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Gallant said in a statement that he would meet with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William J. Burns and focus on “preserving Israel’s qualitative military edge,” including “our ability to obtain platforms and munitions.” Gallant said that he also planned to speak with U.S. officials about “ways to achieve our common goals: victory over Hamas and returning the hostages home.”
But while the Israeli side emphasized goals shared with Washington, U.S. officials said the visit will also focus on an issue where Israeli and U.S. policy diverge: the status of Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where nearly 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are sheltering, and where Israeli officials are planning an incursion they say is necessary to root out Hamas.
On Sunday, Vice President Harris told ABC’s “This Week” that any military operation in Rafah “would be a huge mistake.” Asked whether there would be “consequences” from the United States for an Israeli operation in Rafah, she said, “I am ruling out nothing.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the nation late Sunday on the Jewish holiday of Purim, said “it is impossible to defeat the sheer evil [of Hamas] by leaving it intact in Rafah. … We will enter Rafah and achieve total victory.”
Analysts say that Netanyahu’s bellicose rhetoric over a potential Rafah operation is aimed in large part at his domestic constituency, overstating its imminence for political gain.
Aid groups have warned that such an operation could deepen Gaza’s humanitarian disaster. Half of the enclave’s 2.2 million population already face catastrophic levels of hunger, a U.N.-backed report concluded last week. Famine may already have reached some communities.
In the north, where Gaza’s hunger crisis is most acute, fighting raged for a seventh day Monday as the IDF said that it was continuing operations in the area of al-Shifa Hospital.
The IDF has cast the mission as advancing their goal of destroying Hamas, reporting that more than 150 people they said were terrorists have been killed and hundreds of suspects detained since the operation began. The claims could not immediately be verified.
But global health officials have voiced horror at the conditions faced by medics and patients trapped inside the facility. Citing a doctor, who he did not name, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, said Friday that 50 health-care workers and 143 patients were trapped in one building, with extremely limited food, water, and a single, nonfunctional toilet. He reported that many of the patients were in a critical condition, and lying on the floor.
Hossam, 28-year-old man trapped inside a house near the hospital with dozens of relatives, said that the sounds of fighting were constant. He asked that his surname be withheld out of concerns for his safety.
“What scares us most now is that the soldiers find out about us,” he said. “From time to time we would see troop carriers carrying a large number of detainees.” He said that the men of the family had given the women and children pieces of paper carrying the contact information of relatives and acquaintances in southern Gaza, in case they were separated.
From their building high above the hospital, Hossam reported seeing tanks in the courtyard of the medical complex, “while the bulldozers carry out continuous sweeping operations of the streets and neighboring houses.”
While Israel has proposed moving displaced families in the southern city of Rafah to “humanitarian islands” in other parts of the enclave, it is unclear how that would work in practice. Fighting between the Israeli army and Hamas militants has continued to rage in areas that were once designated as safe zones. Civilians, most of them displaced multiple times, say there is no place left in Gaza that is truly safe.
But despite the harsher rhetoric from U.S. leaders, they appear unwilling to use the most direct leverage they have, which would involve imposing conditions on the supply of U.S. military equipment to Israel. During a visit Friday to Tel Aviv, Blinken was asked repeatedly whether the United States might halt or slow aid to Israel if it invades Rafah or if the conflict continues, and each time he said he would not speculate about hypotheticals.
World opinion, meanwhile, has been increasingly coming together in opposition to a Rafah campaign. In Amman, Jordan, on Monday U.N. Secretary General António Guterres described a growing global consensus “to tell the Israelis that the cease-fire is needed.”
“I heard it in the U.S., I heard it from the European Union, not to mention of course the Muslim world, a growing consensus to tell clearly to Israelis that any ground invasion of Rafah could mean a catastrophic humanitarian disaster,” he said.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters last week that Biden has also requested the visit of another delegation, this one so the Israelis could “hear U.S. concerns about Israel’s current Rafah planning and to lay out an alternative approach.”
The team, including Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer and the head of the National Security Council, Tzachi Hanegbi, was due to leave for Washington Monday evening, an Israeli official told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the schedule has not been made public.
Hajar Harb in London, Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv, Rachel Pannett in Sydney, Annabelle Timsit in London and Sarah Dadouch in Beirut contributed to this report.
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