Israel-Gaza News: Israeli officials ‘deeply frustrated’ by US move to stop arms shipments – as IDF launches another Rafah operation | World News

By Mark Stone, US correspondent

Setting red lines is perfectly fine as long as you stick to them when you cross them.

President Joe Biden knows this all too well.

All too often, these lines in the sand prove to be a flawed tool of geopolitical diplomacy.

Western leaders describe them as clear threats in keynote speeches. “Cross the line if you dare…” is the rhetoric.

The chemical weapons limit set by Barack Obama in 2012 with Syria’s Assad has been exceeded.

Biden’s red line on Ukraine with Putin in 2021 has been crossed.

Each red line is different and of course they differ in the severity of the event they are trying to prevent.

But the principle behind their relocation is the same, as is the message conveyed by crossing them.

Rafah has become Biden’s red line

As Israel sought to defeat Hamas in Gaza over the past six months, President Biden did not believe he needed to draw red lines.

After all, Israel is one of America’s closest allies.

Instead, the Biden administration believed that soft diplomacy and open consultations with a “close friend of America” would be enough.

But gradually, as Biden and the Netanyahu government increasingly disagreed over protecting civilians and a plan for “the day after” in Gaza, a red line emerged – Rafah.

This has become Biden’s red line for Israel.

The American president has repeatedly made it clear that he opposes Netanyahu’s insistence on a ground invasion of the southern Gaza city (Netanyahu’s own red line), which is home to about 1.4 million people, half of them under 18.

The Israeli military has not (yet) entered the city of Rafah, but is instead concentrating its operations on the east of the city and around the crossing into Egypt.

This fact allowed the Biden administration to claim that its red line had not yet been crossed.

“They didn’t describe it as a major ground operation,” spokesman John Kirby said this week.

Is the stoppage of aid just symbolic?

Sometimes red lines are broken. Sometimes they are gradually removed.

The announcement that was leaked a few days ago that America has “paused” an arms shipment to Israel is significant.

Nothing like this has ever happened before, and symbolically for Israel it looks terrible in the middle of its longest and most critical war.

It is an attempt by Biden to plug a hole in his red line. A warning to Netanyahu.

Israeli officials are “deeply frustrated.” That is Biden’s intention.

But is it really just symbolic?

It is quite inconceivable that America would abandon Israel when it comes to arms supplies.

This show may have been paused. Others will continue to include defensive weapons.

Biden pulls many levers to influence Netanyahu. He has others, such as getting the problem of settler violence in the West Bank properly under control.

But behind every lever he pulls there is a domestic political calculation.

Nearly all Republicans oppose every lever he pulls, as do a significant number of his own Democrats.

But critical voters in key states are very pro-Palestine. It’s push-me-pull-you and the election is still six months away.