Israeli forces advanced deeper into Gaza’s southern city of Rafah Sunday, while U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed displeasure with the Israeli operation and highlighted the need to protect civilians.
The U.S. State Department said late Sunday that Blinken “reaffirmed the U.S. opposition to a major military ground operation in Rafah” as he spoke by telephone with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The statement said Blinken also reaffirmed U.S. commitment to “the shared objective of the defeat of Hamas” while also urging Gallant to “help address distribution challenges inside of Gaza as Israel pursues Hamas targets.”
About 300,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians who fled to southern Gaza months ago on orders from the Israeli military to escape the attacks on Hamas militants in northern Gaza have now been ordered to move again, this time to the northwest of Rafah, to an area along Gaza’s Mediterranean Sea coastline.
U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said Sunday the ongoing fighting and the evacuation orders brought “massive displacement of an already profoundly traumatized population.”
Turk questioned where people should go in Gaza, saying there is “no safe place.”
“I have repeatedly expressed my alarm about the catastrophic impact of a possible full-scale offensive on Rafah, including the possibility of further atrocity crimes,” Turk said. “I can see no way that the latest evacuation orders, much less a full assault, in an area with an extremely dense presence of civilians, can be reconciled with the binding requirements of international humanitarian law and with the two sets of binding provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice.”
Earlier Sunday, Blinken told NBC’s “Meet the Press” show there is no specific Israeli plan to protect the Palestinians or provide sufficient humanitarian aid for them.
“There’s something else that’s important,” Blinken said. “We also haven’t seen a plan for what happens the day after this war in Gaza ends. Because right now, the trajectory that Israel is on is even if it goes in and takes heavy action in Rafah, there will still be thousands of armed Hamas left.”
The top U.S. diplomat said, “We’ve seen in areas that Israel has cleared in the north, even in Khan Younis, Hamas coming back.”
