Israel Lacks “Credible Plan” To Safeguard Rafah Civilians, Says Blinken

Rafah is hosting some 1.4 million Palestinians (File)

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday said Israel lacked a “credible plan” to protect some 1.4 million Palestinian civilians in Rafah and warned an Israeli attack could create an insurgency by failing to kill all Hamas fighters in the southern Gazan city.

“Israel is on a trajectory potentially to inherit an insurgency with many armed Hamas fighters left or if it leaves a vacuum filled by chaos, filled by anarchy and probably refilled by Hamas,” Blinken said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Hamas fighters, he said, already are returning to areas of northern Gaza that Israel claimed to have cleared.

Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah has helped fuel the deepest tensions in relations between Israel and its main ally in generations.

NBC and CBS News aired interviews with Blinken dominated by President Joe Biden’s decision to pause a shipment to Israel of bombs over fears of massive civilian casualties in Rafah and a State Department report that Israel’s use of US-supplied arms may have broken international law.

The report, which was unrelated to the bomb shipment, found no specific violations justifying withholding US military aid, saying the chaos of war prevented verification of individual alleged breaches.

Hamas’ use of civilian infrastructure and tunnels “makes it very difficult to determine, particularly in the midst of war,” what happened in specific instances, Blinken said, defending the report criticized by some lawmakers of Biden’s Democratic Party and human rights groups.

Defending the pause on the shipment of 3,500 2,000-pound and 500-pound bombs, Blinken said Israel lacked a “credible plan” to protect some 1.4 million civilians sheltering in Rafah.

He told CBS that the shipment was the only US weapons package being withheld.

But that could change, he said, if Israel launches a full-scale attack on Rafah, which Israel says it plans to invade to root out entrenched Hamas fighters.

If Israel “launches this major military operation to Rafah, then there are certain systems that we’re not going to be supporting and supplying for that operation,” said Blinken.

Israel needs to “have a clear, credible plan to protect civilians, which we haven’t seen,” he said.

Rafah is hosting some 1.4 million Palestinians, most of them displaced from elsewhere in Gaza by fighting and Israeli bombardments that have devastated the seaside enclave.

Israel also has not developed a post-war plan for the security, governance and reconstruction of Gaza, Blinken said, adding on CBS that the United States is working with Arab governments and others on such a plan.

“We have the same objectives as Israel,” he said. “We want to make sure that Hamas cannot govern Gaza again.”

The death count in Israel’s military operation in Gaza has passed at least 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

The war was triggered by the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which some 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 people taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel says 620 soldiers have been killed in the fighting.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)