Biden administration throws obstacles at Israeli op in Rafah while tooling an unfinished pier around the Eastern Med

Elections have consequences.

J.E. Dyer, The OPTIMISTIC CONSERVATIVE May 9, 2024

The short summary of where Israel’s war in Gaza stands this week is that Israel has seized the Gaza side of the Rafah crossing and begun warnings and evacuation of Rafah, followed by bombing, in preparation for the final push to remove Hamas from Gaza.  The Biden administration is attempting to impede this operation by touting a supposed ceasefire/hostages agreement with Hamas, warning Israel not to go into Rafah, and withholding a previously-approved and scheduled delivery of munitions to Israel in order to extort Israel’s policy compliance on the Rafah campaign matter.

In case it isn’t clear that Biden is favoring Hamas and its national patrons over Israel, Thursday morning has brought the news that the Biden administration, while halting arms deliveries to Israel, has issued an arms sales waiver to Qatar, Lebanon, and Iraq – nations connected with or dominated by, respectively, Hamas (along with Muslim Brotherhood terror entities), Hezbollah, and Iran.

This is bad enough for Israel. The prostrate American posture displayed by Biden toward enemies of the U.S. in the Middle East has obvious potential to have a reverse-deterrence effect as we might say, on global terrorists targeting the USA.

The Biden administration is also promising that the U.S.-supplied temporary pier for the Gaza coast will be deployed soon, its assembly having been completed in Ashdod this week.  As discussed in earlier TOC articles, putting the pier off Gaza is a pretext for establishing a U.S.-affiliated presence in Gaza, with implicit American security and political interests in its wake.  It’s a way of gaining leverage over Israel’s policy and strategic decisions for Gaza operations.

We have yet to see what, if anything, Congress will try to do about the withholding of an arms shipment to Israel.  Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was very upset in a hearing with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Charles Brown (USAF) on Wednesday morning.

Just a few notes on this fast-moving situation.  First, I doubt Israel will slow down anything it has planned in Rafah.  Seizing the crossing is the kind of signal act that can’t be left to start growing mold and deteriorating with time.  It needs to be capitalized on quickly.  Securing the Gaza side of the crossing is necessary for sealing Rafah’s back door, and in particular for getting into the tunnels the crossing area is rife with, and preventing them from being used to support Hamas.

Some of that effort will be about rounding up Hamas as it’s trying to flee.  But the IDF should be planning to render any return by Hamas to Rafah untenable, and that means attacking Hamas and other usable infrastructure there.  Israel hasn’t set up the refugee centers ready to receive large numbers of Gazans from Rafah for no reason.  That would be an expensive and time-consuming “show,” if that’s all it were.

It appears that Israel intends to go ahead and get the job done in Rafah – not just hold the crossing, as some sort of bargaining chip in dubious negotiations with Hamas that have no history of producing what Israel needs.

The shipment cut-off

Second, the contents of the arms shipment Biden has halted are directly relevant to the fight in Rafah.  The shipment contains 2,000-lb and 500-lb air-delivered bombs, extensively used for the kind of interdiction and tactical bombing the IDF needs to do in military operations in urban terrain (MOUT).  The IDF uses JDAM precision guidance kits to ensure state-of-the-art accuracy in ordnance delivery, and although the JDAM kits haven’t been listed as items being withheld in this shipment, they were approved as part of the shipment in question in late March 2024.

According to this week’s reporting, a separate shipment of 6,500 JDAM kits, which is said to have been assembled sometime before January 2024 (but not notified to Congress), is also now in limbo.  It isn’t clear if it was ever out of limbo, but the Washington Post is reporting that it’s considered questionable on the same basis as the suspension decision for the previously-approved munitions.

The shipment as approved also reportedly contains artillery rounds and other ammunition, all of which would be needed for fighting in Rafah and fighting Hezbollah, if the terror group opens a second front against Israel from Lebanon.

Note that the suspended shipment is not related to the combined aid package just voted on for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.  (In fact, most of the aid to Israel in that package is for future delivery, probably after the current combat phase of operations in Gaza has ended.)

