Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued defiant comments as US unease over a Rafah invasion continues.
“If we need to, we will fight with our fingernails,” Netanyahu said. “But we have much more than fingernails."
On Saturday, Israel ordered new evacuations in the Gaza city, where over 1 million people are reported to have fled to amid Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in the region.
Smoke billows from Israeli strikes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on May 9 (AFP via Getty Images)The evacuations are forcing people to return north where areas are devastated by previous Israeli attacks. People have been displaced multiple times and there are few places left in the embattled strip to move to.
There has not yet been an evacuation of the heavily populated central area, and Israel has so far stopped short of a planned full-scale invasion.
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The Biden administration remains uneasy about a Rafah invasion along with international opposition. President Joe Biden has already said he will not provide offensive weapons to Israel for Rafah, and on Friday the U.S. said there was “reasonable” evidence that Israel had breached international law protecting civilians in the way it conducted its war against Hamas. This is the strongest statement that the Biden administration has yet made on the matter.
A foreign policy adviser to Netanyahu, Ophir Falk, said in reports that Israel complies with international law and that the army attempts to avoid civilian casualties.
They said this includes warning people of coming military operations through texts and phone calls, while also supplying maps to safer areas.
the caveat is that Biden administration wasn’t able to link specific US weapons to individual attacks by Israeli forces in Gaza could give the administration leeway in any future decision on whether to restrict provisions of offensive weapons to Israel.
Netanyahu has not yet said if a full-scale operation in Rafah will go ahead.
Georgios Petropoulos, an official with the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Rafah, said humanitarian workers had no supplies to help them set up in new locations. “We simply have no tents, we have no blankets, no bedding, none of the items that you would expect a population on the move to be able to get from the humanitarian system,” he said.
There are also concerns over food and fuel.
The World Food Program has warned that it will run out of food for distribution in southern Gaza by Saturday, Petropoulos said. Aid groups have said fuel will also be depleted soon, forcing hospitals to shut down critical operations and bringing to a halt trucks delivering aid across south and central Gaza.
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