The breakdown of talks in Cairo and the rejection of the warning from American President Joe Biden to stop providing weapons to Israel by Benjamin Netanyahu, place Rafah at the center of the war. Yesterday, despite the US withholding the first shipment of bombs to Israel, IDF forces bombed areas of the city, while Palestinian organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacked Israeli tanks streaming into the eastern part of the city with anti-tank missiles and mortars. Meanwhile, during the night, Israeli warplanes struck Hezbollah buildings in southern Lebanon and the cities of Kafr Kila, Alma al-Shab, and Yaroun, after rockets and drones were launched from there towards northern Israel.
Moreover, the Prime Minister of Israel stated, “We will fight ‘tooth and nail’ if necessary. But we have much more than our nails.” Israelis claim that top Hamas officials are hiding among the thousands of refugees in the city, carrying out “surgical” strikes, such as the one in the Shabra neighborhood of Rafah, which resulted in the death of 12 people, including two officials of the “Mujahideen Brigades” organization.
While Israel resumes the attack on Rafah and other parts of the Gaza Strip, in the United States, the White House remained hopeful that Israel would heed its calls and refrain from launching a full-scale attack on Rafah.
“The collapse in Rafah, in President Biden’s view, will not advance this goal,” said spokesperson John Kirby yesterday, noting that Hamas has been significantly pressured by Israel and that there are better options to pursue whatever remains of the organization’s leadership than a risky operation for civilians.
In response to Biden’s threats to stop providing weapons to Israel (and the US withholding a shipment of bombs intended for Israel) if it attacks Rafah, the IDF responded that they have “enough ammunition for Rafah,” while Netanyahu says he hopes he and the US President can overcome their disagreements about the war in Gaza. However, he emphasized that “he has no choice but to destroy” Hamas.
“We often had our agreements, but we also had our disagreements. We managed to overcome them. I hope we can overcome them now, but we will do what we have to do to protect our country,” Netanyahu said in an interview on “Dr. Phil Primetime,” which was recorded before Biden’s threat on Wednesday to withhold further weapons if Israel enters Rafah.
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“If we don’t destroy them, if we leave them alone, they will return. They will emerge from the tunnels, they will reoccupy Gaza, and they will do what they promised to do: They will perpetrate the 7th of October – that massive massacre – again, again, and again,” Netanyahu says. Pressing his argument for why Israel must enter Rafah, Netanyahu says that Israel must destroy the remaining Hamas battalions there. “Rationally thinking people understand that we have no other choice,” he argues.
In his interview with the American network, Netanyahu also referred to the university occupations. He said that some world leaders tell him privately that Hamas must be destroyed, but “when they are confronted with all this propaganda, all this madness at the universities… some of them start to waver. But I don’t waver. We will do what we need to do to protect ourselves.” Asked further about the disturbances at American universities, Netanyahu says that Hamas’s declared goal to destroy Israel “is not resistance.”
“You have many ignorant people, I regret to say, whose sense of history at best goes back to breakfast, not even that. They don’t have the slightest idea what Hamas is,” says the Prime Minister, referring to Hamas’s treatment of homosexuals and women.
And he continued: “Hamas is a country that has no relation to Islamic politics: ‘When they say ‘from the river to the sea,’ that means to obliterate the state of Israel. They support genocide. Now, this is a sad state of American education… There is a deep decay there.”
