Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that Israel will stand alone and “fight with our fingernails” in defiance of US threats to further restrict arms deliveries if Israeli forces proceed with an offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was speaking on Thursday after Israeli and Hamas delegations left the ceasefire negotiations in Cairo. It was unclear whether the talks had broken down or simply paused. Hamas said early on Friday that the “ball is now completely” in Israel’s hands, while Israel has claimed that Hamas’s version of a deal fell far short of its requirements.
The failure to reach an agreement in this week’s round of meetings raised fears of an imminent Israeli attack on Rafah.
Netanyahu appeared to shrug off a public warning from the US president, Joe Biden, the previous night that if the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a major offensive on the city the US would not provide bombs and artillery shells to support the operation.
“If we have to stand alone, we will stand alone. If we need to, we will fight with our fingernails. But we have much more than fingernails,” Netanyahu said. He noted that Israel was approaching the 76th anniversary of its independence, which it had to fight for. “We did not have weapons,” he said, referring to the 1948 war. “There was an arms embargo on Israel, but with great strength of spirit, heroism and unity among us – we were victorious.”
The prime minister sounded a more conciliatory note towards Biden in an hour-long interview with an American self-help guru and talkshow host, Phil McGraw, known as Dr Phil.
“We often had our agreements but we’ve had our disagreements. We’ve been able to overcome them,” Netanyahu said of the bilateral relations on the Dr Phil Primetime show. “I hope we can overcome them now, but we will do what we have to do to protect our country.”
US officials had been hopeful that a diplomatic breakthrough could be achieved in hostages-for-ceasefire negotiations, following a Hamas announcement on Monday that it had accepted a deal. It remains unclear what specific terms it had accepted, and Israel, though sceptical, agreed to send a delegation to Cairo to find out.
An unnamed senior Israeli official was quoted by Reuters on Thursday as saying that the Israeli delegation laid out its reservations to the Hamas position, and deemed the round of Cairo talks to have ended.
The official said the Israeli delegation was returning from the Egyptian capital and Israel would proceed with its operation in Rafah and other parts of the Gaza Strip as planned.
Hamas said its delegation had left Cairo after Israel “rejected the proposal submitted by the mediators and raised objections to it on several central issues”, in an account of the meeting provided to other Palestinian factions, according to Agence-France Presse, but the statement did not explain what the differences were between the sides.
The White House confirmed that the CIA director, William Burns, was also leaving Cairo, but denied that the negotiations had broken down.
“Burns is departing the region as previously scheduled, but interlocutors from other delegations are still in discussions in Cairo, so those talks are still going on,” John Kirby, the national security spokesperson, told reporters. “We’re going to stay engaged, in the hopes that we might be able to land something.”
US officials however were privately pessimistic about being able to prevent an offensive into Rafah, which Biden said on Thursday would trigger more restrictions on the US arms supply, specifically regarding bombs and artillery shells.
Last week, the administration paused the delivery of 1,800 2,000lb bombs and 1,700 500lb bombs in an indication it was prepared to take action to stop a Rafah offensive.
The chief IDF spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, said the Israeli military could carry out its planned operations without US support. “The army has armaments for the missions it plans, and for the missions in Rafah too. We have what we need.”
A major offensive on the city of Rafah would threaten the lives of more than 1 million Palestinians who have sought haven there and who have not received any significant provisions in terms of shelter, food, water and medical support from Israel.
Kirby also said that the US was continuing to advise Israel on how it could defeat Hamas through more surgical operations: “Our view is any kind of major Rafah ground operation would actually strengthen Hamas’s hands at the negotiating table, not Israel’s.”
He added that more civilian deaths in Rafah would give more ammunition to Hamas’s “twisted narrative” about Israel.
The survival of civilians has already been made more precarious by the closing of the two crossings into southern Gaza, Rafah and Kerem Shalom, on Monday when the IDF began action to capture the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing, to the east of the city.
Rafah has run out of fuel and its hospitals are in danger of being overwhelmed, according to medical staff.
Kerem Shalom reopened on Thursday, but aid trucks were unable to navigate the roads because of security concerns and battle damage.
Meanwhile, very little aid is entering Gaza through the northern gate at Erez, close to where hundreds of thousands of people who have been cut off by the Israeli offensive are in imminent danger of starvation, according to the UN and aid agencies.
Cyprus announced on Thursday that a first aid ship had left the island to go to a US-made floating pier, from where humanitarian assistance is supposed to be unloaded and distributed. The Pentagon said that the pier and a causeway that would ultimately be anchored to the Gaza coast were currently off the port of Ashdod.
The Pentagon spokesperson, Maj Gen Pat Ryder, said the floating structures were “awaiting the right weather and security conditions to move them into position and beginning unloading aid”.
Rabih Torbay, the head of the Project Hope medical relief organisation which is active in Gaza, said that the plans involving the US pier remained a mystery to most of the aid groups.
“It is unclear where the pier is going to be attached and the entire logistics, who is going to receive the items and what the distribution plan is, is still very unclear,” Torbay said.
US officials said the capture of the Rafah crossing was a tactical operation with a low number of casualties. The UN, however, said intensified IDF attacks on the Rafah area had triggered the exodus of more than 100,000 people – the largest population movement in Gaza for many months. The mass displacement of people in the event of a large-scale Rafah offensive would be far greater.
“A massive ground attack in Rafah would lead to [an] epic humanitarian disaster and pull the plug on our efforts to support people as famine looms,” said the UN secretary general, António Guterres, during a visit to Nairobi on Friday, adding that the situation in the city was “on a knife’s edge”.
“We are actively engaged with all involved for the resumption of the entry of life-saving supplies – including desperately needed fuel – through [the] Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings,” he said, reiterating his calls for a ceasefire.
In his remarks on Thursday, Kirby spelled out what sort of Israeli operations would trigger further US restrictions on arms. “I think we all understand what a major ground operation looks like in terms of the size of the forces involved, the kinds of operations that would connote large forces, large movements, a lot of civilian casualties, a lot of damaged infrastructure – as opposed to more precise, more targeted, more limited kinds of operations, like we are seeing right now down at the Rafah crossing.”
He added: “A lot is going to depend on what we see Israel do in Rafah and in their planning for Rafah.”
Kirby said on Thursday that Israeli forces were “still getting that [weaponry], the vast, vast majority of everything that they need to defend themselves”.
“We could also in fact help them target the leaders, including Mr Sinwar, which we are frankly doing with the Israelis on an ongoing basis,” Kirby added in what appeared to be the first US confirmation that the US had been providing help to the Israelis in targeting Hamas leaders including Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the 7 October attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 Israelis.
Additional reporting by Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem
