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      Congressman rebuked for call to bomb Gaza ‘like Nagasaki and Hiroshima’

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      Rather than provide humanitarian aid in Gaza, the US should ensure it is subjected to atomic bombing the way that “Nagasaki and Hiroshima” were at the end of the second world war, a Republican congressman said in shocking remarks that by all indications were recorded recently at a gathering with a relatively small group of his constituents.The comments by US House representative Tim Walberg of Michigan drew condemnation from progressive political quarters, including from some who expressed disbelief that a former Christian pastor would advocate for what they called the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.“A sitting US rep in a secret town hall feels comfortable musing privately about genocide,” said a user on X who circulated video of Walberg’s comments late Friday. A reply to that comment read: “Exactly what Jesus would do, right?”Entries on Walberg’s congressional calendar – along with videos on social media – establish that he met with members of the public in Dundee, Michigan, on 25 March. As Mediaite recounted Saturday, a clip of the session that was posted on YouTube and other sites, and recorded by an activist, showed Walberg telling his audience that the US should not spend a “dime” on humanitarian aid in Gaza, where Israel has been carrying out a military campaign for months.The aid would be better spent on supporting Israel, which Walberg labeled the US’s “greatest ally, arguably, anywhere in the world”.“It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima,” Walberg said, alluding to the Japanese cities where the US dropped atomic bombs at the end of the second world war, killing hundreds of thousands of people. “Get it over quick.”Walberg also spoke in favor of affording similar treatment to Ukraine, which has been defending itself from a Russian military invasion since 2022. But Walberg said the purpose there would be to topple Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s forces expeditiously rather than spend the bulk of US “funding for Ukraine … for humanitarian purposes” as the war there dragged out.“Defeat Putin quick,” Walberg said.Once video footage of Walberg’s pronouncements went viral, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement denouncing the congressman’s declarations as a “clear call to genocide”.“This … should be condemned by all Americans who value human life and international law,” Cair’s executive director, Dawud Walid, said in a statement.Walid, whose group is the US’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, added: “To so casually call for what would result in the killing of every human being in Gaza sends the chilling message that Palestinian lives have no value.”A spokesperson for Walberg’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.Israel began carrying out an air and ground onslaught in Gaza after Hamas attacked on 7 October, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking hostages. The military strikes in Gaza have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, and the US said Friday that the Israeli campaign had probably already pushed the area into famine.Some of the Joe Biden White House’s fellow Democrats have been increasingly pressuring the president to cut off the almost $4bn in military aid that the US provides annually to Israel, which has persistently hindered the delivery of humanitarian relief in Gaza. On 26 March, the US abstained from a United Nations vote that saw 14 other members ratify a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, leaving Israel nearly isolated on the global political stage.Nonetheless, within days, Reuters reported that Biden’s administration had authorized the transfer of billions of dollars worth of bombs and fighter jets to Israel, whom Republicans in the US like Walberg generally support steadfastly.“We should be resourcing Israel just like they want to – to kill Hamas on their own,” Walberg said at the meeting in Dundee.Walberg was first elected to Congress in 2007. He reportedly entered the year with more than $1.1m in campaign funds as he prepared to seek a ninth term in the US House. More

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      State department official’s resignation highlights rifts over US Gaza policy

