Biden Stops Some Weapons Shipments to Israel, but What’s Next?
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President Joe Biden threatened to withhold arms shipments to Israel if it continues with its planned invasion of Rafah, as he acknowledged U.S. weapons have been deployed against civilians in Gaza.
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they 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,” Biden said Wednesday in an interview with CNN.
The White House has long opposed Israel’s planned incursion into Rafah, but this is the bluntest Biden has been about trying to force Israel to change course. Last week, the U.S. quietly paused the shipment of 3,500 bombs it feared might be used in Israel’s assault on Rafah. Yet, it was Israeli officials, not the Biden administration, who first revealed the hold on the weapons deliveries.
The administration is also weighing whether to halt more offensive weapons shipments, though it will not stop any equipment needed for Israel’s defense. “We’re going to continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks that came out of the Middle East recently,” Biden said. “But it’s, it’s just wrong. We’re not going to – we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.” Biden reiterated he believes in Israel’s right to defend itself and said the U.S was not walking away from Israel’s security.
Biden had come under increasing pressure, including from college protesters and some Democratic lawmakers, to condition U.S. support for Israel, especially as the country prepares its offensive in Rafah. More than a million Palestinians are in Rafah, including hundreds of thousands who fled there to escape Israel’s offensive elsewhere. More than half of them are children. “There is nowhere safe on the Gaza strip to go to,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on Wednesday.
One pause in U.S. weapons shipments is a signal, but it likely won’t prevent Israel from waging all-out war in Rafah if it chooses. Israel is the largest recipient of American military aid; under a 2016 Obama-era agreement, Israel gets nearly $4 billion a year in weapons assistance through 2028. Congress recently approved a few additional billions in aid, including about $4 billion for missile defense. Some experts noted Israel likely has stockpiled a lot of the artillery and offensive weaponry it would need for ground offensive operations.
“It would take more than stopping one shipment of arms,” Josh Paul, a former State Department official who worked in arms transfers and resigned in protest over the United States’s Israel policy last year, told Splinter before Biden’s announcement.
“It would take a concerted change of policy for several months,” Paul said. “But, at the end of the day, Israel is reliant on U.S. arms, and if nothing else, if there were to be pauses that lasted a week or more, Israel would have to start thinking about where its priorities lie – whether it wants to start tapping into its strategic reserves that it needs for, for example, a Lebanon contingency, or whether it can just continue raining hell on Gaza.”
Israel has begun limited incursions into Rafah, and Israel’s seizure of a border crossing has already blocked off aid, which will exacerbate the already dire humanitarian conditions for Gazans. Ceasefire negotiations continue, though the prospects seem pretty grim right now; Hamas has said it won’t compromise further and Israel had previously signaled that weapons pauses might jeopardize those talks. Some Israeli officials, unsurprisingly, are angered at the U.S.’s potential hold on arms deliveries, like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who wrote this on X.