Blinken expresses concern over threat to withhold Israeli weapons

Secretary of State Antony Blinken lamented the revelation that President Joe Biden had threatened to withhold some arms shipments to Israel amid a wider debate about whether such conditions help Hamas.

“Leaks are an unfortunate part of the business that we’re all engaged in,” Blinken said during a Senate Foreign Relations hearing on Tuesday. “It’s really regrettable, but it happens.”

That lament was how Blinken responded when asked whether the threat to withhold weapons from Israel over a dispute about a potential military operation had “strengthen[ed] Hamas’s hand.”

Blinken seemed to acknowledge that downside but defended the substance of the policy debate behind closed doors.

“We have one weapons system that we have been holding back, pending discussions with Israel, about how and where it would be used because of the concerns that we’ve clearly expressed over many months about the possibility of a full-on military assault on Rafah, a dense urban environment where using something like a 2,000-pound bomb could have terrible consequences for the civilians,” Blinken said. “This is something that needed to be discussed.”

Biden warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would not authorize the delivery of heavy bombs for use in Rafah amid a growing anxiety that the Israeli leader would launch a full-scale ground operation in the city over U.S. objections. That disagreement represented a milestone in U.S.-Israeli relations after months of growing Western discomfort with the civilian toll of the war in Gaza, but it also fostered acrimony in Jerusalem and Washington, D.C., where Biden faced charges of breaking with Israel to Hamas’s advantage.

Israel has drawn increasingly vociferous criticism over its prosecution of the war in Gaza, where the population density and Hamas’s entrenchment in and around civilian infrastructure has resulted in thousands of civilian casualties. Blinken has condemned the terrorist organization for “using civilians as human shields,” but U.S. officials also have suggested that it is “reasonable to assess” that Israel has violated international law in the war.

That dynamic has been complicated by Hamas’s unwillingness to accept a short-term ceasefire deal to release the scores of hostages seized on Oct. 7. The terrorist leaders are using the hostages as leverage to demand a complete end to the war and the withdrawal of the Israeli military from Gaza, among other conditions, a tactic that British Foreign Secretary David Cameron cited to explain the United Kingdom’s refusal to impose an arms embargo on Israel.

“Just to simply announce today that we will change our approach on arms exports, it would make Hamas stronger, and it would make a hostage deal less likely,” Cameron told the BBC in a recent interview.

Just as Biden’s threat to withhold that military assistance resulted in pressure on Cameron to explain why London would not follow suit, the British diplomatic chief’s response put Blinken in a difficult position.

“Please explain why … Lord Cameron, who is the foreign minister of one of our closest allies, is wrong when he says that blocking weapons to Israel would strengthen Hamas’s hand,” Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) asked Blinken.

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Blinken countered by emphasizing the support that Biden has provided to Israel before implicitly acknowledging that the publicity around the weapons shipment has redounded to Hamas’s advantage.

“It’s deeply unfortunate that that discussion leaked to the press, when it was a private discussion between U.S. and Israel,” Blinken said. “It did. And when the president was asked about it, he responded forthrightly, but there’s no final decision, and it remains subject to a discussion.”