Rafah:

Israel’s prime minister on Wednesday insisted there was no “humanitarian catastrophe” in Rafah as he announced nearly 500,000 people had been evacuated from the south Gaza city amid intense fighting.

It came as Palestinians commemorated the 76th anniversary of the “Nakba”, when around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 wartime creation of Israel.

Israeli forces have battled and bombed Hamas around Gaza’s far-southern city of Rafah, but clashes have also flared again in northern and central areas which Israeli troops first entered months ago.

The upsurge in urban combat in besieged Gaza has fuelled US warnings that Israel risks being bogged down in a counterinsurgency operation for years.

But despite previous threats by US President Joe Biden to withhold some arms deliveries over Netanyahu’s insistence on attacking Rafah, his administration informed Congress on Tuesday of a new $1 billion weapons package for Israel, official sources told AFP.

The European Union urged Israel to end its military operation in Rafah “immediately”, warning that failure to do so would “inevitably put a heavy strain” on ties with the bloc.

But even as he announced that hundreds of thousands had been “evacuated”, Netanyahu insisted there was no humanitarian crisis in Rafah.

“Our responsible efforts are bearing fruit. So far, in Rafah, close to half a million people have been evacuated from the combat zones. The humanitarian catastrophe that was spoken about did not materialise, nor will it,” the premier said in a statement.

‘Harder than the Nakba’

The sight of desperate families carrying their scant belongings through the ruins of war-scarred cities has evoked for many the events of the 1948 Nakba which translates from Arabic as “catastrophe”.

Hamas declared in a Nakba Day statement that “the ongoing suffering of millions of refugees inside Palestine and in the diaspora is directly attributed to the Zionist occupation”.

The Islamist group said “their legitimate right to return to their homes from which they were displaced cannot be compromised or relinquished”.

One displaced Gaza man, Mohammed al-Farra, whose family fled their home in Khan Yunis for the coastal area of Al-Mawasi, said: “Our ‘Nakba’… is the worst ever.

“It is much harder than the Nakba of 1948.”

Thousands marched to mark the day in cities across the Israeli-occupied West Bank, waving Palestinian flags, wearing keffiyeh scarves and holding up symbolic keys as reminders of long-lost family homes.

Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Hamas and bring home the hostages still held in Gaza.

An ardent supporter of Israel, Biden has clashed with right-wing hawk Netanyahu as a wave of pro-Palestinian campus protests have heightened election-year political pressure on the Democratic president.

In a Wednesday interview with CNBC, Netanyahu addressed the tensions, saying: “Yes, we do have a disagreement on Gaza. Rather, on Rafah. But we have to do what we have to do.”

Washington has also repeatedly urged Israel to work on a post-war plan for Gaza and supports the goal of a two-state solution, which Netanyahu and his far-right allies strongly oppose.

US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said that, without a political plan for the future, Palestinian groups “will keep coming back” trapping all sides in “this continued cycle of violence”.

Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday said he would “not agree to the establishment of an Israeli military administration in Gaza, Israel must not have civilian control over the Gaza Strip.”

The war broke out after Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

The Hamas also seized about 250 hostages, 128 of whom Israel estimates remain in Gaza, including 36 the military says are dead.

Israel’s military retaliation has killed at least 35,233 people, mostly civilians, according to the Gaza health ministry, and an Israeli siege has brought dire food shortages and the threat of famine.

‘Civilians are starving’

The Israeli military said Wednesday its aircraft had “struck and eliminated approximately 80 terror targets” including military compounds, missile launchers and weapons depots.

It also reported battles in eastern Rafah and in Jabalia in northern Gaza, where it said it had killed them, adding troops were also fighting in the Zeitun area.

Hamas’s armed wing also reported its fighters were clashing with troops in the Jabalia area, much of which has been reduced to rubble.

At least five people were killed, including a woman and her child, in two Israeli air strikes on Gaza City overnight, Gaza’s civil defence agency said.

At the city’s Al-Ahli hospital, a wounded man, his bare chest smeared with blood, lay on a cot while outside several men placed a shrouded corpse in the shade of a tree.

Air raid sirens blared in areas of southern Israel near the Gaza border before the army gave the all-clear, saying it had intercepted a projectile fired from the Jabalia area.