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      A human rights official has resigned from the US state department over Gaza saying the Biden administration is flouting US law by continuing to arm Israel, and is hushing up evidence that the US had seen on Israeli human rights abuses.Annelle Sheline, said she had hoped to have an influence on policy by staying at her post in the Near Eastern section of the bureau of democracy, human rights and labor, taking part in discussions, signing dissent cables and raising her concerns with her supervisor. But she had lost confidence she could do anything that would affect the flow of US arms to Israel.“The fundamental reason was – I no longer wanted to be affiliated with this administration,” Sheline told the Guardian. “I have a young daughter. She’s not yet two, but if some day in the future, she is learning about this and knows that I was at the state department and she asked me [about it] – I want to be able to tell her that I did what I could.”Sheline is only the second state department official to resign over US policy on the Gaza war (another official left the education department over the issue), but she said that many of her colleagues had told her they would resign if they could afford to lose their job, and had urged her to speak out about her reasons for quitting, rather than to leave quietly.View image in fullscreenThe 38-year-old, who studied the foreign policy of Arab governments for her doctorate, said the state department was aware of plenty of evidence that Israel was violating international law in its conduct of the Gaza war, and that the Biden administration was violating US law by continuing to supply weapons.She pointed in particular to the Leahy laws, which forbid assistance to foreign military units implicated in atrocities, and section 620 (I) of the Foreign Assistance Act, which states that no assistance should be given to any government which “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance”.On Monday, the state department said it had received assurances from Israel officials and “not found them to be in violation of international humanitarian law”. But Sheline said: “The law is clear here and we do have evidence. But the specifics are just not being followed.”The state department has said it is reviewing evidence of civilian harm under a mechanism established by the Biden administration last year, weeks before the Gaza war broke out, but Sheline said the results of those investigations would only be made public when the White House wanted them to be.“There are a lot of people working on this at State but at the end of the day, the public policy does have to be something that the White House signs off on,” Sheline said. “Until the White House is ready to take a different line, some of the other things happening in State are just not going to come out.”She said she believed administration policy was being driven by domestic political considerations, but argued that domestic politics were shifting on the issue, pointing to the significant “uncommitted” protest vote in the Democratic presidential primary election, and suggested that the Biden administration had misjudged the mood.“I do think the president’s view of Israel is deeply influenced by a generational divide,” she said. “I think it’s taken this administration a long time to realise that the previous political calculus on this, in terms of big donors, in terms of the Israel lobby, … is seeing a shift.”On Wednesday, Gallup published a new poll showing a significant drop in American public support for Israel’s conduct of the war, from 50% in November to 36% now, with 55% disapproving of Israel’s actions.Sheline credited this shift for helping lead to the US abstention on a UN security council resolution on Monday, allowing it to pass after the US vetoed three earlier draft texts over the nearly six months since the war started.“I am glad to see that slight shift, but it hasn’t really made any difference to the people in Gaza yet,” Sheline said. “So it’s really too little, too late.“Not only are these policies devastating the people of Gaza, but I think they’re also devastating the US image in the world,” she argued. “This administration came in promising to rebuild American diplomacy and America’s moral leadership after the Trump administration, but so many of these issues that the administration said were so important – including human rights – seem to be less important to this administration than the US-Israel relationship.” More

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      Netanyahu has been spoiling for a fight with the US. He may not survive this one | Alon Pinkas

