Biden pressures Israel to reach cease-fire in Gaza, straining ties

TEL AVIV, Israel – The Biden administration dispatched the head of the CIA to meet Wednesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, part of an effort to limit Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah and push for a cease-fire deal with Hamas.

The visit came only hours after the Biden administration announced that it was withholding some military aid from Israel, in an unusually public rift between the two allies.

Taken together, experts said, the moves were indicative of President Joe Biden’s increasing frustration with the way Israel has conducted the war in Gaza – a conflict unpopular with many Democratic voters in an election year.

Still, the steps were unlikely to change the overall course of the conflict, they said.

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

As the war in Gaza has dragged into its seventh month, the death toll has climbed past 34,000, with many of those killed women and children, according to Gaza health officials, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. In the process, Biden has slowly moved from a position of full-throated support for Israel’s right to defend itself after October’s Hamas-led terror attack to a campaign of consistent pressure intended to limit civilian casualties and increase humanitarian aid to the besieged Palestinian enclave.

That shift has created growing cracks in the countries’ decadeslong relationship, which have widened most recently over Israel’s declared plan to invade Rafah, a city the Israelis say is a key Hamas military stronghold but where more than 1 million displaced Palestinians have taken refuge in tent cities. Hamas on Sunday launched a rocket attack from Rafah on an Israeli position near another vital crossing at Kerem Shalom, killing four soldiers.

In view of Israel’s long-threatened assault on Rafah, U.S. officials said Tuesday night that Biden had paused an arms shipment to Israel last week to prevent the U.S.-made weapons from being used in an invasion.

The president withheld 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs, fearing they could be dropped on Rafah, officials said.

Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary, told a Senate committee Wednesday that the United States had been clear “from the very beginning that Israel shouldn’t launch a major attack into Rafah without accounting for and protecting the civilians that are in that battle space, and again, as we have assessed the situation, we have paused one shipment of high payload munitions.”

The 2,000-pound bombs, some of the largest in the Israeli arsenal, were routinely used in the early weeks of the war, including in areas the military had designated safe for civilians, according to a New York Times investigation.

Earlier on Tuesday, after warning civilians to evacuate to nearby safe zones, Israeli tanks moved into Rafah, taking over the Gaza side of the city’s border crossing with Egypt. Hours after that action, which fell short of a full invasion, the White House confirmed the pause in bomb deliveries.

Alon Pinkas, a former diplomat for Israel, said that the U.S. decision was motivated by mounting American frustration with 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 a signal to Israel that a full-scale invasion of Rafah could have further consequences.

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

Matan Kahana, a lawmaker from the party of Benny Gantz, a political rival of Netanyahu who is also a member of the emergency wartime government, said in an interview on Israel’s Army Radio on Wednesday that, if nothing else, the decision underscored Israel’s dependence on American munitions.

He called them “the bread and butter of our fighting, both throughout the current war and the future.”

While the hold on the weapons’ shipment was unlikely to affect Israel’s capabilities in the short term, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, called the decision “very disappointing.”

Biden, he said in an interview on Israel’s Channel 12 News, “can’t say he is our partner in the goal to destroy Hamas, while on the other hand delay the means meant to destroy Hamas.”

But if the move by the United States was intended to send a message to Israel, it lacked some teeth.

The Biden administration is not halting all weapons to Israel and, at this point, has not made a final determination on how to proceed with the bombs withheld last week. In fact, officials said the administration had just approved the latest tranche of aid amounting to $827 million worth of weapons and equipment. The administration intends to send “every dollar” of the money just appropriated by Congress, the officials said.

Tensions between Biden and Netanyahu have grown steadily in recent months. During a phone conversation a month ago, Biden for the first time threatened to rethink U.S. support for the war if Netanyahu did not change course, according to a White House summary of the call. While Biden did not explicitly say he would limit or cut off arms during the call, that was an implied possibility.

Since then, the White House has credited Israel with responding to the president’s demands by doing more to limit civilian casualties and facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. In some ways, Israel has gradually moved closer to what some U.S. military officials had been seeking from the start: a more surgical campaign prioritizing targeted operations.

But differences over a possible invasion of Rafah and the terms of a cease-fire deal being negotiated by international mediators have led to new tensions between the White House and the Israelis.

Negotiators from Israel and Hamas were in Cairo on Wednesday amid a renewed international push on a proposed deal for a cease-fire, although Israeli officials said that major gaps remained between the sides.

In a sign of the growing urgency, Netanyahu met with Burns on Wednesday afternoon in Israel, according to an Israeli official who requested anonymity to discuss the talks. Another person briefed on hostage negotiations confirmed that Burns was traveling to Israel.

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

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’ revision, that phrase is clearly defined as a permanent end to the war and a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip. 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’ revised proposal, Netanyahu said 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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.