The faithlessness of this Biden move is, of course, off the charts.  Much more could be said about that, but most people don’t need help speculating on the motive.

I do want to briefly touch on the administration’s methods, and the impact on the IDF.

Regarding methods, the Wall Street Journal had a key piece of that puzzle in an article on 6 March about how the arms shipments to Israel are being handled.  Basically, the shipments since the fall of 2023 have been made in batches small enough that they evade the requirements for prior notification to Congress.  Many of them apparently are being arranged using means by which they can fly under the radar, such as transferring arms from existing U.S. stocks, and contracting them as direct commercial sales, rather than under Foreign Military Sales (FMS) cases.

This ensures that there’s little visibility for Congress or the public.  But it can also obscure whether anything is actually even happening.  The proposed shipment of 6,500 JDAM kits, for example, isn’t documented anywhere that the public can access.  We are only taking the administration’s word for it, “leaked” to the Wall Street Journal (and apparently afterward to WaPo), that there really is such a shipment in the works.

This combination of factors makes it easier for the administration to manipulate perceptions about the arms shipments.

Team Biden and the media are also flogging a theme that Israel may not be performing carefully enough, with the bombs in particular, when it comes to collateral damage and casualty rates.  (This too goes to method.)  The IDF’s casualty rate in Gaza is actually exceptionally low compared to everyone else on earth, starting with the United States.

But just before the leaking began this week on the threat to withhold arms from Israel, an article in The Hill outlined a deadline – one that passes today (8 May) – for the State Department to certify Israeli compliance with U.S. requirements for the use of weapons we sell.

An ingenious feature of this compliance sidelight is that the principal complaint of NGOs about the IDF’s performance has centered on the use of the bombs in the just-halted shipment.  (See the CNN link above.)

The NGOs and media complain that Israel uses bombs too powerful for the tasks in Gaza, and doesn’t ensure sufficiently precise delivery, which is what the JDAM kits are for.  Thus, withholding the bombs is a punishment for which Biden purports to have a ready pretext, while withholding the JDAM kits is a way of limiting Israel’s access to the most precise means of delivery.

All of that basically boils down to a game being played, but it does portend an extortion situation with Israel:  i.e., the Biden administration warning to “Play ball with us or we’ll ratchet up the rhetoric about collateral damage, and cut off your precision-guidance kits.”

This is simply a hybrid-warfare information operation against Israel.

It’s being waged by the U.S. government.

Short note on the IDF’s munitions stocks

At some point it will matter whether Israel can replenish its inventory of the 2,000-lb and 500-lb bombs.  (Note that there are also 1,000-lb bombs and a smaller, 300-lb class precision weapon called the Small Diameter Bomb, or SDB.  All of these U.S.-made air-delivered munitions have seen use in Gaza in 2023-24, as well as in other operations over the last 15 years.)

The Rafah operation would be likely to use up a considerable portion of Israel’s existing inventory of such munitions.  In a February 2024 piece, WSJ cited a U.S. intelligence assessment of what the IDF has on-hand and how long it will last.  The relative timeliness of that assessment makes it worth repeating:  “According to a U.S. intelligence assessment, the remaining weapons are enough for Israel to sustain 19 more weeks of fighting in Gaza. That span would shrink to days if Israel launched a second front against Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon, according to a person familiar with the U.S. assessment.”

There hasn’t been another arms shipment to Israel since February, but the IDF has been going through inventory since then.  The period in question has been something of an operational pause, so the rate of use hasn’t been alarming.  But as of early May, I would estimate the stocks on-hand would last some 15-16 weeks, without a second front against Hezbollah.

Weird pier

I’m sorry to have to warn you, this is going to hurt.

On Thursday 9 May, the cargo ship M/V Sagamore got underway from Cyprus with the first shipment of humanitarian aid to be transferred ashore to Gaza via the U.S. pier system.  The system is incomplete, as we’ll see, but maneuvering the cargo around via a series of stopgaps at sea is intended to get the cargo ashore.

Right away, the actual developments with Sagamore and the floating pier appear to deviate significantly from what the media seem to think the U.S. DOD briefed.  Outlets like the New York Times have picked up on this.