Middle East Crisis: Biden’s Warning on Weapons Supplies Creates Outrage in Israel

President Biden’s remarks underscored a widening rift between the United States and Israel over the Israeli government’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, which has caused enormous civilian devastation.

American-made weapons, including heavy bombs, have played a key role in Israel’s war effort since the country came was brutally attacked Hamas and other militant groups on Oct. 7.

Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, declared that Israel would achieve “complete victory,” despite what he described as the American president’s “pushback and arms embargo.”

“We simply have no choice as this war is an existential one and anything other than complete victory will put the existence of the Jewish state in danger,” he said.

The Israeli army sent tanks and troops into the eastern part of Rafah on Monday night and proceeded to take over the main border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, but has stopped short of entering built-up parts of the city.

It was not immediately clear whether Israel has stockpiled enough weapons to mount a major operation in Rafah without weapons from the United States, which is by far its largest arms supplier.

Nadav Eyal, a prominent columnist for a centrist Israeli newspaper, said Mr. Biden had essentially decided to announce the end of the war publicly. He called the U.S. decision “the most serious clash between an American administration and the government of Israel since the first Lebanon war,” he wrote on X.

During that conflict, in 1982, the Reagan administration suspended the delivery of cluster-type artillery ammunition to Israel.

But he said he would block the delivery of weapons that could be fired into densely populated areas of Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering.

The president had already halted the shipment of 3,500 bombs last week out of concern that they might be used in a major assault on Rafah — the first time since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 that Mr. Biden has leveraged U.S. arms to try to influence how the war is waged.

On Wednesday, he said that he would also block the delivery of artillery shells.

“If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities, that deal with that problem,” Mr. Biden said in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett.

He added: “But it’s just wrong. We’re not going to — we’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells used, that have been used.”

Asked whether 2,000-pound American bombs had been used to kill civilians in Gaza, Mr. Biden said: “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers.”

Mr. Biden’s remarks underscore the growing rift between the United States and its closest Middle East ally over the war in Gaza, which has killed more than 34,000 people and caused a humanitarian crisis. The United States is by far the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, and the Biden administration plans to deliver a report to Congress this week assessing whether it believes Israel’s assurances that it has used American weapons in accordance with U.S. and international law.

Mr. Biden had resisted earlier calls to condition aid to Israel. He remains unwavering in his support of Israel’s right to defend itself, even as he speaks out forcefully against the invasion of Rafah and grows frustrated with what he once described as Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing.”

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has rebuffed the U.S. warnings, saying that Israel would move forward with eradicating Hamas even if it has to do so alone.

This week, the Israeli war cabinet voted unanimously to move forward with a Rafah assault, and Israeli forces warned more than 100,000 civilians to evacuate as it started what it called “targeted strikes” against Hamas.

U.S. officials said this week that Israel had said its operation thus far in Rafah was “limited” and “designed to cut off Hamas’s ability to smuggle weapons into Gaza,” but continued to express their concern with an escalation.

Mr. Biden said he did not consider Israel’s operations in Rafah to date to qualify as a full-scale invasion because they have not struck “population centers.”

But he said he considered them to be “right on the border,” adding that they were causing problems with key allies such as Egypt, which has been integral to cease-fire negotiations and opening border crossings for humanitarian aid.

Mr. Biden said he had made it clear to Mr. Netanyahu and his war cabinet that they would not get support if they moved forward with an offensive in densely populated areas.

“We’re not walking away from Israel’s security,” he said, “we’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas.”

Mr. Biden was also asked about Gaza protests on college campuses — specifically chants calling him “Genocide Joe” — that have erupted in recent weeks.

Asked if he hears the message of those young Americans, Mr. Biden said:

“Absolutely, I hear the message.”

— Erica L. Green Reporting from Racine, Wis., where President Biden was traveling on Wednesday

What happened after Oct. 7?

Since Oct. 7, the United States has sent tens of thousands of weapons to Israel. For the most part, it accelerated supplies that were already committed under contracts, many of which were approved by Congress and the State Department long ago, according to Bradley Bowman, a military expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

“What the U.S. started to do almost immediately was send an extraordinary flow of weapons,” Mr. Bowman, a former U.S. Army officer, said.

