The Biden administration tried to argue Thursday that if Israel launched an ambitious attack on Hamas in Rafah, that would strengthen Hamas, improve Hamas’s leverage in hostage negotiations, and build popular support for Hamas.
Israel launched a limited operation in Rafah this week, near the Egyptian border, as it prepares to take on the final four Hamas battalions in a town that is viewed as the last stronghold of the terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that an Israeli military campaign in Rafah would “actually weaken … Israel’s security.” He also said that the U.S. had presented Israel with “a full range of policy choices” that would achieve the same goal of dismantling Hamas without entering Rafah, but did not explain what those choices were.
Asked whether President Joe Biden’s announcement that the U.S. was withholding weapons from Israel would undermine Israel’s leverage in hostage negotiations, Miller said that “hasn’t been our assessment” of the talks.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby made similar claims, according to the Times of Israel:
“Any kind of major Rafah ground operation would actually strengthen Hamas’s hands at the negotiating table, not Israel’s. That’s our view,” Kirby says in a briefing with reporters.
“If I’m Mr. Sinwar, and I’m sitting down in my tunnel… and I’m seeing innocent people falling victim to major significant combat operations in Rafah, then I have less of an incentive to want to come to the negotiating table,” the White House spokesperson argues.
The logic appeared to be that if more Palestinian civilians died, Hamas would have less incentive to release Israeli hostages — whether out of anger at civilian casualties, or because of Hamas’s desire to cause more civilian casualties, Kirby did not make clear.
The White House has not said what an alternative to attacking Hamas in Rafah would be.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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