The Biden administration “cannot support a major military operation in Rafah,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a news conference Friday at the G7 meeting in Italy.
“First, there are currently somewhere around 1.4 million people in Rafah — many of them displaced from other parts of Gaza. It’s imperative that people are able to get out of the way of any conflict, and doing so is a monumental task for which we have yet to see a plan,” Blinken said. “Not only getting them out of harm’s way but making sure that they can be supported with humanitarian assistance.”
Blinken also said that even if people are largely out of harm’s way, inevitably a major military operation would have “terrible consequences” for the civilians remaining there.
A White House statement said that, in a discussion Thursday, Israeli officials had agreed to consider U.S. concerns about their planned military operations in the southern Gaza city.
