conflict
‘It Makes No Sense’: Experts Puzzled By Biden Admin’s Claim That Rafah Invasion Wouldn’t Help Israel Defeat Hamas
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By JAKE SMITH
The Biden administration’s claim that an Israeli invasion into Rafah would not help the nation defeat Hamas or secure a hostage release deal “makes no logical sense,” several experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday that Israel cannot achieve a “sustainable and enduring defeat” against Hamas by invading Rafah, also claiming that it could jeopardize ongoing negotiations to free the hostages in Gaza. Experts told the DCNF that the claim doesn’t hold water as a military operation is the only way to pressure Hamas into reaching a hostage deal and eventually achieve victory over the terror group.
“An enduring defeat of Hamas certainly remains the Israeli goal, and we share that goal with them,” Kirby said. “Smashing into Rafah, in [Biden’s] view, will not advance that objective, will not get to that sustainable and enduring defeat of Hamas.”
Two high-level defense experts and a former senior U.S. official told the DCNF that Kirby is mistaken and that the only way to ensure Hamas is defeated is through military operations.
“Kirby is wrong,” Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington-based defense think tank, told the DCNF. “Only the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) patient, well-planned and well-executed operation has been successful in smashing Hamas and releasing hostages, to date.”
“You can’t defeat Hamas with good vibes and nice words. You defeat them on the battlefield through munitions, through kinetic action,” Executive Director of Polaris National Security and former State Department official Gabriel Noronha told the DCNF.
Kirby and State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller have said that the administration believes if Israel chooses to push into Rafah, it will weaken their hand in negotiations to secure a deal to release the hostages currently held in Hamas captivity. Israel has been negotiating with Hamas through international meditators, including the U.S., for months to reach a deal that would see a temporary ceasefire in the Gaza region in exchange for their release.
“We actually think that a Rafah operation would weaken Israel’s position, both in these talks and writ large,” Miller said on May 9.
“If I’m Mr. Sinwar, and I’m sitting down in my tunnel … and I’m seeing innocent people falling victim to major significant combat operations in Rafah, then I have less of an incentive to want to come to the negotiating table,” Kirby told reporters, referring to Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the military branch of Hamas.
Hamas is unlikely to be more inclined to move the hostage deal along if Israel doesn’t invade Rafah as the terrorist group isn’t concerned with the wellbeing of Palestinians in the region, experts told the DCNF. The IDF has accused the terrorist group of using civilians as human shields and embedding itself within population centers.
“It’s preposterous. It stands in the face of all the evidence we’ve actually seen in this conversation,” Noronha told the DCNF. “There’s been nothing that the White House has released that makes room for any kind of justification for what they’re claiming from the podium.”
The lack of military pressure from Israel would make Hamas less incentivized to reach a hostage and ceasefire deal, Shoshana Bryen, defense analyst and senior director of The Jewish Policy Center, told the DCNF. Hamas agreed to one ceasefire deal in November after coming under intense stress from Israeli forces, but the deal quickly fell apart in December.
“The only serious negotiating Hamas did was in the very early days when Israel’s fury was evident and accepted by most of the world,” Byren told the DCNF. “Hamas leadership saw that it might be defeated on the battlefield, so it permitted a ceasefire and released hostages. Since that time, the Biden administration has worked to constrain Israel — up to and including the withholding of arms approved by Congress.”
“Hamas isn’t stupid. As long as the Biden administration works to constrain Israel, Hamas doesn’t have to give anything,” Byren said.
Experts who spoke to the DCNF also took issue with Kirby claiming that Israel does not need to push into Rafah because Hamas has largely been crippled by Israeli forces since Oct. 7.
“It’s like saying, ‘Oh, we did chemotherapy for a month. We got 80% of the cancer, we’re good to go. We’ll just leave now.’ Again, it makes no sense,” Noronha told the DCNF.
“When someone announces that they want to kill you, they train to kill you, they arm to kill you, they teach their children that if the adults don’t finish the job in this generation, the children are expected to do it in the next generation,” Bryen told the DCNF. “When they say, ‘100 October 7s,’ they’re not kidding.”
Israeli forces seized control of the Rafah crossing bordering Egypt on Tuesday, saying that it was a vital chokepoint to stop the flow of weapons into Gaza, according to The Wall Street Journal. The IDF is moving further into the eastern corridors of Rafah, but has not yet gone into Rafah city, where the bulk of the more than one million refugees are located, according to The Associated Press.
Biden said during a CNN interview on Wednesday that the administration has not seen Israel cross a line in Rafah, but warned of consequences, including halting military aid, if Israel launches a full-scale invasion.
“If Israel had listened to the White House [since the war began], 18 Hamas terrorist battalions would still be standing, dozens of senior Hamas terrorist leaders would still be alive directing terror operations, dozens of Israeli and foreign hostages would still be languishing in the helm of Hamas captivity and Hamas would still be in charge planning the next October 7,” Dubowitz told the DCNF. “The Biden administration’s pressure on Israel has only prolonged the war and the suffering on both sides.”
conflict
Sec Def Austin Unveils $400 Million Arms Package For Ukraine — But One Thing Is Missing
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Jake Smith
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived in Ukraine but isn’t bringing the good news Kyiv wants to hear, as the country continues to struggle to hold the front line amid Russian advances.
