President Joe Biden said he will halt weapon shipments to Israel if it launches a ground invasion on Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza where approximately 1.3 million people are sheltering.
“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,” Biden told CNN on Wednesday.
“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.”
It is the first time that Biden has articulated any sort of restrictions on U.S. arms shipments to Israel in this war.
For seven months, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to more than 34,000 and most of its population became displaced, Biden publicly refused to place conditions on U.S. military support for Israel’s war on Hamas, even as he publicly urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to protect civilians in Gaza and approved airdropping aid to a starving population.
But it seems the president may have reached the limits of his support for Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza, which began after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200. Netanyahu has long vowed to launch a full-scale invasion of Rafah to eliminate what Israel has called the last Hamas stronghold. Israel’s military has continued to bomb cities in Gaza, including Rafah, but amid reports of an imminent invasion, the U.S. announced on Wednesday that it had paused shipments of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.
In his interview with CNN, Biden acknowledged that those deadly bombs have been used to kill civilians. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs,” he said. But, Biden added, Israel’s current attacks on Rafah do not meet the threshold for pulling other weapon shipments.
“They haven’t gone into population centers. What they did is right on the border,” he told CNN. “But I’ve made it very clear to Bibi and the war Cabinet, they’re not going to get our support if in fact they do go into those population centers.”
Meanwhile, Republican leaders — who have sought to exploit divisions within the Democratic Party to portray themselves as the pro-Israel party — criticized Biden over his latest remarks. “I hope it’s a senior moment, because that would be a great deviation in what is said to be the policy there,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told Politico.