US, Egyptian and Qatari mediators have pushed for a truce and hostage release deal for months, but the talks are now close to “a stalemate”, said Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani.

Sporadic aid deliveries into Gaza by truck have slowed to a trickle since Israeli forces took control of the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt last week.

Another convoy carrying humanitarian relief goods was ransacked by Israeli right-wing activists on Monday after it had crossed from Jordan through the occupied West Bank. 

Washington and London condemned the attack, and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said he was “outraged” about the assault at a time “hundreds of thousands of civilians are starving”.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

Days after the October 7 attack, Joe Biden walked onto the tarmac in Tel Aviv and offered a warm bear hug to Benjamin Netanyahu, a sign both of solid support for Israel and the US president’s long, if not uncomplicated, relationship with the prime minister.

Seven months into the devastating conflict, the gentle approach is over. Biden, who memorably once wrote to Netanyahu “I love you,” has for the first time raised the ultimate leverage the United States has on Israel — military aid, which totals $3 billion a year.

Biden — whose backing for Israel in the face of civilian casualties had riled the left of his Democratic Party months before elections — has been incensed that Netanyahu has rejected appeals to stay out of Rafah, the southern Gaza city where the United Nations says some 1.4 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

Biden administration officials initially saw Netanyahu’s vows to attack Rafah as rhetorical. But in talks with the prime minister, including a visit last week by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US officials have been convinced that Netanyahu is serious.

Biden, in an interview with CNN on Wednesday, vowed to stop supplying bombs and artillery shells if Israel goes ahead in Rafah, after his administration confirmed it had already halted a shipment of thousands of bombs.

Biden, who last spoke to Netanyahu on Monday, has made his case on Rafah “repeatedly and straightforwardly,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said, adding that the invasion was now “a choice that Israel will have to make.”

“It’s one we hope they don’t,” Kirby said.

Netanyahu — who has vowed to eliminate Hamas, which carried the deadliest ever attack on Israel on October 7 — publicly brushed aside Biden’s warnings.

“If we have to stand alone, we will stand alone,” he said.

Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Herzog, said that while he had “full admiration” for Biden, the threat to withhold US weapons was “unacceptable” and “sends the wrong message” to Israel’s adversaries.

Biden’s Republican rival in November elections, former president Donald Trump, accused Biden of siding with Hamas.

But Trump’s relations have also been strained with Netanyahu, who swiftly recognized Biden’s victory in the 2020 election which Trump refused to concede.

Another brawl for Bibi

Fights with Washington are familiar terrain for the hawkish Netanyahu.

Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, who knows the United States intimately from years living in his country’s primary ally, clashed bitterly with the last two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Netanyahu openly campaigned alongside Obama’s Republican rivals against his nuclear diplomacy with Iran, leaving lasting resentment among many Democrats.

But Biden as Obama’s vice president was known internally for advocating holding the Israelis close and expressing concerns privately.

Biden’s approach comes both from his history with Israel and the importance he attached to personal relationships.

Biden has often spoken of traveling as a young senator to Israel shortly after the 1973 Yom Kippur War and being briefed by a chain-smoking prime minister Golda Meir.

At a 2010 event, Biden said his father, horrified by the Holocaust, said his love of Israel “began in my gut and went to my heart” and that his father vocally supported the creation of the state of Israel.

In the same remarks, Biden described Netanyahu as a “close, personal friend” for decades, with Biden having met the future Israeli leader, known by his nickname Bibi, when he was a young diplomat in Washington.

In a later speech, Biden described a photograph he once gifted to Netanyahu, saying he inscribed on it, “Bibi, I don’t agree with damn thing you say, but I love you.”

‘The bear-hug didn’t work’

Allison McManus, managing director for national security and international policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said that whatever the two leaders’ history, their interests were “completely at odds.”

“This is not necessarily a personal friendship that is somehow going to eclipse the strong political interests that each of these leaders has,” she said.

“This is a moment where I think Biden sees that the bear-hug didn’t work. The strong, stern words didn’t work,” she said. “Withholding the weapons is the biggest tool of influence that the US has.”

But she noted that Biden made a threat rather than simply stopping the weapons.

In doing so, Biden is “leaving the door for Netanyahu to pull back from Rafah,” she said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)