How Does the US Know That What Israel is Doing is Not Enough to Ensure the Safety of Those in Rafah?

The Biden administration will share with Israel its intelligence on the whereabouts of Hamas’s leadership in Gaza if Israel agrees not to go ahead with its military operation in Rafah, according to the Washington Post. “U.S. cites intelligence, offers Israel supplies to limit Rafah operation,” by Yasmeen Abutaleb, Washington Post, May 11, 2024:

The Biden administration, working urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering Israel valuable assistance in an effort to persuade it to hold back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people familiar with the U.S. offers.

American officials have also offered to help provide thousands of shelters so Israel can build tent cities — and to help with the construction of delivery systems for food, water and medicine — so that Palestinians evacuated from Rafah can have a habitable place to live, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose secret diplomatic talks.

How does the United States know that what Israel is doing is not enough to insure the safety of those now in Rafah? Hasn’t the IDF managed, within little more than a week, to convince 400,000 Gazans to leave Rafah for safter sites further north? Weren’t the Bidenites convinced that such a large-scale operation would never succeed, and that all but a handful of the Gazans would remain in Rafah? What further steps do the Bidenites expect the IDF to take in order to minimize civilian casualties beyond what it is already doing? Don’t the millions of leaflets, messages, and telephone calls, that the IDF has during the past seven months used to such effect elsewhere in Gaza, and is using today in Rafah to persuade one million people — out of a total of 1.3 million — to move outside the city to safety, with 400,000 having already done just that, proof that the Bidenite naysayers were wrong?

The offer of shelters, meanwhile, is peculiar. On the one hand, the Bidenites do not want the IDF to succeed in persuading Gazans to leave Rafah, which would make the IDF’s task of taking on Hamas in the center of the city — the very thing the Bidenites hope to avoid — much easier. On the other hand, the Americans are now offering to help Israel build the tent cities where people fleeing from Rafah can settle.

This two-month long operation, instead of an immediate full-scale invasion, is being undertaken to meet the demand of the Bidenites that such an invasion not be undertaken. But neither Biden nor Blinken has noted this publicly, neither has thanked Israel for agreeing to such a slow operation, that will undoubtedly cost more IDF soldiers their lives than would a sudden invasion, hammering at Hamas with everything in the IDF’s armory, including airstrikes that save Israeli soldiers’ lives by minimizing the need for hand-to-hand combat, but also lead to more civilian deaths.

Not once has Biden, or Blinken, or Sullivan, mentioned the 14 million leaflets the IDF has dropped over northern Gaza in the early days of the war to warn civilians away from areas about to become a battlefield, or from buildings that were soon to be targeted. Nor have they mentioned the Israel has made over 70,000 direct phones calls, sent over 13 million text messages and left over 15 million prerecorded voicemails to notify civilians that they should leave combat areas, where they should go, and what route they should take. The IDF has even deployed drones with speakers attached, that begin “speaking” their warnings as soon as they hit the ground — a remarkable advance that Israeli technologists came up with to do something no other army, as John Spencer has written, “in the history of warfare has done.” The IDF has also announced and conducted daily pauses of all operations to allow any civilians left in combat areas to evacuate. No other army in the world warns enemy soldiers about attacks in this manner. No other army is so solicitous of the wellbeing of civilians in the enemy camp. But not a single aspect of this massive warning operation has been mentioned by the Bidenites, who instead keep insisting that Israel must not do in Rafah what it has done elsewhere in Gaza.

Furthermore, the Bidenites have failed to mention the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths in Gaza, which is the key indicator of how much is being done by the IDF to minimize casualties. According to the UN, in all the wars fought since World War II, the ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths has been 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Americans managed to get this ratio down to 4:1. In Iraq, the American military did even better, lowering the ratio to 3:1 — that is, three civilians killed for every combatant. But in Gaza, the IDF has managed to achieve a civilian-to-combatant ratio of close to 1:1, that is, one civilian death for every combatant killed. This is information that the public, subjected to endless tales of Palestinian “civilians being killed in Gaza” needs to know. It does not fit the anti-Israel narrative that the Bidenites are now disseminating, claiming that the IDF must not behave in Rafah as it has elsewhere in Gaza. But the IDF has behaved admirably elsewhere in Gaza, with its elaborate system of warning preventing many civilian deaths. The Bidenites are not about to let these facts be submitted to a candid world.