The Biden administration has reportedly settled on a plan to pitch to the Israelis as an alternative to a full ground incursion into Rafah. It raises more questions than answers.
The White House doesn’t want Israel to go into Hamas’s last redoubt in the numbers with which it would normally try to capture and secure a city full of Hamas terror leaders and militants. One reason is that President Biden and his advisers are nervous about the pro-Hamas elements in his party ramping up their protests and threatening his nominating convention this summer in Chicago. Another reason is that Egypt doesn’t want Israel to do anything that would cause Palestinians to enter Egyptian territory even temporarily and even for humanitarian purposes, nor does Egypt want anyone seeing what’s underneath Rafah—probably because Egyptian-facilitated smuggling tunnels below the southern Gaza city will be revealed.
It’s that last reason that U.S. officials are focusing on, according to the Times of Israel. But they are doing so in an exceedingly strange way: “Washington envisions Israel focusing instead on preventing the smuggling of weapons from Egypt into Gaza through the Philadelphi Corridor.”
Instead? Why not “also”? Why should Israel have to choose? The report continues: “The official avoided blaming the…
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