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      How do you gaslight an entire nation about a war and then try to do the same to a superpower that is your ally? And how do you turn a just war into global isolation and widespread condemnation? Just ask Benjamin Netanyahu. He has the patent.Netanyahu has been deliberately and intently seeking a confrontation with the US ever since late October. The UN security council resolution 2728, demanding an “immediate ceasefire”, is just the latest pretext for this premeditated showdown. This may sound counterintuitive and imprudent to you, given that the two countries are close allies, given Israel’s heavy reliance on US military aid and its diplomatic umbrella, and particularly given President Biden’s sweeping and unwavering support for Israel since the 7 October catastrophe.But Netanyahu has two reasons to instigate such a confrontation. The first is pure gaslighting on a grand scale. He concocted a narrative that supposedly explains the war’s context and consequently absolves him from the responsibility and accountability he persistently refuses to assume. It also distracts from his stated policy of imploring Qatar to funnel more funds to Gaza to strengthen Hamas, all in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority and render any political negotiations impossible.According to this narrative, 7 October was simply a debacle that could have been averted had the Israel Defense Forces and Shabak intelligence not failed. The bigger problem now, according to Netanyahu, is the possibility of a Palestinian state that the world, especially the US, has been trying to impose on Israel since the attack. According to this narrative, only a heroic Netanyahu can stand up to the US, defy an American president and prevent this travesty.Now of course it is impossible that a new Palestinian state could be “imposed” from outside. But this framing allows Netanyahu to placate his rightwing extremist coalition and partners, who have long opposed any form of Palestinian statehood. And it lets him make conflict with the US a focal point, rather than his own failures. It’s not about the Louis XIV wannabe prime minister. It never is.The second reason is more current and practical: the confrontation is about setting up Biden as the scapegoat for Netanyahu’s failure to achieve “total victory” or “the eradication of Hamas”, two fortune cookie-type slogans that he spews regularly.The security council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, adopted by 14 members with the US abstaining, puts Israel on a double collision course: with the UN security council but more critically, with the US. Netanyahu’s sanctimonious tantrums about how “surprised” he was and how the US abstention is a departure from policy that would prevent victory is mendacious. He was warned repeatedly by the Biden administration that this would be an inevitable outcome if he persisted with his endless recalcitrance, defiance and effective refusal to engage with the US, ostensibly Israel’s staunch ally and protector.When you ignore US requests, dismiss the president’s well-intentioned advice, inundate the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, with duplicitous spin, casually deride US plans and ideas for a reconfigured region, show crude intransigence by refusing to present a credible and coherent vision for postwar Gaza, hold a video call with Republican senators (a group that Netanyahu feels he is a life member of) and actively pursue an open confrontation with the administration, there’s a price to pay. Most recently, Blinken’s state department has warned Israel that it is increasingly isolated and is in danger of inflicting “generational damage” to its reputation and image.Had Israel seriously engaged with the US on any of the above issues, without necessarily agreeing to everything, it would have prevented this rift. The US has one long-running fundamental contention with Israel: the lack of a coherent political objective for the war, with which military means must be aligned. The US inquired time after time about Israel’s goals and got nothing but “topple Hamas”, which is a worthy goal, but does not address the “day after”.In respect of the security council, Israel will conveniently explain to itself that the resolution is not a big deal, that there is no imminent threat of sanctions and anyway, the UN was always and remains anti-Israeli. Perhaps. But that’s not the point. The resolution puts Israel in a very unpleasant and precarious place to be for a country, let alone a democracy and a US ally. The more critical and consequential arena is US-Israel relations. Their deterioration under Netanyahu has been well documented over the past year, but the security council resolution represents a new low.Since around January time, the US has negatively revised its assessment of Israel under Netanyahu. He does not behave as an ally, he has accrued a debilitating credibility deficit over the years on a multitude of issues, and he has intentionally failed to come up with a plan for postwar Gaza – to the point where he is now seriously suspected in Washington of prolonging the war for his own political survival antics. The current showdown over the security council resolution widens the rift to the point that it is impossible to see how the trajectory will change as long as Netanyahu is in power.At the moment, the US has three points of disagreement with Israel regarding the details of the prosecution of the war: the notion that Israel is impeding humanitarian aid; the number of civilian non-combatant deaths; and a possible military invasion of Rafah, on the southern tip of Gaza. These differences could have been resolved had Netanyahu and Biden had a working, honest and good-faith relationship. They do not. In fact, Netanyahu has a track record of confrontations and frequent spats with US administrations, from George HW Bush through to Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and now Biden. His – unsuccessful, it must be added – meddling in US politics is also a familiar trait of his since the 1990s.The current state of relations is close to an inflection point, and could go in one of two directions: either Netanyahu is ousted or leaves or loses an election, or the US will be convinced that the bilateral ecosystem has faltered and warrants a major reassessment of relations. Under Netanyahu, Israel has reached the point at which its very value as an ally is being questioned. It took the US some time, but it finally seems to realise a simple fact: Israel may be an ally, but Netanyahu most certainly is not.
      Alon Pinkas served as Israel’s consul general in New York from 2000 to 2004. He is now a columnist for Haaretz
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      Kamala Harris says Israel assault on Rafah ‘would be a huge mistake’

