Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets with United States President Joe Biden in Tel Aviv, October 18, 2023.(Photo: Miriam Alster/Flash90)
While speaking at the Knesset on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Biden administration’s policies and directives during Israel’s ongoing war against Iran and its proxies were consistently off base.
In April, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken began warning the prime minister against the ground offensive in Rafah, telling him that Israel “will be left alone,” Netanyahu said.
“The U.S. objected, had reservations, expressed opposition, it did not threaten, it did not apply sanctions, not at that time,” he says. “It expressed reservations and suggested that we not go in on the ground. It said, ‘It can be handled from the air.’ It sent experts. We decided to follow our view and go in, a ground offensive,” Netanyahu said.
The U.S. also opposed going into Gaza City, the city’s Shifa Hospital and Khan Younis, where the IDF later found a command center, weapons and combat gear belonging to Hamas militants.
Netanyahu reportedly told Biden at the time: “We will fight with our hands and nails.”
The prime minister also said that U.S. officials had significantly overestimated the number of potential civilian deaths in Rafah, placing the number of likely fatalities around 20,000.
While there were some civilian casualties, Netanyahu told Congress in July that the “lowest” ratio of combatant to non-combatant casualties was in Rafah.
“Remember what so many people said? If Israel goes into Rafah, there’ll be thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of civilians killed,” the prime minister told Congress. “I asked the commander there, ‘How many terrorists did you take out in Rafah?’ He gave me an exact number: 1,203.”
“I asked him, ‘How many civilians were killed?’” Netanyahu added. “He said, ‘Prime Minister, practically none. With the exception of a single incident, where shrapnel from a bomb hit a Hamas weapons depot and unintentionally killed two dozen people, the answer is practically none.’”
Netanyahu noted that the U.S. helped Israel “significantly” at the beginning of the war, and that Biden had shown solidarity by visiting Israel during wartime. However, the prime minister recalled how Biden “also said that he would stop shipments of important weapons to us. And so, he did. A few days later, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared and repeated the same things, and I told him — we will fight with our fingernails.”
In an interview on May 8 with CNN’s Erin Burnett, Biden said his administration was “not supplying” some 2,000-pound and 500-pound bomb shipments to Israel for the Rafah incursion, as both he and Blinken lamented the high Palestinian death toll over the course of the war.
“I made clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gotten into Rafah yet — 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, to deal with that problem,” Biden said.
The move was met with strong opposition from both congressional Republicans and Democrats, and Biden lifted the pause of munition shipments shortly thereafter.
Speaking about Iran’s drone and missile attack on Israel, Netanyahu said, “Again, we were told by our friend that there is no need to respond. And I said that sitting and not reacting is not acceptable, and we responded.”
Israel’s retaliatory response took out some of Iran’s most significant air defense batteries and “inflicted real damage on Iran’s ballistic missile production capability,” Netanyahu added.
In his address, the prime minister also criticized those in Israel who urged him to heed Washington’s directives, and those who pushed for an end to the war.