U.S. officials said Tuesday that an Israeli attack that killed dozens of Palestinians in southern Gaza was a tragedy but did not violate President Biden's red line on withholding arms exports to Israel.
The bloodshed came after Biden warned earlier this month that the United States would block certain arms transfers if Israel attacked the populated area of Rafah – a warning that has been carried out periodically as the war has dragged on.
White House spokesman John F. Kirby said the casualties were “devastating” but that the scale of the attack was not enough to change U.S. policy. “We don't want to see a major ground operation,” Kirby told reporters. “We've never seen anything like that.”
Kirby said Israeli tanks were on the city's outskirts “to put pressure on Hamas,” and offered some specificity to Biden's warning to Israel that critics say was too vague.
“We have not seen them conduct any large scale operations or large numbers of soldiers in columns or formations, any sort of coordinated operations against multiple targets on the ground,” Kirby said. “All the information that we're seeing indicates that they are not conducting a large scale ground operation in the populated areas of Rafah city.”
Biden has come under pressure from supporters and members of his own party to use his power to cut arms supplies to Israel to influence its conduct in the war. The United States is by far Israel's largest arms supplier, and as the deaths mount, American responsibility is being called into question.
The attack in Rafah on Sunday, which sparked a deadly fire, killed at least 45 people, including children, and injured 249, according to Gaza's health ministry, and has drawn international outrage, including from the leaders of the European Union, the United Nations, Egypt and China.
Asked about Rafah on Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris said “tragic” words don't even begin to describe the deaths. She did not answer a follow-up question about whether the attack crossed a red line for Biden.
Still, the Israeli military's actions are similar to those that Biden said he would not tolerate in a CNN interview earlier this month, when he warned that the U.S. would not supply Israel with weapons to attack Rafah.
“I made it clear to President Bibi and his war cabinet that if they actually go into these population centers, they're not going to have our support,” Biden said in the interview.
In the interview, Biden stressed that the US would still ensure Israel's security, citing support for the Iron Dome missile defense system and Israel's “ability to respond to attacks,” but said it would block the delivery of weapons that could be launched into the populated area of Rafah.
The area attacked on Sunday was not included in Israel's evacuation order issued in early May, and some Palestinians who had taken refuge in the camp said they considered it a safe haven.
The Israeli military said Sunday's attack targeted a Hamas facility and used “precision bombs” to target its commander and another senior official. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the civilian deaths were a “tragic accident.”
According to the United Nations, around one million people have fled the city of Rafah during the Israeli military's offensive on the city, including many in the west of the city and in areas around the camp that was hit on Sunday.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the United States was closely monitoring the Israeli investigation into the incident.
“Israel has said that there may have been a Hamas munitions dump near the area where Hamas carried out the attack,” Miller said. “This is a very important factual question that must be answered.”
Israeli military spokesman Maj. Gen. Daniel Hagari told a news conference that Israeli warplanes had fired the “smallest munitions” they could use, adding that “our munitions alone would not have been able to cause a fire of this magnitude.”
Israel invaded Gaza after a Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 killed about 1,200 people inside Israel. Gaza health officials say Israeli retaliatory attacks have killed more than 36,000 people, many of them women and children.
World leaders, including Biden, have warned about the dangers of conducting a large-scale military operation in Rafah without a proper plan for evacuating Gaza residents who have taken refuge there.
Miller was able to provide few details about the hundreds of thousands of people who have fled Rafah in recent weeks.
“Some of them went back to Khan Yunis,” he said. “Some went to western Rafah. Some went to Mawashi. I don't think there's one answer.” Miller said he didn't know whether Israel was supporting the people.
Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and an adviser to Palestinian leaders in past peace talks, said the White House was benefiting from Biden's vague description of his “red lines” regarding Israel's military operation in Rafah.
“This is clearly ambiguous and deliberate,” Elgindy said. “They don't want to be tied down. They don't want to tie themselves down because Israel will definitely cross that line. We've seen it many times.”
Erica L. Green With assistance from Washington, Michael Crowley From New York.