In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden said, “If they [the IDF] 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.”
He went on to state that his administration wasn’t walking away from Israel’s security and would “continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of the Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks that came out of the Middle East [i.e. Iran] recently,” such as Iran’s April 14 ballistic missile attack.
However, with regard to offensive armaments of the type that would likely be used in Rafah, “it’s just wrong,” he continued. “We’re not going to—we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells,” he said….
Is it “just wrong” for the Israelis to want to finish off Hamas by dismantling the last four intact? Battalions of its combatants known to be in Rafah? Do the Bidenites want Hamas to still be standing in Rafah when the war sputters to its end, crowing about its “victory” over the “Zionist entity” and preparing to regroup — as Hamas is now doing in northern Gaza, which the IDF had thought had permanently cleared out months ago?
Biden’s CNN announcement came a few days after Israel was blind-sided by Hamas’s public “acceptance” of a ceasefire deal the Jewish state had not even seen.
According to Axios, Israeli officials were reportedly surprised to see “many new elements” in the deal that were not contained in the previous proposal to which Israel had agreed and which had been presented to Hamas by the American, Egyptian and Qatari mediators 10 days earlier.
Among the “new elements” added by Hamas to the proposed deal was the demand not merely for an immediate ceasefire but for an end to the war, and a complete withdrawal of IDF troops from Gaza. Another new element was a reduction in the number of hostages Hamas would be willing to free, reduced from 33 to a mere 20.
The U.S. and the other mediators had drafted “a new deal” and were not transparent about it, two Israeli officials told Axios. The officials went on to state that they suspect the Biden administration gave Hamas guarantees via the Egyptians and Qataris about ending the war, which the terror group demands but which Jerusalem says is a nonstarter until Hamas is defeated, the hostages are released and Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel.
The most disturbing news is not that the American mediators were working hand-in-glove with the Egyptians and Qataris, and not keeping Israel abreast of the latest talks, nor of Hamas’ changes to a previous proposal that Israel had agreed to. No, the most disturbing aspect of all this was the Bidenites’ offer to provide intelligence on the three senior Hamas leaders still hiding in Gaza — Yahya Sinwar, his brother Mohamed, and Mohamed Deif. Why has this information been withheld so far from Israel? Had the IDF been given that information, and acted upon it, the war in Gaza might have ended, with a clear Israeli victory, months ago.
Bidenites instead have withheld such critical information from Israel, and they are now proposing to supply it, but only if Israel agrees to their demand that the IDF not enter Rafah. This is not how Washington should treat a loyal ally, one that has always supplied the Americans with whatever information about the Gaza hideouts of Hamas, its security services, especially Mossad, manage to obtain on terrorist plots against America. These information leaders should now be turned over to Israel without delay, and without making it conditional on an Israeli promise not to enter the center of Rafah. Israel is now in the fourth war for its very survival — the first three were in 1948, 1967, and 1973 — and has a right to expect that information critical to its war effort will not be withheld by its American ally, or perhaps one should now put that last word between doubting quotation marks, as in American “ally.”
