US president Joe Biden has warned Israel the United States will halt some arms shipments if the Rafah offensive goes ahead, as fighting continued in the southern Gaza city on Wednesday and ceasefire talks took place in Cairo.
Washington confirmed it had halted a shipment of powerful bombs that Israel could use in a full-scale assault.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah ... I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Mr Biden said in an interview with CNN.
“We’re going to continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks that came out of the Middle East recently,” he said. “But it’s, it’s just wrong. We’re not going to – we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”
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Hamas said its fighters were engaging Israeli troops who entered the eastern outskirts of Rafah on Tuesday and seized the Rafah crossing to Egypt, cutting off a vital aid route.
Israel said it targeted Hamas positions with its air force and with tank fire. It claimed to have killed 30 militants since Monday. Hamas says most of those killed were civilians, including children. Israel also said it killed Ahmed Ali, the commander of Hamas’s naval force in Gaza city.
Militants fired rockets from Rafah towards southern Israel on Wednesday for the second consecutive day.
There is no indication so far that the Israeli forces intend to push deeper into Rafah, where more than one million residents have fled to avoid the fighting in the seven-month war. Tens of thousands of residents have fled Rafah in the last few days. Israel has told civilians to go to an “expanded humanitarian zone” in al-Mawasi, some 20km away.
Israel’s offensive has killed 34,844 Palestinians in seven months of war in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.
The war began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7th, killing about 1,200 people and abducting 252 others, of whom 128 remain hostage in Gaza and 36 have been declared dead, according to the latest Israeli figures.
The Rafah crossing remains closed, raising concerns that Gaza residents will soon face a shortage of key humanitarian supplies. In response to a US request, Israel on Wednesday reopened the other main southern crossing, Kerem Shalom, which had been closed for three days after four soldiers close to the terminal were killed by Hamas mortar fire.
Aid for Gaza was loaded on to a ship in Cyprus on Wednesday. It will be delivered using – for the first time – a US pier built off the Gaza coast.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organisation, warned that hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip have only three days of fuel left due to the closure of border crossings.
“Without fuel, all humanitarian operations will stop. Border closures are also impeding delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza,” he said.
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United Nations secretary general António Guterres said he was “disturbed and distressed” by Israel’s Rafah incursion and called for the Rafah crossing to be reopened immediately. He also urged Israel and Hamas to “spare no effort” to agree a ceasefire, warning that the entire region was facing a “decisive moment”.
Meanwhile, contacts continued in Cairo to bridge the gaps between Israel and Hamas, while CIA director William Burns met Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
The Biden administration told Israel that the ceasefire deal accepted by Hamas on Monday night was a counterproposal to the Egyptian draft which Israel had accepted.
US defence secretary Lloyd Austin on Wednesday confirmed that Washington has delayed the transfer of weapons – precision bombs according to media reports – to Israel because of its opposition to a big ground operation in Rafah.
“We’ve been very clear ... from the very beginning that Israel shouldn’t launch a major attack into the Rafah without accounting for and protecting the civilians that are in that battlespace. As we have assessed the situation, we have paused one shipment of high payload munitions,” he told a Senate hearing.
Israeli analysts described the US decision as a “yellow card”, warning that it could be the first step towards a wider US arms embargo. Washington is Israel’s closest ally and main weapons supplier.