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      Senior US Democrats on Sunday increased pressure on Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to abandon a planned offensive into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering.Two days after a similar call by US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was rejected by the Israeli leader, vice-president Kamala Harris said that the Joe Biden White House was “ruling out nothing” in terms of consequences if Netanyahu moves ahead with the assault.Harris said that Washington had been “very clear in terms of our perspective on whether or not that should happen”.“Any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake,” Harris said on ABC’s This Week. “I have studied the maps – there’s nowhere for those folks to go. And we’re looking at about a million and a half people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there.”Harris declined to say if she, like Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, the most senior politician of the Jewish faith in the US, believed that Netanyahu is an obstacle to peace. But she said: “We’ve been very clear that far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.“We have been very clear that Israel and the Israeli people and Palestinians are entitled to an equal amount of security and dignity.”Her remarks came as political figure from progressive elements of the Democratic political established added their voices to the growing opposition to the humanitarian costs of Israel’s five-month military campaign on the Palestinian territory.That air and ground campaign began after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing more than 1,100 and taking hostage. The offensive has killed more than 30,000 people and pushed Gaza to the brink of famine.On Friday, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused the Jewish state of committing “genocide” against the Palestinians and called on the US to suspend military aid to Israel.She went further Sunday, saying that Israel had “crossed the threshold of intent” in blocking humanitarian aid from reaching starving Gazans.“Multiple governments [and other entities] have stated themselves plainly that the Israeli government and leaders in the Israeli government are intentionally denying, blocking and slow-walking this aid and are precipitating a mass famine,” she told ABC News.“It is horrific. What we are seeing here, I think, with a forced famine, is beyond our ability to deny or explain away. There is no targeting of Hamas in precipitating a mass famine of a million people, half of whom are children.”Netanyahu responded to US pressure on Friday by issuing a statement saying that he told Blinken there was no way to defeat Hamas without going into Rafah.“And I told him that I hope we will do it with the support of the US, but if we have to – we will do it alone,” Netanyahu said.Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday dismissed Netanyahu’s position, saying: “The actions of Hamas do not justify forcing thousands, hundreds of thousands of people to eat grass as their bodies consume themselves.“We are talking about collective punishment, which is unjustifiable.”Separately on Sunday, senator Ralph Warnock of Georgia – a key Black Democrat in Biden’s political coalition for re-election – was asked by CBS’s Face the Nation why the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had become a key issue for African American voters amid a broader discussion around US values.“We in the African American community understand human struggle. We know it when we see it,” Warnock said. While the US cannot forget or turn away from the 7 October attack by Hamas, he said, “we cannot turn away from the scenes of awful suffering and human catastrophe in Gaza”.“For Mr Netanyahu to go into Rafah, where some 1.4 million Palestinians are now sheltering, would be morally unjustifiable,” Warnock added. “It would be unconscionable. And I hope that at the end of the day, cooler heads will prevail.”Asked if continuing to transfer military supplies to Israel was a sacrifice of US moral authority, Warnock instead acknowledged that “Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood, and its enemies are more than just Hamas”.“But look, we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Warnock said. “We can be consistent in our support of Israel’s right to defend itself – and at the same time, be true to American values, and engage this catastrophic humanitarian situation that’s on the ground.” More

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      Israel defence chief to head to Washington for Gaza talks