According to a report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, there were so many arms shipments to Israel that a senior Pentagon official said the Department of Defense sometimes struggled to find sufficient cargo aircraft to deliver them.

Pete Nguyen, a Pentagon spokesman, said in an email that recent assistance has included precision-guided munitions, artillery ammunition, medical supplies and “other categories of critical equipment.”

He added that “the United States has surged billions of dollars in security assistance to Israel since the Oct. 7 attacks.”

How much has been made public?

Lawmakers and news media have recently criticized the lack of public information about the sales. The Defense Department so far has only published two news releases, on Dec. 9 and 29, about the approval of emergency military sales to Israel, while it lists much of the military equipment sent to Ukraine in a regularly updated fact sheet.

As laid out in those news releases, the aid sent to Israel from Oct. 7 to Dec. 29 included 52,229 M795 155-millimeter artillery shells, 30,000 M4 propelling charges for howitzers, 4,792 M107 155-mm artillery shells and 13,981 M830A1 120-mm tank rounds.

But the State Department can legally refrain from telling Congress and the public about some new arms orders placed by Israel since Oct. 7 because they fall below a certain dollar amount.

The Washington Post reported that the United States had approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since Oct. 7.

What did they send?

One sale approved in late October allows for the sale to Israel of $320 million in kits for converting unguided “dumb” bombs into GPS-guided munitions, on top of a previous, $403 million order for the same guidance kits.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies compiled a list of news reports and official information available about the weapons delivered. According to the reports, that included air defense systems, precision-guided munitions, artillery shells, tank rounds, small arms, Hellfire missiles used by drones, 30-mm cannon ammunition, PVS-14 night vision devices and disposable shoulder-fired rockets.

The Pentagon leased its two Israeli-made Iron Dome antimissile batteries back to Israel, according to the website Breaking Defense.

The U.S. also gave Israel access to the U.S. military stockpiles in Israel for immediate needs. An American official said that Israel’s recently requested munitions from those stockpiles have included bombs ranging from 250 to 2,000 pounds, and that many have been 500-pound bombs.

How is it funded?

The military aid to Israel is funded under a 2016 agreement known as a memorandum of understanding that committed the United States to giving Israel $38 billion in weapons over 10 years.

Additionally, President Biden last month signed an aid package that will send about $15 billion in additional military aid.

Israel regularly receives arms from the Defense Department and from American weapons makers directly, which included the unguided and guided bombs that Israel has bought from the United States over the years and dropped on Gaza in recent months, and also fighter jets, air defense missiles and helicopters.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. military aid to Israel has amounted to $216 billion since Israel’s founding in 1948.

John Ismay contributed reporting.

No aid trucks have entered Gaza since Sunday through the two main border crossings, the United Nations said on Wednesday in its own warning about the dire implications of Israel seizing the Rafah crossing with Egypt on Tuesday and closing the Kerem Shalom crossing between Gaza and southern Israel over the weekend. Israel said it had reopened Kerem Shalom on Wednesday, but as of about midnight on Thursday, no fuel or other humanitarian aid had entered Gaza through the crossing, according to UNRWA, the main U.N. agency aiding Palestinians in the enclave.

Already, the Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital — one of three major hospitals in Rafah that has been partially functioning before the Israeli military’s operation this week — has entirely shut down and emptied out, according to Dr. Marwan al-Hams, the hospital’s director.

Speaking by phone from a field hospital in southern Gaza, Dr. al-Hams said that all patients and doctors at Al-Najjar had fled or been transferred to other medical facilities and that a few health workers had risked their lives to return to the hospital complex to try to salvage medical equipment and supplies.

When Israel banned the entry of any fuel into Gaza for several weeks at the start of the war, it plunged the entire enclave into darkness and turned hospitals into places of cascading horrors. Surgeons at the Kamal Adwan Hospital, in northern Gaza, were forced to operate by cellphone flashlight and premature infants who needed incubators died at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

All humanitarian operations across the Gaza Strip are at imminent risk of collapse because of the lack of fuel, international aid groups said at a joint news conference on Wednesday.

“If the fuel is cut off, the aid operation collapses, and it collapses quickly,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International. “That means water can’t be pumped, lights can’t be kept on in hospitals, vehicles cannot distribute aid.”

