More could be withheld over Rafah assault, warns Blinken
The US could block more weapons systems to Israel if it went ahead with a ground offensive in Rafah, the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken said yesterday.
The Biden administration has suspended the shipment of 3,500 2,000lb and 500lb bombs owing to concerns over the scale of civilian casualties in the territory.
Blinken said he was also concerned any further ground captured by Israel would not be retained and instead would create a vacuum “that’s likely to be filled by chaos, by anarchy and ultimately by Hamas again”.
Speaking to CBS News Blinken said that President Biden remained determined to help Israel defend itself, adding that the bombs were the only US weapons currently being withheld. That could change, he warned, if Israel launched a fullscale attack on Rafah.
Washington has made clear to Israel that if it “launches this major military operation to Rafah, then there are certain systems we’re not going to be supporting and supplying for that operation”, said Blinken. “We have real concerns about the way they’re used.”
He added that Israel needed to “have a clear, credible plan to protect civilians, which we haven’t seen”
He warned that Hamas was coming back owing to the lack of a coherent plan for Gaza. “We’ve been working for many weeks on developing credible plans for security, for governance, for rebuilding,” he said. “We haven’t seen that come from Israel.”
The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, also warned that with more than a million people crowded into Rafah “you would have really significant civilian casualties”. The president did not want to see US weapons in that kind of operation, he added.
There was condemnation of a Rafah offensive from elsewhere, with Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, saying it would breach international law.
“I can see no way that the latest evacuation orders, much less a full assault, in an area with an extremely dense presence of civilians can be reconciled with the binding requirements of international humanitarian law and with the two sets of binding provisional measures ordered by the international court of justice,” Türk said.
The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, condemned the forced evacuation of Rafah as “intolerable”, while the Unrwa chief, Philippe Lazzarini, branded the claim of safe zones as “false and misleading”
However, the foreign secretary, David Cameron, refused to restrict British arms supplies at this stage even as he joined calls opposing a major offensive in Rafah.
Lord Cameron said: “For there to be a major offensive in Rafah there would have to be an absolutely clear plan about how you save lives, how you move people out the way, how you make sure they’re fed, you make sure that they have medicine and shelter and everything. We have seen no such plan … so we don’t support an offensive in that way.”
Cameron said he had made these points in a call with Ron Dermer, a close adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Friday.