President Joe Biden spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, impressing upon the Jewish state leader that no military operation in Rafah should continue without a plan to evacuate civilians.
Biden “called for urgent and specific steps to increase the throughput and consistency of humanitarian assistance to innocent Palestinian civilians,” the White House said in a statement Sunday afternoon. “He reaffirmed his view that a military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there.”
Rafah is a highly populated city in Gaza bordering Egypt, holding more than half of Gaza’s entire population, and home to one of the largest refugee camps for Palestinians fleeing war. Last week, Israel ordered evacuations in the city in anticipation of a military operation to rout out what the country believes is the last bastion of the terrorist organization Hamas.
According to the Associated Press, Israel launched airstrikes, killing at least 44 Palestinians, which included more than a dozen children, in spite of the U.S. warning Israel last week not to complete operations in Rafah.
In Biden’s call with Netanyahu, the president said he “shared” the prime minister’s goal “to see Hamas defeated and to ensure the long-term security of Israel and its people,” according to the White House statement.
In its initial attack, Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7, most of whom were civilians. Since the onset of the war, the Gaza Health Ministry says nearly 28,000 Palestinians have been killed, the Associated Press reported Friday.
Despite White House concerns that the Israeli military is not taking proper precautions to ensure it is killing as few civilians as possible, saying its conduct has been “over the top,” Netanyahu brushed off those claims.
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“I appreciate President Biden’s support for Israel since the beginning of the war. I don’t know exactly what he meant by that, but put yourself in Israel’s shoes. We were attacked. Unprovoked attack, murderous attack on Oct. 7, the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust,” he said Sunday. “And let me tell you, I think we’ve responded in a way that goes after the terrorists and tries to minimize the civilian population in which the terrorists embed themselves and use them as human shields.”
“We dropped thousands of fliers. We phone Palestinians in their homes. We ask them to leave. We give them safe corridors and safe zones,” he continued.