Austin has been intimately involved over the last two years in overseeing U.S. military aid to Ukraine, of which there has been approximately $70 billion. The Defense Secretary touched down in Ukraine on Sunday in a show of continued support and announced a new $400 million arms package, but won’t be giving Kyiv what it really wants — the ability to use U.S.-provided long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russian territory, according to multiple reports.
The request to use the missiles for such a purpose has been something Ukraine has asked for for months; as Ukraine can’t produce such weapons, it is looking to the U.S. and Europe for help.
Austin arrived in Ukraine without signaling that the request would be filled, and that’s likely to leave Kyiv unsatisfied. The administration has been hesitant to allow Ukraine to use U.S. or European-provided missiles to conduct long-range attacks against Russia, in part because it could escalate the war and drag the U.S. further into the conflict.
“We think it is wrong that there are such steps,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in early September, according to The Washington Post. “We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the occupied territory of Ukraine but also on the Russian territory, so that Russia is motivated to seek peace.”
I’m back in Ukraine for the fourth time as Secretary of Defense, demonstrating that the United States, alongside the international community, continues to stand by Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/0gCwAqqEpK
— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) October 21, 2024
The idea has been frequently discussed between U.S. and Ukrainian officials but nothing has come to fruition. Austin has also previously said that he doesn’t think it would significantly improve Ukraine’s odds of victory, noting in an early September press conference that “there’s no one capability that will in and of itself be decisive in this campaign.”
Ukraine is also pressing the administration for NATO membership, but Austin had no new updates to give on that request either, according to reports. The Biden-Harris administration has said that Ukraine’s fate is eventually to join NATO but hasn’t provided a timeline for when.
However, the U.S. is providing Ukraine with $400 million worth of weapons systems, Austin announced on Monday, including munitions, armored vehicles and tanks, according to reports. The aid will certainly meet some of the needs of Ukraine’s military but is not as large as some of the prior multi-billion dollar packages.
“The United States understands the stakes here, Mr. President,” Austin told Ukrainian Zelenskyy in Kyiv on Monday, Reuters reported.
President Joe Biden’s options to help Ukraine are starting to run out as he prepares to leave office in January. Even with U.S. and European-provided military aid, it has done little more than help Ukraine maintain a defensive position against Russia, which has shown no signs of stopping its invasion campaign.
Russia launched sweeping missile and drone strikes against targets in Eastern Ukraine over the weekend ahead of Austin’s visit, according to Reuters. Ukrainian forces staged a successful incursion into regions in Western Russia at the end of the summer but Russian forces have started to retake some of the territory in recent weeks, The New York Times reported.
The odds that Biden can secure substantially more funding from Congress to aid Ukraine are slim; it was already difficult for the president to secure the last $60 billion aid package in April, as the sentiment among some lawmakers is that the administration doesn’t seem to have a plan to end the war and move Ukraine toward victory.
It will be either presidential candidates Donald Trump or Kamala Harris who will have to pick up where Biden left off. Harris would likely mirror Biden’s approach to the war and continue strong U.S. support for Ukraine’s military campaign, but some critics fear that she lacks the needed foreign policy wisdom to properly maneuver the conflict.
Trump has vowed to end the war before January if he’s elected in November, touting his ability to negotiate with both Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has also signaled he may end military aid to Ukraine in favor of seeking a peaceful settlement between Kyiv and Moscow.
Austin on Monday dismissed ideas that U.S. support for Ukraine would end if Trump were elected in November.
“I’ve seen bipartisan support for Ukraine over the last 2-1/2 years, and I fully expect that we’ll continue to see the bipartisan support from Congress,” Austin said, according to Reuters.
conflict
Middle East War Shows No Signs Of Stopping One Year After Oct. 7 — And No Clear Path To Exit
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Jake Smith
The chaos of Hamas’ October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel is still being felt one year later as the broader region grapples with a conflict that has shown no signs of stopping.
Hamas Oct. 7 terrorist attacks caught Israel by surprise and resulted in the murder of approximately 1,200 people and the kidnapping of hundreds of others, including American citizens. Israel retaliated and launched a war against Hamas in Gaza, which a year later has not ended but instead spilled into the broader Middle East and drawn in other bad actors such as Hezbollah and Iran.
“We’re still stuck in Oct. 7, 2023, in one unending day of terror, of fear, of anger, of despair,” Yuval Baron, an Israeli citizen whose father-in-law is still being held by Hamas in Gaza, told Reuters.
Israeli forces have largely occupied Gaza and killed thousands of Hamas operatives, largely crippling the terrorist group’s capabilities, although it has come at great humanitarian cost to the enclave, according to Reuters. The conflict has displaced millions of Palestinians and wreaked havoc across Gaza, leaving many areas uninhabitable, Bloomberg reported.
