The Biden administration has offered intelligence that could help the Israeli military locate Hamas leaders hiding inside Gaza if Jerusalem abandons the plans to capture the terrorist stronghold of Rafah, the Washington Post reported Saturday.
The Biden administration’s offer suggests that Washington may have been withholding critical intelligence that could lead to the elimination of Hamas’s top terrorist leadership and shorten Israel’s military operation in Gaza.
According to the newspaper, the “sensitive intelligence” offered by Washington could “help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels.” The administration also offered humanitarian aid for displaced Gazans if Israel scales down the ongoing operation in Rafah.
After withdrawing most of the ground troops from Gaza in early April amid mounting pressure from the Biden White House, Israel launched a limited offensive in eastern Rafah on Monday, Hamas’s last standing stronghold. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Saturday expanded the Rafah operation after getting a nod from the country’s war cabinet.
The Washington Post reports:
The Biden administration, working urgently to stave off a full-scale Israeli invasion of Rafah, is offering Israel valuable assistance if it holds back, including sensitive intelligence to help the Israeli military pinpoint the location of Hamas leaders and find the group’s hidden tunnels, according to four people familiar with the U.S. offers.American officials have also offered to help provide thousands of shelters so Israel can build tent cities — and to help with the construction of delivery systems for food, water and medicine — so that Palestinians evacuated from Rafah can have a habitable place to live, said the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose secret diplomatic talks.President Biden and his senior aides have been making such offers over the last several weeks in hopes they will persuade Israel to conduct a more limited and targeted operation in the southern Gaza city, where some 1.3 million Palestinians are sheltering after fleeing there from other parts of Gaza under Israeli orders. Israel has vowed to go into Rafah with “extreme force,” and this week Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a number of steps that raised fears at the White House that the long-promised invasion could be materializing.Administration officials, including experts from the U.S. Agency for International Development, have told Israel it will take several months to safely relocate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are now living in decrepit and unsanitary conditions in Rafah. Israeli officials disagree with that assessment.
As Israeli military expands its ground operation in Rafah, Hamas is reportedly trying to regroup its jihadi fighting force and restore its terrorist infrastructure in the area.
The IDF “reported beginning an operation overnight based on intelligence information regarding attempts by Hamas to reassemble its terrorist infrastructure and operatives in specific areas of eastern Rafah and on the Gazan side of the Rafah Crossing,” the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS reported. “IAF fighter jets and additional aircraft struck approximately 30 terror targets in the area and killed several Hamas terrorists, read the IDF statement.”
The ongoing military operation was not a full-scale offensive but limited to tactical strikes on Hamas targets, the IDF assured. “The Israel Defense Forces is continuing its precise operation against Hamas in Rafah as part of our efforts to achieve an enduring defeat of Hamas and bring all our hostages home,” IDF Spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said Sunday. “Our operations against Hamas in Rafah remain limited in scope and focus on: tactical advances; tactical adjustments; and military advantages — and have avoided densely populated areas.”
While Hamas continued firing rockets at Gaza’s main humanitarian border crossing of Kerem Shalom, disrupting the aid supply to the enclave, the IDF was delivering aid and running field hospitals for Gazans.
“Our war is against Hamas, not against the people of Gaza,” the IDF spokesman said. “Over the last few days we facilitated the entry of 200,000 liters of fuel through the Kerem Shalom crossing; we facilitated and coordinated the opening of a new field hospital in Central Gaza; and we are operating to enable the flow of humanitarian aid to Rafah through the Salah Al-Din Road.”
The IDF also carried out strikes against the remnant of Hamas’s terrorist force trying to raise its head in the north.
“Following calls to the civilian population to temporarily evacuate from the area of Jabaliya to shelters in western Gaza City, IDF troops began an operation overnight based on intelligence information regarding attempts by Hamas to reassemble its terrorist infrastructure and operatives in the area,” the IDF revealed in a press statement Sunday. “Prior to the entry of the troops, IAF fighter jets and additional aircraft struck approximately 30 terror targets in the area and eliminated several Hamas terrorists.”
New figures have once again raised questions about the fantastical casualty numbers being issued by the Hamas Health Ministry. According to the Jerusalem Post, even the United Nations — a body plagued with anti-Israel bias — revised the Gaza casualty figures in its recent report, halving the number of women and children killed in the conflict.
Besides being fabricated, the Hamas ministry’s inflated figures do not distinguish between civilians and terrorists. The mainstream media, college activists and hostile foreign governments have been using these fake figures to maligne and condemn Israel.
Despite Hamas using Gaza civilians as human shields, the IDF has created “new standard for urban warfare,” British military historian and expert John Spencer notes.
“Israel has made over 70,000 direct phones calls, sent over 13 million text messages and left over 15 million pre-recorded voicemails to notify civilians that they should leave combat areas, where they should go, and what route they should take,” Spencer wrote in a March 25 article published in Newsweek. “They deployed drones with speakers and dropped giant speakers by parachute that began broadcasting for civilians to leave combat areas once they hit the ground. They announced and conducted daily pauses of all operations to allow any civilians left in combat areas to evacuate.”
More than 15,000 Hamas terrorists have been eliminated by the Israeli military since October 7, The Times of Israel confirmed Sunday.
The Jerusalem Post reported UN’s ‘revision’ of Hamas’s fake casualty numbers:
The United Nations seemingly halved the estimated number of women and children killed in Gaza, according to UN data published on May 6 and 8.The UN published the number of fatalities reported by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health or the Government Media Office in Gaza and Israeli authorities.The UN provided a disclaimer below the data: “The UN has so far not been able to produce independent, comprehensive, and verified casualty figures.”On May 6, the UN published data showing that 34,735 people had reportedly been killed in Gaza, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children.On May 8, the UN published data showing 34,844 people had reportedly been killed, including 4,959 women and 7,797 children.The new figures showed the number of identified deaths as of April 30, which total 24,686 people; the new data also specified that 10,006 men had been killed and 1,924 elderly.
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