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By Marissa Newman, Gwen Ackerman and Fares Akram
US President Joe Biden warned Israel against attacking the city of Rafah in southern Gaza as cease-fire talks with Hamas remained deadlocked at the beginning of Ramadan.
The US hoped for a breakthrough before Islam’s holy month, which began after sundown on Sunday. A deal would probably lead to a six-week pause in fighting, the freeing of dozens of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza and the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
Negotiations remain at an impasse, however, with Israel accusing Hamas of stalling in a bid to inflame violence across the region during Ramadan, and Hamas saying more Israeli hostages had died in captivity than earlier believed.
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Israel has said that, barring a total surrender by Hamas, it has to launch an assault on Rafah because it’s the last bastion of the Iran-backed group. Israeli military officials estimate 5,000 to 8,000 Hamas fighters are holed up there. Israel’s indicated it would be prepared to move into the city during Ramadan if there’s no truce.
More than a million Palestinian civilians are also sheltering in Rafah, most of them having fled from northern parts of Gaza at the start of the war in October.
In an interview with MSNBC on Saturday, Biden expressed hope that a cease-fire can still be reached and warned that an Israeli invasion of Rafah would represent a “red line.”
Previously, he said an offensive couldn’t happen until Israel allowed civilians to leave. Netanyahu has pledged that will happen. On Sunday, he reiterated that Israel plans to move forces in at some stage.
“We’ll go there,” he said in an interview with Axel Springer, Politico’s parent company. “I have a red line. You know what the red line is — that October 7 doesn’t happen again.”
The war has been raging since Hamas militants killed 1,200 people and abducted 250 during their Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel.
More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israel’s retaliatory air and ground attacks, according to officials in the Hamas-run territory. Hamas is designated a terrorist organization by the US and the European Union.
Biden’s comments came as the US military began sending supplies to Gaza by sea and building a temporary dock to deliver large quantities of aid. Ships will carry food, water, medicine and other supplies to the Mediterranean enclave, which has been devastated by the war. In his State of the Union address on Thursday, Biden called the situation in Gaza “heartbreaking.”
Most aid has gone into Gaza on trucks through the Egyptian border. Some countries, including the US and Jordan, are carrying out air drops too.
The move to open a maritime corridor comes as the US and Arab states criticize Israel — which inspects all goods going into Gaza in case they include military supplies for Hamas — for not allowing trucks in quickly enough.
The president, in a statement released to mark the beginning of Ramadan, said the US will lead international efforts to get aid into Gaza.
“We’ll continue to work with Israel to expand deliveries by land, insisting that it facilitate more routes and open more crossings to get more aid to more people,” he said.
The only truce so far lasted a week and ended on Dec. 1. During that, dozens of hostages were released from Gaza in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.
“We cannot have another 30,000 Palestinians dead,” Biden said on MSNBC, adding that Netanyahu “must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.”
“He is hurting Israel more than helping Israel,” Biden added, in some of the harshest criticism he’s leveled against the Israeli leader.
“I don’t know exactly what the president meant,” Netanyahu said in the Axel Springer interview. “But if he meant by that that I’m pursuing private policies against the majority — the wish of the majority of Israelis — and that this is hurting the interests of Israel, then he’s wrong on both counts.”
Biden said he would never cut off weapon supplies to Israel and affirmed Israel’s right to fight Hamas.
Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, which is handling the cease-fire and hostage negotiations, said talks were ongoing to “narrow the gaps” with Hamas. Still, it sounded pessimistic a deal would be struck soon.
“Hamas is holding to its position as if it was uninterested in a deal and is striving to ignite the region during Ramadan at the expense of the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip,” Mossad said in a statement.
Hamas is believed to be holding about 130 Israeli hostages. It’s unclear how many are still alive.
In an interview with Bloomberg, a Hamas official called Husam Badran said at least 60 hostages had died because of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. The claim couldn’t be independently verified.