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      Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant will leave on Sunday for talks in the United States, the Israeli government said, amid growing tensions between the allies over the war in Gaza.Gallant will meet with US counterpart Lloyd Austin, US secretary of state Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan “and additional senior officials”, a statement said.“The parties will discuss developments in the war against the Hamas terrorist organisation in Gaza, efforts undertaken to return the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, humanitarian efforts and measures required to ensure regional stability,” it said.The visit comes after Blinken’s latest whistle-stop tour of the region during which he warned that an Israeli offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah would be a “mistake” that “risks further isolating Israel around the world”.Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that Israel was prepared to move ahead with the Rafah operation “alone”, without US support.There are widespread fears of mass civilian casualties in Rafah, where about 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge during the war which erupted after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on southern Israel on 7 October.Gallant’s visit will be his first to Washington since the fighting broke out.US president Joe Biden said Monday he had told Netanyahu to send a team to Washington to discuss how to avoid a full-scale military operation in Rafah.A US defence official said this week that Gallant’s scheduled meeting with Austin was separate from the delegation visit requested by Biden.The Hamas attack on 7 October resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.Israel’s retaliatory military campaign to destroy Hamas has killed at least 32,142 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory. More

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls Israeli Gaza campaign an ‘unfolding genocide’

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      Progressive US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the Israeli military campaign in Gaza an “unfolding genocide” in a scathing speech that demanded the Joe Biden White House suspend aid to Israel’s armed forces.“As we speak, in this moment, 1.1 million innocents in Gaza are at famine’s door,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech on the House floor on Friday.Citing 30,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza and noting 70% were women and children, she continued: “A famine … is being intentionally precipitated through the blocking of food and global humanitarian assistance by leaders in the Israeli government. This is a mass starvation of people, engineered and orchestrated.“This was all accomplished – much of this was accomplished – with US resources and weapons. If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes.”Ocasio-Cortez’s comments marked the first time the congresswoman, one of the most prominent members of the US’s political progressive left, referred to Israel’s assault on Gaza as a genocide. Israel mounted the campaign there in response to the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,100 and took hostages.While other American progressives – including congresswomen Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian – have used the term “genocide”, Ocasio-Cortez had refrained from doing so until her remarks on Friday.In January, Ocasio-Cortez implied that she was waiting for the UN’s international court of justice to weigh in on the term, noting that “the fact that this word is even in play, the fact that this word is even in our discourse, I think, demonstrates the mass inhumanity that Gaza is facing”.Earlier in March, a group of protesters confronted Ocasio-Cortez at a movie theater in Brooklyn, criticizing her for “refus[ing] to call it a genocide”.Ocasio-Cortez on Friday called on Biden to suspend the transfer of US weapons to aid the Israeli government, saying “honoring our alliances does not mean facilitating mass killing”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We cannot hide from our responsibility any longer,” she said. “Blocking assistance from one’s closest allies to starve a million people is not unintentional. We have a responsibility to prove the value of democracy, enshrined in the upholding of civil society, rule of law and commitment to human and civil rights.”Ocasio-Cortez was one of 22 House Democrats who voted against the $1.2tn, six-month spending package that both the House and Senate passed on Friday. The package includes a ban on direct US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, an agency providing key assistance to Gaza, until March 2025.Biden is expected to sign the bill, which was sent to his desk early on Saturday morning after it passed the Senate. More

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      In defying Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu is exposing the limits of US power | Jonathan Freedland

