Biden’s Rafah warning sends immediate shockwaves through US and global politics Anchorage

US-Israel relations have reached a critical crossroads that shows that even President Joe Biden’s staunch support can reach its limits when it starts to conflict with wider American national security and moral interests — and his own dicey political position.

Biden’s warning in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett that he’d halt some weapons shipments to Israel if it invades the Gazan city of Rafah marks the most direct US attempt to rein in its ally in a national security crisis since the Reagan administration, and the first significant conditioning of American military assistance since the start of the war.

Biden’s statement of his ultimate red line takes his trial of strength with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to its most intense level yet and sent immediate shockwaves through US and Israeli politics and around the world.

Washington fears a full-scale Israeli incursion into densely populated Rafah would cause civilian casualties on a level even greater than the 34,000 Palestinians the Gaza Health Ministry reports have already been killed in the Israeli war on Hamas. The city is already “hanging on the edge of a precipice,” a senior United Nations official told CNN Thursday. Hospitals are overstretched as Palestinians die in Israeli attacks on the suburbs and tens of thousands of people have already fled.

The civilian carnage in the Gaza war has caused outrage globally and generated extreme pressure on Biden at home that threatens to splinter his Democratic coalition as he wages a neck-and-neck reelection campaign against Donald Trump. Republicans are already accusing the president of appeasing terrorists following his comments.

Despite US concerns, Netanyahu’s government says it has no choice but to finish its assault on Hamas, which embeds itself in civilian areas — including in Rafah — where key leaders are hunkered down in tunnels. For Netanyahu, the eradication of the group that carried out the October 7 attacks may be a matter of political survival.

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