2024-05-11 18:25:50
As part of US attempts to prevent Israel from launching a comprehensive ground attack on Rafah, the newspaper revealed:Washington PostUS President Joe Biden’s administration will provide Israel with “valuable aid” if it renounces the Rafah invasion.
The newspaper explained that this assistance will include providing sensitive information to help the Israeli military locate Hamas leaders and uncover the movement’s hidden tunnels, according to four informed sources.
According to the newspaper, U.S. officials also offered to help provide thousands of shelters so Israel could build tent cities, as well as build food, water and medicine delivery systems, so that Palestinians evacuated from Rafah can have a suitable place to live. » said the US officials, who declined to reveal their identities.
The newspaper explained that Biden and his top aides have made such offers in recent weeks in hopes of convincing Israel to implement a limited, more targeted operation in southern Gaza City, where around 1, 3 million Palestinians have found refuge after fleeing other regions. from Gaza on Israeli orders.
Israel has pledged to enter Rafah with “excessive force” and this week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a number of steps that have raised concerns in the White House about the possibility of carrying out the since-promised invasion. a long time.
The newspaper reported that U.S. administration officials, including experts from the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Israel that it would take several months to safely transfer hundreds of thousands of Palestinians currently living in dilapidated and unsanitary conditions in Rafah. Israeli officials disagree with this assessment.
Biden aides are emphasizing to their Israeli counterparts, the newspaper said, that Palestinians cannot simply be transferred to barren or bombed areas of Gaza, but that Israel must provide basic infrastructure, including shelter, food , water, medicine and other necessities, so that these be… To prevent them from receiving assistance for better living conditions and not simply being exposed to more starvation or disease.
Experts from various sectors of the U.S. government are advising their Israeli counterparts in detail on how to develop and implement such a humanitarian plan, down to the number of tents and the amount of water needed for specific areas, according to several sources close to the case. the affair was reported in the newspaper.
Humanitarian groups said safely evacuating Rafah residents was almost impossible given conditions in the rest of Gaza.
The newspaper believes that these unusually detailed and sensitive discussions highlight the enormous risks facing Israel and the United States as Netanyahu prepares to invade Rafah, the last town in Gaza that has not been destroyed by Israeli attacks. .
The Washington Post noted that Israel has become increasingly isolated during the seven-month war in Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of nearly 35,000 Palestinians, and that Biden has faced massive criticism in at home and abroad for his support of this war.
Israeli leaders emphasize that they must invade Rafah to complete their mission to eliminate Hamas, which attacked Israel on October 7, killing around 1,200 people. But the newspaper reported that destroying the city’s vast network of tunnels, where many Hamas leaders and activists are based, would expose tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians to danger.
This prompted US officials, according to the newspaper, to advocate a large-scale and overly complex evacuation plan as the best option, even as they urgently called for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. .
A senior US administration official told the newspaper: “We have serious concerns about the way Israel has carried out this campaign, and it could culminate in Rafah. »
U.S. officials are now working closely with Egypt to find and dig tunnels across the Egypt-Gaza border in the Rafah region, which Hamas has used to replenish its military resources, according to two people familiar with the discussions. . For the Washington Post.
According to the newspaper, the US offers came during negotiations over the past seven weeks between senior US and Israeli officials regarding the scale and scope of the operation in Rafah. But she said it is not yet clear whether Israel will respond to repeated US warnings not to launch a full-scale ground invasion.
US President Joe Biden has frozen shipments of advanced bombs to Israel and threatened the Netanyahu government to freeze future shipments in the event of an invasion of Rafah, but Israeli threats to continue the operation have not stopped.
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