If Israel’s ongoing assault on Rafah on the Gaza Strip is anything to go on, the concept of “red lines”, so beloved of US presidents as a measure of when to take action, is increasingly flexible. Back in February, when the Israeli government was planning the operation, the US president Joe Biden said it would have “consequences”.
An all-out assault on the area, where an estimated 400,000 people remain stranded for want of any other safe areas, would force the White House to reconsider its military support for its longtime close ally. Biden told CNN that if the Israel Defense Forces moved into Rafah, “I’m not supplying the weapons”. He reiterated that message on March 9.
But now the message coming out of Washington and Jerusalem is that neither Israel’s ground assault of Rafah which is well under way nor the Israeli airstrike which struck a tent encampment in Rafah, killing 45 people including women and children at the weekend had breached any red lines. Israel says it has gradually moved through the various districts of Rafah, relocating civilians as it has proceeded and always targeting Hamas fighters. And this means it has been a “limited operation”.
This hasn’t prevented the horrified reaction from much of the rest of the world at the images of the burned bodies of women and children from the weekend airstrike. The strike came just two days after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to halt its operations in Rafah. The ICJ also ordered Israel to open the border crossing between Gaza and Egypt to allow aid to access a population that remains on the brink of starvation. But the ICJ has no power to enforce its rulings.
Now that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has total control of the Philadelphi Corridor, the 14km demilitarised strip which runs along the border with Egypt, opening the crossing should notionally be easy. But the latest reports are that it remains closed.
The ICJ ruling in turn came two days after the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan KC, revealed he had applied for arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant, and several of Hamas’s top leaders on the grounds of war crimes.
These recent events suggest there has been a considerable shift in international sentiment away from hitherto fairly solid support for Israel, observes Julie Norman, a senior associate fellow on the Middle East at the Royal United Services Institute and an expert in international and US affairs at UCL. This will add to the pressure on both Netanyahu and the US president, whose longstanding support for Israel has been sorely tested over the past months.
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But Norman believes this is more likely to result in a circling of the wagons in both Jerusalem and........