The Biden administration, working urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering Israel valuable assistance in an effort to persuade it to hold back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people familiar with the U.S. offers.
American officials have also offered to help provide thousands of shelters so Israel can build tent cities — and to help with the construction of delivery systems for food, water and medicine — so that Palestinians evacuated from Rafah can have a habitable place to live, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose secret diplomatic talks.
President Biden and his senior aides have been making such offers over the past several weeks in hopes they will persuade Israel to conduct a more limited and targeted operation in the southern Gaza city, where some 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering after fleeing there from other parts of Gaza under Israeli orders. Israel has vowed to go into Rafah with “extreme force,” and this week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a number of steps that raised fears at the White House that the long-promised invasion could be materializing.
The United States has provided Israel with intelligence throughout the seven-month war. Senior Biden aides are now seeking to convince Israeli officials that they can destroy the remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah with more targeted strikes that the United States can assist, by identifying senior Hamas leaders, rather than a full-scale invasion.
Administration officials, including experts from the U.S. Agency for International Development, have told Israel it will take several months to safely relocate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are now living in decrepit and unsanitary conditions in Rafah. Israeli officials disagree with that assessment.
Biden aides are stressing to their Israeli counterparts that Palestinians cannot simply be moved to barren or bombarded parts of Gaza, but that Israel must provide basic infrastructure — including shelter, food, water, medicine and other necessities — so that those who are evacuated will have livable conditions and not simply be exposed to additional famine or disease.
Experts from across the U.S. government are advising their Israeli counterparts in great detail on how to develop and implement such a humanitarian plan, down to the level of how many tents and how much water would be needed for specific areas, according to several people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Aid groups have said safely evacuating people from Rafah is nearly impossible given the conditions in the rest of Gaza.
“The aid community generally is very skeptical there’s any safe way to relocate people out of Rafah,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former USAID official in the Obama administration. “I’ve been really concerned about the U.S. line on this — that the line has not been, ‘End the war and don’t go into Rafah.’ The line has been to find a way to safely evacuate people, and that presumes that’s a possible thing.”
The unusually detailed and sensitive talks highlight the enormous stakes facing both Israel and the United States as Netanyahu prepares to invade Rafah, the last city in Gaza that has not been devastated by Israel’s onslaught. Israel has become increasingly isolated during the seven-month Gaza war, which has resulted in almost 35,000 Palestinian deaths, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Biden has also drawn enormous criticism domestically and abroad for backing it.
Israeli leaders contend that they must go into Rafah to finish the job of eliminating Hamas, which attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and killed about 1,200 people. But destroying the city’s extensive tunnel network, where many Hamas leaders and fighters are based, would endanger tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. That has led U.S. officials to urge a large-scale, inordinately complex evacuation plan as the best option, even as they push urgently for an Israel-Hamas cease-fire.
“We have serious concerns about how Israel has prosecuted this campaign, and that could all come to a head in Rafah,” said a senior administration official.
U.S. officials are now working closely with Egypt to find and cut off tunnels that cross the Egypt-Gaza border in the Rafah area, which Hamas has used to replenish militarily, according to two people familiar the discussions.
The American offers have come during negotiations over the last seven weeks between top U.S. and Israeli officials on the scale and scope of an operation in Rafah. It is not yet clear whether Israel will heed repeated U.S. warnings not to launch a full-scale ground invasion, particularly as Biden and Netanyahu had their most public break this week after months of building tensions and open conflict.
In recent days, Israel has seized a border crossing near Rafah and ordered more than 100,000 people to evacuate the city, frustrating U.S. officials because those ordered to leave were not given a secure, livable destination.
Some U.S. officials view those actions as an effort on Israel’s part to apply pressure in its ongoing negotiations with Hamas over an extended cease-fire in exchange for the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Negotiators left Cairo this week, dimming hopes for a deal, but Biden aides insist they are still working on an agreement, which they view as the most promising way to end the war.
The Biden administration has made an internal assessment that Hamas — and its leader in Gaza, Yehiya Sinwar — would welcome a major, protracted battle in Rafah that is destructive and deadly, according to a senior administration official, because it would further isolate Israel.
U.S. officials say Israel has not launched a full-scale Rafah ground invasion at this point, despite a series of raids in recent days. In private discussions, Israel has said it is taking seriously American warnings and provided assurances as recently as Friday that its soldiers would not barrel into the city before evacuating about 800,000 Palestinians, according to a senior administration official familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations.
Biden this week said he would withhold the transfer of offensive weapons to Israel if the country moves ahead with a Rafah invasion that targets population centers, a notable turnaround for the president, who has long resisted imposing consequences on Israel for its conduct in Gaza despite rising pressure from fellow Democrats. Netanyahu defiantly responded that Israel “will stand alone” if necessary.
Biden said Israel has not crossed his “red line” because its forces have not begun invading or bombing densely populated areas of Rafah.
Frank Lowenstein, a former State Department official and Middle East expert, said that Biden is likely to give Israel some flexibility but that further scenes of families dying and suffering could provoke a strong reaction.
“Actually restricting more weapons deliveries is a step the Biden administration would probably prefer not to take. As a result of that, they’re likely to keep the definition of the red line flexible, so they can decide based on the entirety of the circumstances whether Israel has crossed it or not,” said Lowenstein, who helped lead Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2014. “It seems like the brightest part of that pink line would be mass casualty events for civilians in Rafah and large-scale armored incursions into the city.”
Israel has already launched strikes on Rafah that have killed dozens of civilians and further crippled crumbling hospitals. This week, it seized the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, cutting off the main artery through which a limited amount of humanitarian aid was delivered. The World Health Organization warned that hospitals in southern Gaza were days away from running out of fuel. At least 110,000 people have fled Rafah as Israel’s bombardment there intensifies, according to U.N. agencies, and the population is suffering from widespread hunger and famine.
The Biden administration this week paused the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs over fears of how they might be used in a Rafah operation, suggesting that U.S. officials are growing wary of Israel’s assurances that it will moderate its tactics. One senior administration official said the United States wanted to signal to the Israelis that it had options at its disposal if Israel moves ahead in Rafah in ways Washington opposes, such as bombing densely packed areas.
If Israel opts to “smash” into Rafah, Biden would decide on withholding additional weapons shipments, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Friday. “Again, we hope it doesn’t come to that,” he added.
After his unwavering embrace of Israel during much of the Gaza war, Biden has more recently sought to balance that support with explicit warnings. On Tuesday, at a Holocaust memorial event, he put the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in the context of the Holocaust. On Wednesday, he warned in a CNN interview that a major invasion of Rafah would lead to a cutoff of U.S. offensive weapons. On Friday, his administration certified that Israel was not using U.S.-provided weapons in violation of international humanitarian law, an assertion strongly disputed by human rights groups.
As U.S.-Israel talks now focus more sharply on the shape of the Rafah operation, a senior administration official said, Israeli officials are not strongly pushing back on the U.S. demands, although they disagree that evacuating the civilians would take months. Netanyahu is also facing pressure from far-right cabinet ministers in his government, who want a scorched-earth campaign in Rafah.
Israel’s recent seizure of the Rafah border crossing angered many Biden aides, who have for months been pressing Israel to allow more aid into Gaza. The World Food Program has said northern Gaza is experiencing a full-blown famine, and aid groups warn that conditions in southern Gaza will become similarly dangerous if Israel does not quickly reopen the Rafah crossing.
Some aid groups also say there is currently no safe way to relocate people in Rafah to locations elsewhere in Gaza because the territory has been reduced to rubble, with collapsed infrastructure and defunct hospitals. Rafah is the southernmost city in Gaza, and U.S. officials and humanitarian aid groups have warned there is nowhere left for Palestinians to move, in part because of Egypt’s steadfast refusal to let them in.
Konyndyk and other human rights activists are skeptical that an incursion by the Israel Defense Forces into Rafah would be less destructive than the rest of its Gaza campaign, no matter how closely the United States works to limit an invasion.
“I don’t think it’s credible, based on the past seven-plus months of IDF conduct, to think a Rafah invasion would not entail a similar level of civilian harm to what we’ve seen so far,” Konyndyk said. Noting that Israel’s recent actions in Rafah are already interfering with aid delivery, he added, “This is a fractional preview of what a full-on Rafah invasion would look like.”
