President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken both threatened to leave Israel “alone” and deny the Jewish state’s military critical weapons ahead of a planned offensive in southern Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed on Monday.
During a secret meeting with an Israeli parliamentary committee, Netanyahu disclosed that Biden, 81, began warning him in April against the assault on the city of Rafah — even telling the PM that “you will be left alone,” the right-leaning Israeli outlet Now 14 reported.
Netanyahu, 75, told members of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee that he replied to Biden, “We will do it alone,” foreshadowing public remarks he would make early in May.
Days after the phone call, Blinken also traveled to Israel to meet with Netanyahu and discourage the offensive by saying: “You will not have weapons.”
Netanyahu reportedly shot back: “We will fight with our hands and nails.”
The PM also crowed that US officials had vastly overestimated the number of potential civilian deaths in a Rafah assault, putting the number of likely fatalities around 20,000.
While there were some “tragic” civilian killings, Netanyahu said in a joint address to both chambers of Congress in July that the “lowest” ratio of combatant to non-combatant casualties came 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 US lawmakers. “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 went on. “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.’”
“You want to know why? Because Israel got the civilians out of harm’s way, something people said we could never do, but we did it,” he said.
Biden publicly announced on May 8 that his administration was “not supplying” some 2,000-pound and 500-pound bomb shipments to Israel for the Rafah invasion, 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 told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an interview at the time.
The move earned swift blowback from congressional Republicans and Democrats — and the president eventually un-paused the shipment of munitions.
Neither the White House nor the State Department immediately responded to a request for comment.