America is running out of options in the Gaza war

Eight months later, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the White House to achieve those goals, underscoring President Biden’s vulnerability ahead of his face-off with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on Thursday.

US-led talks on a ceasefire to end the war and release hostages held by Hamas have all but collapsed. Hezbollah attacks on Israel’s northern border have intensified, heightening the Biden administration’s fears of a full-scale conflict. And the White House and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have exchanged accusations over whether the US has slowed down its arms shipments.

These tensions underscore Biden’s challenge to achieve a foreign policy victory before the U.S. presidential election in November – a victory that would require the buy-in of warring parties operating on a very different timetable.

Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar shows little interest in a quick ceasefire, and Netanyahu’s opposition to a Palestinian state has overshadowed the Biden administration’s broader strategy for the region, which includes stabilizing post-war Gaza.

Eventually, world leaders will tire of the war and be in favor of a deal, but not as quickly as Biden hopes. “Their clocks are not synchronized with Biden’s,” says Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They tick much more in unison and much slower.”

Biden has tried to strike a balance between supplying Israel with weapons and criticizing a military operation that has killed around 38,000 Palestinians in Gaza, many of them women and children, according to local health authorities. That figure does not distinguish between civilians and militants.

US officials praised the delivery of food aid to the Gaza Strip and the pressure on Israel to scale back a planned attack on the Hamas stronghold of Rafah, reducing the use of troops and ammunition.

But the bitterness toward the Israeli president recently came to the fore when Netanyahu broadcast a video message in English claiming that the United States was withholding weapons from Israel. The Israeli prime minister reiterated the allegations in an interview published by online publication Punchbowl News on Friday.

“There have been significant slowdowns in the supply of essential ammunition and weapons,” Netanyahu said.

US officials said on Friday they were stunned by Netanyahu’s comments. “There are no bottlenecks,” US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Thursday.

Current and former U.S. officials said Netanyahu’s comments appeared to reflect Israeli political calculations, stressing that the administration had not delayed any arms shipments except for a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs that the White House said was being reviewed because of concerns about civilian casualties in Gaza.

Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat, said the prime minister’s behavior was part of a pattern of quarrels and confrontations with the government to show he stood up to the United States. “This is 100 percent staged,” Pinkas said.

The delivery of the 2,000-pound bombs was held up in May to force Israel to reconsider its plans for an attack on Hamas fighters in Rafah. Israel has since revised its plan for a two-division assault on Rafah and instead focused on sealing the Egypt-Gaza border, conducting smaller ground operations in the city and using smaller types of munitions in its air strikes.

The White House fears that ongoing fighting in Gaza could lead to an expansion of the war into Lebanon. Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters have been trading blows across the Lebanese border since October 7, when the Hamas-led fighters launched an attack from Gaza into Israel that killed 1,200 people, most of them Israeli civilians.

Biden’s proposed ceasefire plan for Gaza is the best way to prevent a major confrontation, US officials say. The plan would begin with a temporary ceasefire and an exchange of hostages, followed by a permanent end to hostilities and an influx of aid and reconstruction funds into Gaza.

Although Netanyahu has said he supports Biden’s original ceasefire plan, the Israeli prime minister has still not presented a viable plan for the long-term management of the Gaza Strip and is instead focused on the military destruction of Hamas.

The Biden administration has called for reviving the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority in the hope that it can also administer the Gaza Strip after the war between Israel and Hamas ends if Israel is persuaded to accept a Palestinian state. But the government in Ramallah is on the brink of financial collapse, in part because of the suspension of Israeli tax revenues after the October 7 attacks.

Khaled Elgindy of the Middle East Institute believes that while both Netanyahu and Sinwar are only paying lip service to a ceasefire, in reality both are gaining political advantage from the war.

Sinwar, he said, had dramatically increased Hamas’ popularity throughout the Arab world, despite the high number of Palestinian civilian casualties the war had caused. Netanyahu’s popularity in Israel had faltered, and he was in danger of being ousted after a peace deal, Elgindy said.

“Netanyahu would like nothing more than to drag out the ceasefire talks indefinitely so he can stay in power,” Elgindy said. “Because once this war ends, the clock will start ticking for the end of his term.”

Publicly, the US has blamed Hamas for blocking the ceasefire and causing further deaths in Gaza, but neither Biden nor his Arab partners have been able to exert any significant pressure on Hamas.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that Netanyahu is committed to the ceasefire plan for Gaza and that if it does not move forward, Hamas will be to blame. The responsibility, Blinken said after a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, lies with “a man” who is hiding “ten floors underground in Gaza” and has to cast the deciding vote, referring to Sinwar.

David Satterfield, US special envoy for humanitarian affairs in the Middle East until April, recently said at an online event hosted by the Carnegie Foundation that the obstacles to a peace agreement are the greatest he has seen in 45 years. One difficulty is that the conflicting parties, Israel and Hamas, are less interested in achieving politically tangible successes in the negotiations than in their own existence.

“This is a fundamental conflict of interest where it is very, very difficult to imagine a solution that works for all parties involved – and one of those parties is a vicious terrorist organization,” he said.

Write to Alan Cullison at [email protected], Michael R. Gordon at [email protected] and Anat Peled at [email protected]