Team Biden to Israel – Secure Egypt-Gaza border

Israel sees a ground assault in Rafah as crucial to achieving long-term security. However, Team Biden intends to present alternative solutions to Israel. One of their suggestions? Securing the Egypt-Gaza border. Joe Biden proposed to Benjamin Netanyahu to send an interagency team to Washington D.C. to hear U.S. concerns about Rafah. The U.S. side is not suggesting that Israel not do what it intends to do. Instead, they want Israel to know that the U.S. is willing to work with them on alternative solutions that will help with their security.

From The Times of Israel:

Elaborating on the alternative approach the Biden administration has in mind, a second senior US official said Washington envisions Israel focusing instead on preventing the smuggling of weapons from Egypt into Gaza through the Philadelphi Corridor.

The official avoided blaming the Egyptian government for the smuggling that was partially responsible for Hamas’s re-armament amid successive rounds of conflict with Israel over the past 15 years. However, they said reaching a new arrangement with Cairo and building the necessary infrastructure to cut off the smuggling route would be more critical to the dismantlement of Hamas than a major ground offensive in Rafah.

“If Israel smashes into Rafah with all the civilian casualties that doing so would entail, cooperation from Egypt on locking down the [Philadelphi] Corridor will be much more difficult,” the second senior official said.

The first official clarified that US opposition to a major Rafah ground invasion doesn’t mean it opposes more targeted operations against Hamas’s leadership in Rafah or elsewhere, and said that the alternative plans the Biden administration intends to present to the visiting Israeli delegation will focus on this goal as well.

The US also envisions Israel using the coming period to implement a massive humanitarian surge, the US official said, speaking two days after the publication of a UN-backed report warning that famine is imminent in northern Gaza.

The senior US official said this will require Israel to open additional ground routes within Gaza to deliver aid to the north, where some 300,000 Palestinians have been practically cut off from aid after bucking IDF directives to evacuate at the beginning of the war. Israel and Hamas are almost six months into a war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 massacre, when thousands of terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 253 hostages during a murderous rampage across southern Israel.

The Times of Israel provides additional information here.

Category: Biden, GWOT, International Affairs, Israel