Israeli tanks rolled into the western part of Rafah on Thursday as the city came under intense helicopter, drone and artillery fire in what residents described as one of the worst bombardments of the area so far.
The assault on Rafah has driven out more than a million Palestinians who had been sheltering there, forcing them into areas with little or no access to food, water or shelter. The UN has warned that more than a million people are expected to “face death and starvation by the middle of July”.
Joe Biden had warned he would cut off the supply of US weapons if Israel went ahead with an attack on Rafah, in part because of the lack of an adequate humanitarian plan for all the civilians who would be displaced, but the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his war cabinet launched the attack anyway over a month ago.
The Biden administration has yet to slow the flow of arms in response, arguing that Israel had yet to carry out “major operations”.
People living in Rafah described the level of fighting as devastating, however.
“There was very intense fire from warplanes, Apaches [helicopters] and quadcopters, in addition to Israeli artillery and military battleships, all of which were striking the area west of Rafah,” a resident told Agence France-Presse.
Hamas said its fighters were battling Israeli troops on the streets of the city, which lies on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.
The White House is now focused on a hostages-for-ceasefire proposal outlined by Biden on 31 May and endorsed by the UN security council on Tuesday. US officials said the proposal had been accepted by Israel, despite repeated remarks from Netanyahu distancing himself from key parts of the deal, most importantly the mechanism by which a ceasefire would become a permanent end to the war.
Hamas has responded to the proposal with suggested amendments, some of which the US says are negotiable, and others which it insists are unacceptable.
Briefing journalists at the start of a G7 summit in Italy, the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, denied that the Israeli leadership “contradicted or walked back” the proposal.
“To this day, they stand behind the proposal that was put on the table in late May that President Biden described in his 31 May speech,” Sullivan said.
“I do think Hamas’s assertion that they’ve accepted that proposal, to the extent that they are saying that publicly, is not correct,” he added. While some amendments are minor, Sullivan said: “Others are not consistent with what President Biden laid out or what the UN security council embraced.
“Our goal is to figure out how we work to bridge the remaining gaps and get to a deal,” he said.
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Biden was due to brief other leaders in the Apulia summit on progress of the ceasefire talks, and also on the situation on the Israel-Lebanon border where the tempo of fighting between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah has escalated in recent days, with intense Hezbollah drone and rocket strikes on IDF targets. Israel has said it would respond “with force”.
Sullivan said that Biden would tell his fellow G7 leaders that agreeing a ceasefire in Gaza was linked to achieving calm on Israel’s northern border.
On the eve of the G7 summit, the UN humanitarian relief chief, Martin Griffiths, called on the leaders of the rich industrialised member states to act to prevent human-made famines in Gaza and Sudan.
“Famine in the 21st century is a preventable scourge. G7 leaders can and must wield their influence to help stop it,” Griffiths said. “Waiting for an official declaration of famine before acting would be a death sentence for hundreds of thousands of people and a moral outrage.”
“In Gaza, half of the population – more than 1 million people – is expected to face death and starvation by the middle of July,” he said. “In Sudan, at least 5 million people are also teetering on the brink of starvation.”
Griffiths, who will retire from his position at the end of this month, called on the G7 to step up support for humanitarian relief but also “more than anything, the world must stop feeding the war machines that are starving the civilians of Gaza and Sudan”.