President Biden summoned senior Israeli military, intelligence and humanitarian officials to Washington for consultations over Israel’s plans to launch a major military operation in Rafah.
President Biden has summoned a senior Israeli military, intelligence and humanitarian team to Washington for consultations over Israel’s plans to launch a major military operation in Rafah, telling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call Monday that any effort to “smash” into the southern Gaza city would be a mistake, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.
In the talks, which Sullivan said Israel had agreed to, the United States will “lay out an alternative approach that would target key Hamas elements … without a major ground invasion.” He said the meeting would be held by the beginning of next week.Sullivan insisted that the first call between the two leaders in more than a month was “very businesslike.
The conversation came as a new report from a group of international aid organizations known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, or IPC,in which more than 1.1 million people — half of the Gaza population — face catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation. “This is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded” by the IPC, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said at a news briefing.
The administration has pressed Israel instead to secure northern Gaza, where its scorched-earth military campaign began last fall, so that aid can be delivered to the hundreds of thousands of people remaining there who are on the brink of famine, and so that the hundreds of thousands more who fled to the south can return home. Late Sunday, Israel again attacked al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza City in search of Hamas fighters it had said were cleared out in its previous assault.
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