The lack of fuel is also further threatening the availability of food in Gaza, where the local authorities say that some children have already died of starvation.

Rafeek El Madhoun, a program manager for the aid group Rebuilding Alliance, said on Wednesday that some of its kitchens in Gaza had been unable to cook for two days, even as Israeli military operations in Rafah were causing a “crazy increase” in the number of hungry and displaced people arriving in western parts of the city and in central Gaza.

Mr. El Madhoun, who said he has been making daily trips between Rafah and Deir al Balah, roughly 12 miles north, said the coastal road between southern and central Gaza had become increasingly crowded as people fled, and that transportation costs to move supplies from one place to another had tripled.

The immediate and wide-ranging threat to already overwhelmed humanitarian operations in Gaza undermines the Israeli military’s claim that its offensive in Rafah has been “limited,” the director of the W.H.O.’s health emergencies program, Dr. Michael Ryan, said at a separate news conference on Wednesday.

He said that closing the two border crossings . “The first act is to stop the fuel, stop the food, stop the medicine at source, at the border.”

“I don’t call that ‘limited’ and I don’t call that ‘restricted.’ I call that a re-imposition of total blockade on nearly 2.5 million civilians who are already starving, who are already dying from preventable diseases, and who need our protection.”

Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting.

Israel said that the Kerem Shalom crossing reopened on Wednesday, but did not indicate when the Rafah crossing would reopen. The U.N. disputed Israel’s claim.

The fighting in the Rafah area and the closure of the crossings set aid efforts back, at least temporarily, to the conditions of the first weeks of the war, when an Israeli and Egyptian blockade prevented anything from entering Gaza, producing desperate shortages of food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies. Israel has described the military action it began on Monday as a limited incursion into Rafah that seized control of the border crossing, not the full-fledged offensive it has vowed to carry out, despite warnings from the United States and aid groups that it would be a humanitarian catastrophe.

U.N. officials said the conditions threaten to halt all its humanitarian operations in Gaza.

As many as a million people displaced from other parts of Gaza, more than half of them children, have sought refuge there, living in squalid conditions and relying on international aid efforts.

“Rafah is the epicenter of humanitarian operations in Gaza,” António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, said on Tuesday. “Attacking Rafah will further upend our efforts to support people in dire humanitarian straits as famine looms.”

Before the war began last October, about 500 aid trucks and additional commercial trucks a day carried supplies into Gaza, home to some 2.3 million people. Even after deliveries resumed, they were a fraction of the prewar level, as Israel kept most crossings closed, insisted on close inspection of every load, and barred some supplies.

After intense international pressure on Israel, including from the United States, the average rose to more than 200 humanitarian aid trucks a day in second half of April and the first days of May, according to the United Nations, still well below what aid agencies said was needed and what the Biden administration had called for. No commercial trucks have entered Gaza since the war started in October.

For months the United Nations and aid groups have also struggled to gain access and safe passage for their staff to work in Gaza, despite intense negotiations with Israel.

Now, U.N. officials say that the limited progress they had made is in jeopardy.

“We are managing the whole aid operation opportunistically as opposed to holistically — if there is something we can grab we will grab it,” said Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, in an interview on Wednesday.

“We want the ability to work without being in the middle of a conflict zone and people we are trying to help being terrified,” he added.

A day earlier the leader of the U.N.’s humanitarian office for the Palestinian territories, Andrea De Domenico, said from Jerusalem in a video briefing with reporters that fuel would run out in days, cutting off communications, shuttering hospitals and halting distribution of food and other essential aid.

Gaza’s electrical grid stopped working early in the war. The only power available now comes from generators, making fuel essential.

The presence of Israeli tanks and fighting around Rafah’s border had made it impossible for the U.N. to access fuel in storage facilities in the area, Mr. De Domenico said. He added that people are fleeing Rafah to areas where there was no shelter, clean water and drainage.

“It is impossible to improve the situation existing in the new displacement sites without the entry of supplies and without the fuel to transport them to the location where the people are concentrating,” said Mr. De Domenico.

If the area around the Rafah crossing becomes a battle zone, U.N. officials said, it would be nearly impossible to deliver and distribute the aid.