarm over the situation at the complex. The hospital, along with the surrounding area, had been sheltering 30,000 patients, medical workers and displaced civilians.
“Hospitals should never be battlegrounds,” the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a post on social media warning that the situation was “endangering health workers, patients and civilians.
Doctors Without Borders said it was “extremely concerned” for the safety of patients and medical staff in the hospital compound. In a statement on Monday, the organization urged “all warring parties to respect the grounds and perimeter of the hospital and ensure the safety of medical personnel, patients and civilians.”
Israel has said that the hospital complex doubled as a secret Hamas military command center, calling it one of many examples of civilian facilities that Hamas uses to shield its activities.
Four months ago, Israeli forces stormed the complex and found a tunnel shaft that they said supported their contention that the armed group had used it to conceal military operations.
Since then, Israel has withdrawn many troops from northern Gaza and has shifted the focus of its invasion to the south. As a result, lawlessness has increasingly taken hold in the north, prompting international aid organizations to suspend operations despite a dire humanitarian crisis.
The Biden administration has grown increasingly critical of Israel’s conduct of the war and its toll on civilians. On Monday, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said that “more innocent civilians have died in this conflict, in this military operation, than in all the wars in Gaza combined, including thousands of children.”
“A humanitarian crisis has descended across Gaza, and anarchy reigns in areas that Israel’s military has cleared but not stabilized,” he said.
The United Nations human rights chief, Volker Türk, blamed Israel on Tuesday for what he said was the entirely preventable catastrophe of starvation and famine unfolding in Gaza, urging international pressure on the country to allow for the unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid.
International alarm has been growing over the hunger crisis in Gaza, with food experts predicting an imminent famine in the north of the enclave and foreign leaders and diplomats becoming increasingly blunt in pointing the finger at Israel.
“The situation of hunger, starvation and famine is a result of Israel’s extensive restrictions on the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid and commercial goods, displacement of most of the population, as well as the destruction of crucial civilian infrastructure,” Mr. Türk said in a statement.
Mr. Türk said Israel’s restrictions on aid, together with its conduct in its campaign to destroy Hamas, including the displacement of people and the destruction of infrastructure, may amount to the use of starvation as a weapon of war, which is a war crime.
Israel has pushed back on criticism that it is restricting aid from entering Gaza, pointing to its support for several recent initiatives, including efforts to provide supplies by air and sea that aid groups say are far less efficient than road.
It has accused Hamas of diverting aid and of using Palestinian civilians as human shields. The country’s mission in Geneva said on Tuesday that Mr. Türk “seeks once again to blame Israel for the situation and completely absolve the responsibility of the U.N. and Hamas.”
A report released Monday by the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification said that 1.1 million people, half the population of Gaza, would most likely face catastrophic food insecurity and predicted an imminent rise in hunger-related deaths.
“The coping mechanisms we have seen the past weeks, even months, are people eating bird seeds, animal fodder, wild grass and weeds,” Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the U.N. aid agency in Geneva, told reporters on Tuesday while discussing the report. “We are beyond that. There’s literally nothing left.”
The World Health Organization said on Tuesday that it had set up a center to try to stabilize malnutrition levels in the south of Gaza and was looking to set up another in the north, but it said that to bring in supplies at the scale needed would require a cease-fire. Talks in Qatar are continuing amid another intensive diplomatic push to secure a pause in the fighting.
— Nick Cumming-Bruce reporting from Geneva
David Barnea, center. the head of Israel’s foreign spy agency, Mossad, in Tel Aviv in January. Mr. Barnea participated in cease-fire talks in Qatar on Monday.Credit...Amir Cohen/Reuters
The head of Israel’s delegation has returned home from cease-fire talks in Qatar, an Israeli official said on Tuesday, but talks there are continuing amid another intensive diplomatic push to secure a pause in the fighting in Gaza as famine looms.
Warnings from the United Nations that a “famine is imminent” have added urgency to efforts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, and get more humanitarian aid into Gaza. In addition to the discussions in Qatar, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will visit Saudi Arabia and Egypt this week to discuss postwar plans for Gaza and the wider Middle East.
