Is an Israeli invasion of Gaza’s southern city of Rafah about to commence? Perhaps. On Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, proclaimed that Israel had set a date to invade the city, where an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge from six months of relentless bombing and incalculable destruction.
Leaks to the Israeli media are also pointing ominously to an Israeli government procurement of 40,000 12-person tents, suggesting a repugnant plan of further displacing almost half a million Palestinians, this time into government-issued tents that will probably be plopped down in the middle of nowhere.
Then again, maybe the invasion won’t happen. According to CNN, senior officials in the Biden administration consider Netanyahu’s announcement to be bluster. At a press conference on Tuesday, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, told reporters: “We do not have a date for any Rafah operation, at least one that’s been communicated to us by the Israelis.” He later added: “I don’t see anything imminent.”
There’s also Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, who on Monday reportedly told Lloyd Austin, the US defense secretary, that Israel was still putting together its plans for a potential offensive. He indicated to Austin that no date has been set for the invasion, according to multiple reports. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, also told reporters on Tuesday that if Netanyahu “has a date, he hasn’t shared it with us”.
So what’s going on here? For one thing, Netanyahu has announced authorizing the invasion of Rafah at least four times in the last two months, as the Times of Israel notes. Rafah, in other words, is being made to stand for something larger than itself.
While it’s always possible that an offensive could happen, the likes of which would bring further catastrophe to civilian life in Gaza, there could be other reasons behind Netanyahu’s swagger. This latest proclamation could be a sideshow designed to draw attention away from death by starvation that is already happening in the north of Gaza, as well as a distraction from the very real political problems Netanyahu is facing in Israel. Some 100,000 people rallied for his removal in demonstrations across several cities last Saturday. Global pressure has also been mounting on Israel since the IDF killed seven humanitarian workers for World Central Kitchen on 1 April.
Some observers further consider Netanyahu’s threats to invade Rafah as negotiating tactics to pressure Hamas to accept Israel’s terms for the release of hostages. Others believe his threats are ways to appease the extreme-right members of his ruling coalition. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s national security minister, recently stated that if Netanyahu “decides to end the war without a substantial attack on Rafah to defeat Hamas, he will not have a mandate to continue as premier”.
Mairav Zonszein, an astute observer of Israeli politics and senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, has also suggested that the threat of invasion could “be a ploy by Netanyahu to argue, further down the road, that the reason Israel wasn’t able to defeat Hamas entirely was US opposition to a major ground invasion in Rafah”.
Rafah is quickly becoming some kind of symbol in Israeli politics whose meaning can be difficult to discern. Yet Rafah is also a city populated not with political calculations, but with people, hundreds of thousands of them, who have been displaced multiple times over. (Most of Gaza’s population, more than 80%, were already registered refugees before 7 October.) As much as Rafah now is a target and symbol of invasion, it is a mistake to believe that Rafah is some sort of final red line that must not be crossed; the situation all over the Gaza Strip is already completely insupportable and has been beyond the bitter edges of human cruelty for months on end.
Despite vocal pressure from the White House, the Israelis continue to hamper the delivery of food to Gaza’s civilians, according to the United Nations. On Tuesday, Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the UN office for humanitarian affairs, explained that food convoys going to the north of Gaza, where 70% of people face starvation, are three times more likely to be denied access by Israel than humanitarian convoys with other kinds of material. The UN has also found that “95% of pregnant and breastfeeding women in Gaza are not getting adequate food or nutrition”.
On 6 April, the World Health Organization announced findings of an investigation into access to healthcare in the Gaza Strip. The basic right to health is “utterly out of reach for the civilians of Gaza”, the WHO found. On 2 April, the International Rescue Committee stated that “37 mothers [in Gaza] have been killed each day since October 7th, a rate of 2 mothers every hour”. The IRC also found that “many women have had to give birth without any form of medical aid and there are credible reports of women forced to undergo C-sections without anesthesia”.
This is of course just a smattering of the misery that the people of Gaza are enduring. And while the Biden administration has indicated its opposition to an incursion into Rafah without protection of civilian life, it is still continuing to send loads and loads of arms to Israel. The administration strategy can only be described as simultaneously cynical and unconscionable. The last reported shipment occurred in the final week of March and included 1,800 2,000-pound bombs, munitions that have been credibly linked to large-scale civilian death and destruction.
What the current talk about Rafah has managed to do is both stand in for yet also minimize the rest of Gaza. In fact, the problem with framing an Israeli invasion of Rafah as the limit of what Israel can do in Gaza is that this framing runs the very serious risk of passively legitimizing everything that came before. Furthermore, what happens when this red line, too, is crossed? Based on prior observation, I would have to guess more loud remonstrations of moral outrage – accompanied by even greater arms sales. And then a new red line will be drawn.
Enough of this logic. Yes, the invasion of Rafah must be stopped, but we cannot stop at Rafah. We shouldn’t sit waiting to protest a Rafah incursion in the future. We must instead be demanding a ceasefire to save the people of Gaza, and it must come now.
Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