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      The pictures out of Gaza get more harrowing with each passing day. After months of witnessing civilians grieving for loved ones killed by bombs, now we see children desperate to eat – victims of what the aid agencies and experts are united in calling an imminent “man-made” famine. What matters most about these images is their depiction of a continuing horror inflicted on the people of Gaza. But they also reveal something that could have lasting implications for Israelis and Palestinians, for Americans and for the entire world. What they show, indeed what they advertise, is the weakness of the president of the United States.Joe Biden and his most senior lieutenants have been urging Israel to increase the flow of food aid into Gaza for months, in ever more insistent terms. This week the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, cited the finding of a UN-backed agency that the threat of hunger now confronted “100% of the population of Gaza”,adding that this was the first time that body had issued such a warning. Earlier this month, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, told Israel it needed to do whatever it took to get humanitarian aid into Gaza: “No excuses.” The Biden administration is all but banging the table and demanding Israel act.A week ago, it seemed to have had an effect. The Israel Defense Forces announced what was billed as a “dramatic pivot”, promising that it would “flood” Gaza with food supplies. But there’s precious little sign of it. An additional crossing has been opened, the so-called 96th gate, allowing a few more trucks to go in, but nothing on the scale that is required to avert disaster – or mitigate the disaster already unfolding. For all the talk of a pivot, there is still “a series of impediments, blockages, restrictions … on lorries carrying the most basic humanitarian aid”, David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee said this week. He noted the way that Israel’s ban on “dual use” items, those things that could be used as weapons if they fell into the hands of Hamas, means that even the inclusion of a simple pair of scissors for a clinic can result in an entire truckful of aid being turned back.To repeat, the victims of this are the 2.2 million people of Gaza, who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. But it represents a severe problem, or several, for Biden too. The most obvious is that he is in a re-election year, seeking to reassemble the coalition that brought him victory in 2020. Back then, a crucial constituency was the young, with voters under 30 favouring Biden over Donald Trump by 25 points. Now it’s a dead heat. To be sure, there are several factors to explain that shift, but one of them is younger Americans’ outrage at the plight of Gaza.The threat to re-election is illustrated most sharply in the battleground state of Michigan, home to 200,000 Arab-Americans who are similarly appalled, with many unequivocal that they will not vote for Biden, even if that risks the return of Trump – with all that implies for the US and the world. That number is more than enough to tip the state from Democrat to Republican in November. “If the election were held tomorrow, I think Biden would lose Michigan,” veteran Republican strategist Mike Murphy told me on the Unholy podcast this week. For Biden, “this is a pain point”.US support for Israel in this context would be a headache for any Democratic president, but Israel’s willingness to defy its most important ally presses especially on Biden. For one thing, the upside of his great age is supposed to be his experience in foreign affairs and especially his personal relationships with fellow world leaders. He likes to say he has known every Israeli prime minister since Golda Meir and that he’s dealt with Netanyahu for decades. Critics reply: a fat lot of good it’s done you.And that is the heart of the matter. For most of Israel’s history, it’s been taken as read that a clear objection from a US president is enough to make an Israeli prime minister change course. A shake of the head from Dwight Eisenhower brought an end to the Suez war of 1956. A phone call from Ronald Reagan ended the Israeli bombardment of west Beirut in 1982. In 1991, George HW Bush pushed a reluctant Likud prime minister to attend the Madrid peace conference, by withholding $10bn in loan guarantees.Biden has repeatedly made his displeasure known, and yet Netanyahu does not budge. It’s making the US look weak and for Biden especially, that’s deadly. “The subtext of the whole Republican campaign is that the world’s out of control and Biden’s not in command,” David Axelrod, former senior adviser to Barack Obama, told me on Unholy . “That’s basically their argument, and they use age as a surrogate for weakness.” Every time Netanyahu seems to be “punking” Biden, says Axelrod, it makes things worse.Plenty of Israeli analysts suggest that appearances are deceptive. In their view, Netanyahu is making a great show of thumbing his nose at Biden, because he is in an undeclared election campaign and defiance of Washington plays well with his base, but in reality he is much more compliant. In this reading, Team Netanyahu’s talk of a ground operation in Rafah – where nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are crammed together, most having fled Israeli bombardment – is just talk. Yes, the Israeli PM likes to threaten a Rafah invasion, to put pressure on Hamas and to have a bargaining chip with the Americans, but he is hardly acting like a man committed to doing it. Amos Harel, much-respected defence analyst for the Haaretz newspaper, notes that there are only three and a half IDF brigades currently in Gaza, compared with 28 at the height of hostilities. “Netanyahu is in a campaign, and for the time being at least, ‘Rafah’ is just a slogan,” he told me.Let’s hope that’s right, and a Rafah operation is more rhetorical than real. That does not address Israel’s foot-dragging on aid, which Netanyahu is clearly in no hurry to end, in part because his ultranationalist coalition partners believe sending food to Gaza is tantamount to aiding the Hamas enemy.That leaves Biden with two options. His preferred outcome is a breakthrough in the talks in Qatar, which would see both a release of some of the hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October and a pause in fighting, allowing aid to flow in. But Netanyahu fears such a pause, which would hasten the day of reckoning for his role in leaving Israel’s southern communities so badly exposed six months ago to Hamas – whether that reckoning is at the hands of the electorate or a commission of inquiry. He prefers to play for time, ideally until November, when Netanyahu hopes to say goodbye to Biden and welcome back Trump.The alternative for Biden is tougher. Last month, he issued a new protocol, demanding those countries that receive US arms affirm in writing that they abide by international law, including on humanitarian aid. If the US doesn’t certify that declaration, all arms sales stop immediately. In Israel’s case, the deadline for certification is Sunday.Joe Biden does not want to be the man who stopped arming Israel, not least because that would leave the country vulnerable to the mighty arsenal of Hezbollah just across the northern border with Lebanon. His administration is split on the move and he may well deem it too much. But he does need to see food flood into Gaza, right away. He has tried asking Netanyahu nicely. Now he needs to get tough.
      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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      Republican House speaker says he’ll invite Netanyahu to address Congress