The effort to build Gaza after the fighting ends — whenever that may be — will likely be an incredibly costly venture that could take years and require joint cooperation between several Arab states, according to Bloomberg. Millions of tons of debris will have to be cleared from the enclave while buildings are repaired or replaced.
“We thought it would be two months [of fighting] — at most,” Mohammed Shakib Hassan, a Palestinian civil servant who fled his home after Israeli forces entered Gaza last year, told The New York Times. “Twelve months have passed in front of our eyes.”
Israel, with the help of the U.S., has on several occasions made offers for a ceasefire in Gaza conditioned on the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas and the surrender of the terrorist group, but these proposals have been rejectedmultiple times. Yayha Sinwar, the leader of Hamas who has been hiding underground in Gaza, reportedly believes that he is not going to survive the war and has zero intention of reaching a ceasefire deal with Israel at this point in the conflict, according to U.S. intelligence assessments reviewed by The New York Times.
The Biden-Harris administration has spent months brokering negotiations between Israel and Hamas and working with regional mediators to try to reach a deal, but these efforts have largely been fruitless. Though President Biden has on several occasions predicted that a ceasefire could be reached in short order, his own officials now privately believe it will be near impossible to get a deal done between now and January, the end of Biden’s term.
“They’re probably not going to get one before the election, or before January either. But that’s not on them, per se. It speaks to the difficulty of how far apart [Israel and Hamas] are,” former State Department official Gabriel Noronha told the Daily Caller News Foundation in September.
There have been various roadblocks to getting a deal done. Specifically, Israel wants to leave troops along the Gaza-Egyptian border, arguing that it would stonewall Hamas from trafficking in weapons, but Hamas has rejected this term.
Though the prospects of a deal are unlikely at this point, Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza has largely come to a close as the terrorist group’s capabilities have been vastly diminished.
“Hamas is a shadow of its former self. Israel is going to continue to try to eradicate them, but it’s sort of a guerilla campaign. Hamas is being starved and smoked out. I suspect that you’re going to see Hamas go underground somewhat — more figuratively than literally at this point,” Noronha told the DCNF last month.
Instead, Israel has shifted much of its forces and focus away from Gaza and toward Lebanon, which houses the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. Hezbollah is Iran’s largest terrorist group in the Middle East and has engaged in cross-fire skirmishes with Israel since last October out of support for Hamas, displacing thousands of civilians near the Israel-Lebanon border, according to NPR.
Hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah have reached a boiling point in recent weeks, as Israel has launched sweeping airstrikes against the terrorist group in southern Lebanon and killed the group’s leader in an airstrike in late September, according to The Washington Post. Israeli forces have begun ground raids against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, in what could be the prelude to a much larger ground invasion.
The Biden-Harris Administration, along with other allies, also put forward on Sep. 26 a separate ceasefire proposal for Israel and Hezbollah, although it was seemingly ignored by both parties.
“It’s clear that Israel is determined to rid Lebanon of Hezbollah,” senior fellow at the Strauss Center and former Pentagon official Simone Ledeen told the DCNF. “They need Hezbollah to lay down their arms and surrender… the Israelis [are] really focused on getting to that objective.”
The multi-front Middle East conflict extends also to Iran, which — though it has helped orchestrate and fund the various terror attacks against Israel — made an unprecedented move in April and launched a sweeping missile strike against Israel from directly within Iran’s borders, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Iran launched a similar attack against Israel last week in the form of roughly 180 missiles, most of which were intercepted by U.S. and Israeli forces.
Israel is expected to respond with an attack directly against Iran, although the timing and nature of the move is publicly unknown. The Biden-Harris administration is helping coordinate the attack with Israel, though it wants Israel to avoidgoing after the country’s nuclear facilities.
“The launch of over 180 ballistic missiles by Tehran requires a decisive reaction to prevent future attacks,” Israeli intelligence agent Avi Melamed said in a statement on Monday. “Currently, it seems that Israel is finalizing its operational plans while the U.S. prepares munitions to defensively counter any potential Iranian counterstrike.”
The conflict extends even further into Iraq, Syria and Yemen, all hotspots for other various Iranian-backed terrorist groups that have attacked U.S. and Israeli forces in the region since last October, according to Axios. Israeli forces have launched a series in those regions, too, in recent months.
Until the current Middle East conflict comes to an end, the possibility of regional peace may be too far out of reach, even as that remains a goal for other key Arab states and Western nations. Iran’s “axis of resistance” has taken severe blows since last October, according to Axios.
But Israeli forces are stretched across multiple fronts in a conflict with no clear end game, and the Israeli people seem to be growing more and more weary of the conflict; 23% of Israelis considered leaving the country in the last year, according to a recent poll cited by Axios.
“This war won’t end because nobody is willing to blink,” Thomas Nides, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, told the Times. “In the meantime, everyone is losing — hostages and their families, innocent Palestinians, Israelis displaced from northern Israel, Lebanese civilians. And it’s truly tragic.”
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