The Biden administration, working urgently to avert a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering valuable assistance to Israel if it exercises restraint, including providing sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military locate leaders of the Hamas and finding the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people briefed on the U.S. offers.
U.S. officials have also offered to help provide thousands of shelters so Israel can build tent cities — and help build food, water and medicine delivery systems — so that Palestinians evacuated from Rafah can have a habitable place to live, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to disclose secret diplomatic talks.
President Biden and his top aides have made such offers in recent weeks in hopes of persuading Israel to carry out a more limited and targeted operation in the southern Gaza city, where an estimated 1.3 million Palestinians have refugees after fleeing other parts of Gaza on Israeli orders. Israel has vowed to enter Rafah with “extreme force,” and this week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a number of steps that have sparked fears in the White House that the long-promised invasion will materialize .
Administration officials, including experts from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), have told Israel that it will take several months to safely relocate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are now living in poor conditions. dilapidated and unsanitary in Rafah. Israeli officials disagree with this assessment.
Biden aides stress to their Israeli counterparts that Palestinians cannot simply be moved to barren or bombed parts of Gaza, but that Israel must provide basic infrastructure – including shelter, food, water, medicine and other necessities – so that those who are evacuated can live in decent conditions and are not simply exposed to further starvation or disease.
Experts from across the U.S. government are advising their Israeli counterparts in detail on how to develop and implement such a humanitarian plan, down to the number of tents and the amount of water needed for specific areas, according to several people briefed on the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Aid groups said it was almost impossible to safely evacuate Rafah residents given conditions in the rest of Gaza.
“The aid community is generally very skeptical that there is a safe way to move people out of Rafah,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former USAID official during the Obama administration. . “I have been really concerned about the position of the United States on this – that the position has not been to end the war and not go to Rafah. The position has been to find a way to safely evacuate people, and that’s assuming it’s possible. »
The unusually detailed and sensitive talks highlight the enormous stakes facing Israel and the United States as Netanyahu prepares to invade Rafah, the last town in Gaza that has not been devastated by the Israeli assault. Israel has become increasingly isolated during the seven-month war in Gaza, which has resulted in nearly 35,000 Palestinian deaths, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Biden has also drawn heavy criticism both in the United States and abroad for his support.
Israeli leaders maintain they must enter Rafah to complete the work of eliminating Hamas, which attacked Israel on October 7 and killed around 1,200 people. But destroying the city’s vast network of tunnels, home to many Hamas leaders and fighters, would endanger tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. This led U.S. officials to recommend a large-scale, extremely complex evacuation plan as the best option, while urgently pushing for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
“We have serious concerns about the way Israel has conducted this campaign, and it could call into question everything in Rafah,” a senior administration official said.
