‘President Biden Has Taken Forceful Action’: Dems Back Biden’s Decision to Withhold Arms
High numbers of Palestinian civilians dead at issue
Senior members of the Biden administration, and other Democrats, fanned out on television Sunday to back President Biden’s decision to withhold high-power weapons from Israel in its attack on the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
A political firestorm erupted last week when Biden acknowledged that he was holding back huge bombs from being delivered to Israel, in order to prevent their use against Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians have taken refuge since Israel’s military campaign began in Gaza after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.
Biden had been under mounting pressure to do more to prevent massive deaths of Palestinian civilians. About 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly young children and women.
Biden has been warning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for weeks not to invade Rafah.
Biden administration officials share the conclusion that the Israeli military has killed more civilians than actual Hamas terrorists, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“There’s a gap between the stated intent and some of the results we’ve seen,” he said of Israel, in an appearance on the NBC News program, Meet The Press. “But because it’s so complicated, in the midst of a war, and particularly in the midst of a war where you have an enemy that hides in civilian infrastructure, to make final determinations on these individual incidents. We’re looking the totality of what’s happened.
“We think it’s reasonable to assess based on what’s happened that there have been acts that have been inconsistent with Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law,” Blinken said.
Because so many Palestinians have sought safe haven in Rafah, it should not be subject to the same kind of widespread devastation as the rest of Gaza, Blinken told host Kristen Welker.
“As you know, Margaret, most of the population from Gaza displaced from the north and from central Gaza have gone to Rafah. We said to Israel we cannot and will not support a major military operation in Rafah in the absence of a credible plan to protect civilians. We have not seen that plan,” he said.
A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen Chris Coons (D-Del) appeared on ABC News to back Biden’s decision.
“I think President Biden has taken forceful action, so much so there’s been a lot of blowback for his recent public statement, and I’ll remind you other American presidents have done the same thing when a close, trusted partner isn’t listening to private admonitions,” he said. “It was President [Ronald] Reagan who repeatedly paused the delivery of F-16s when the then-prime minister [of Israel] conducted a strike against a Syrian nuclear complex and invaded southern Lebanon and conducted the war in southern Lebanon in a way that raised real concerns about the civilian consequences.”
Another member of Foreign Relations, Sen Chris Murphy (D-Conn) was interviewed on CNN and he, too, supports Biden.
“President Biden is learning the mistakes us military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, what we learned in both of those efforts was that you cannot defeat a terrorist ideology. You cannot defeat you a terrorist movement with military force alone and Afghanistan, we spent 20 years there,” Murphy said. “And ultimately we were so cavalier about civilian casualties that we made the Taliban stronger. And we ultimately lost that engagement to the Taliban.
“And so in Israel, what Joe Biden is telling the Israelis is, ‘We will be partners with you but you have to understand that the pace of civilian casualties, the amount of humanitarian disaster there is in the long-run, going to make Hamas stronger, is going to make it more likely that Israel will be attacked again and is going to make other terrorist organizations that have designed to attack the United States stronger,’” he said. “So we will be partners in this fight, but in the situation of Rafah, we cannot have a military invasion of Rafah that ends up in tens of thousands of additional civilians dying. That would be bad for Israel from a moral and a strategic standpoint.”
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