Could Biden stop Netanyahu’s attack on Rafah?

Israel entered Rafah, a city that marks Gaza’s southern border crossing with Egypt, on May 7, 2024, launching a military offensive that the US and others have cautioned Israel not to pursue.

President Joe Biden warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 6 against expanding the Gaza war into Rafah, indicating that this could lead to a shift in US policy on Israel.

A divergence over how to handle the war in Gaza prompted the US to place a hold on shipping US-made bombs to Israel, according to Israeli officials and a US official quoted in Politico, Axios and The Wall Street Journal.

Rafah is one of the only places in Gaza that has not been destroyed in the Gaza war. It is also a refuge for more than 1 million Palestinians, about half of whom are children, who have been displaced from their homes elsewhere in Gaza because of the conflict.

The Conversation spoke with Gregory Treverton, a chair of the National Intelligence Council under the Obama administration and a national security scholar at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, to understand the limits of US political leverage in influencing Israel’s seven-month war with Hamas.

Is the US’s warning to Israel typical for their diplomatic relationship?

This is certainly not without precedent. There have been many US presidents and secretaries of state who have been frustrated with Israel over something, going back to at least the 1973 war between Israel and a coalition of Arab countries.

The US pressed Israel to adhere to a UN Security Council cease-fire resolution then – one sponsored by both the US and the Soviet Union – but Israel, for a time, refused.

Other presidents have been in the position of saying, “Do this,” and the Israeli comeback is