Israeli negotiators arrived in Qatar’s capital, Doha, on Monday for a new round of in-person talks about a potential cease-fire and the release of hostages held by Hamas and other armed groups. Their delegation was led by David Barnea, the head of Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy agency.
Mr. Barnea returned to Israel on Tuesday morning, according to an Israeli official who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. Further details were not immediately available, but the Israeli news media reported that other members of Israel’s negotiating team remained in Qatar.
Officials from Qatar and Egypt have acted as intermediaries in the cease-fire discussions, in part because negotiators for Israel and Hamas do not talk directly with each other.
A spokesman for Qatar’s foreign ministry, Majed al-Ansari, confirmed that Mr. Barnea had departed but said on Tuesday that “technical teams” seeking to hash out finer details of a potential agreement were continuing to meet in Doha.
He said that while there had not yet been a breakthrough in talks, Qatar remained “cautiously optimistic.”
Two senior Israeli officials said the government had initially given its negotiating team an amorphous mandate for the latest round of talks. The team had now been authorized to go deeper into details during the talks, they said, but wasn’t given the full latitude it had requested. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to communicate with the news media.
The Israeli officials said on Monday that a proposal being discussed included a 42-day pause in the fighting in exchange for the release of 40 of the more than 100 hostages taken from Israel and still held in Gaza by Hamas or its allies. But they emphasized that they expected it would take a long time to reach an agreement.
Last week, Hamas presented a new proposal that omitted a previous demand that Israel immediately agree to a permanent cease-fire in return for beginning an exchange of hostages and Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
The Israeli officials said Hamas’s new proposal included details that were unacceptable to Israel.
For months, Hamas leaders have been publicly calling for a comprehensive cease-fire and complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Israeli officials repeatedly rejected the demands and indicated that they would be open to only a temporary pause.
Cassandra Vinograd contributed reporting.
— Aaron Boxerman
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said in Manila on Monday that he would visit Saudi Arabia and Egypt this week.Credit...Anthony Wallace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will visit Saudi Arabia and Egypt this week, a trip that comes as the Biden administration tries to broker a hostage deal that would pause Israel’s offensive in Gaza and allow more humanitarian aid into the Palestinian territory.
Speaking to reporters during a stop in Manila on Tuesday, Mr. Blinken said his discussions would include postwar plans for Gaza and the wider Middle East, including a potential agreement that would normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel and lay the groundwork for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.
Mr. Blinken will be traveling to the region as mediators from Egypt and Qatar hold meetings in Qatar about a possible cease-fire. Israel sent a team of negotiators to Qatar on Monday.
The trip will be Mr. Blinken’s sixth to the region since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which set off the war in Gaza. In the announcement of his travel, the State Department said that he would meet with the Saudi and Egyptian “leadership,” without naming specific officials. There was no mention of a visit to Israel.
Mr. Blinken said that during stops in Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, and Cairo, the Egyptian capital, he would be discussing “the imperative of having a plan for Gaza, for when the conflict ends,” and that the hope was such a conclusion would come “as soon as possible, consistent with Israel’s needs to defend itself and make sure that Oct. 7 can never happen again.”
Any postwar plan for Gaza will involve the question of how to provide governance and security in Gaza, a subject on which the United States and Israel disagree.
Mr. Blinken also said he would address “what is the right architecture for lasting regional peace,” an apparent reference to diplomacy between the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia to broker a joint agreement.
Such a pact would likely require Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians in return for its first-ever formal diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. In turn, the Saudis want the United States and Israel to support the creation of a civil nuclear program on Saudi soil, as well as greater military support from Washington.
Mr. Blinken stressed the urgency of providing humanitarian relief to Gaza, whose inhabitants, he said, “continue to face a horrific humanitarian situation.” He said that Hamas bore blame for the crisis but that it was also “incumbent on Israel” to protect civilians during its military campaign.
He is expected to travel to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday and to Egypt on Thursday.
Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing in Gaza and a presumed mastermind of the Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel, was confirmed dead on Monday by a senior U.S. official after an Israeli airstrike more than a week ago.
Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, told reporters that Mr. Issa, one if the highest-ranking officials in Hamas, had been killed. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said on March 11 that Israeli military warplanes had targeted Mr. Issa and another senior Hamas official in an underground compound in central Gaza.
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