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      Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, said on Thursday that he plans to invite Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to speak before Congress.The comments come a week after Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, called for elections in Israel which could oust Netanyahu, claiming the prime minister has “has lost his way”.Republican support for Netanyahu has remained staunch, despite the death toll in Gaza rising to more than 30,000 in the face of Israel’s continued military action.“I would love to have him come in and address a joint session of Congress,” Johnson said on Thursday morning, in an interview with CNBC. “We’ll certainly extend that invitation.”Johnson said it would be “a great honor of mine” to invite the Israeli leader. He added: “We’re just trying to work out schedules on all this”.Netanyahu addressed Republican senators virtually at a closed door event on Wednesday. Earlier in the week Israel’s prime minister said he was “determined” to carry out a ground invasion of Rafah, the city in the south of Gaza, despite opposition from Joe Biden. An estimated 1.5 million Palestinians have taken shelter in Rafah after fleeing violence elsewhere in the country.Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the United States, was criticized by Republicans and by Israel’s ruling Likud party after he said Netanyahu “has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel” in a speech in the Senate.The Senate leader pointed out that Netanyahu had included far-right figures in his government, and said the prime minister “has been too willing to tolerate the civilian toll in Gaza, which is pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows. Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”On Thursday, Schumer said he would welcome Netanyahu to speak before Congress.“Israel has no stronger ally than the United States and our relationship transcends any one president or any one prime minister,” Schumer said in a statement.“I will always welcome the opportunity for the prime minister of Israel to speak to Congress in a bipartisan way.”Johnson’s invitation comes after Reuters reported on Wednesday that a bill being worked on by the House, Senate and the Biden administration would continue a ban on funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (Unrwa), the main UN agency for Palestinians, until March 2025.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe White House said in January it was temporarily pausing new funding to Unrwa after Israel accused 12 of the agency’s 13,000 employees in Gaza of participating in the 7 October Hamas attack.Australia, Sweden, the European Commission and Canada recently reinstated funding to Unrwa, having paused funding while the allegations were investigated.In announcing the resumption of funding Penny Wong, the Australian foreign minister, said: “The best available current advice from agencies and the Australian government lawyers is that Unrwa is not a terrorist organization.”In 2015, Netanyahu infuriated the Obama administration by accepting an invitation from John Boehner, then the Republican speaker, to address a joint sitting of Congress about the threat of a nuclear Iran.That speech was interpreted as a partisan intervention in US politics, and an attempt to wreck western negotiations with Iran over Tehran’s nuclear programme. The White House was particularly incensed that Boehner and Ron Dermer, then the Israeli ambassador to Washington, conspired to arrange the speech without consulting the administration. More