Middle East CrisisNetanyahu Rebuffs Biden and Vows to Press Ahead With Rafah Invasion

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class="live-blog-post-content css-h61jh5 evys1bk0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: var(--color-content-secondary,#363636); font-family: nyt-imperial, georgia, "times new roman", times, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.25rem; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.875rem; margin: 0px auto 0.9375rem; max-width: 600px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-size-adjust: 100%; vertical-align: baseline; width: 600px;">Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel brushed aside disagreement with the Biden administration over a planned ground invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, saying Tuesday that his government would press ahead despite pleas for restraint from the United States and key allies.

Mr. Netanyahu made the remarks to Israeli lawmakers a day after speaking by phone with Mr. Biden, who the White House said had reiterated concerns that invading Rafah would be “a mistake.” Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said that Israel’s objectives in Rafah “can be done by other means,” and that Mr. Netanyahu had agreed to send a team of Israeli officials to Washington to hear U.S. concerns and to discuss alternatives.

The White House says a meeting with an Israeli delegation on Rafah is expected early next week.

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Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One on Tuesday that the Biden administration expected the Israeli officials to arrive in Washington “likely” early next week.

How Gazans have fared after Israel has asked them to flee.

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The latest example is Rafah in southern Gaza, a city swollen to more than 1.4 million people by forced displacement. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Tuesday that his military would invade the city to root out Hamas but that it would provide humanitarian aid and “facilitate an orderly exit of the population.”

Israel’s military says its forces are still operating at Al-Shifa Hospital

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The latest raid of Al-Shifa began on Monday in what Israeli officials said was an operation targeting senior Hamas officials who had regrouped there, setting off a battle that both sides said had resulted in casualties.

On Tuesday, Israel’s military said its troops were “continuing precise operations” in the sprawling complex of the hospital, which is Gaza’s largest. It said it had killed dozens of militants, though its account of the fighting could not be independently verified.

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Emmy Shaheen, a resident of Gaza City, filmed clashes around Al-Shifa Hospital, where the the Israeli military carried out an operation.CreditCredit...Emmy Shaheen

The Al Jazeera news network said that one of its journalists had been detained for 12 hours. It said the journalist, Ismail al-Ghoul, had been severely beaten. Israel’s military has not responded to the allegations, which drew outrage from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The Gazan Health Ministry condemned the raid as a “crime against health institutions,” and humanitarian organizations expressed alarm over the situation at the complex. The hospital, along with the surrounding area, had been sheltering 30,000 patients, medical workers and displaced civilians.

“Hospitals should never be battlegrounds,” the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a post on social media warning that the situation was “endangering health workers, patients and civilians.

Doctors Without Borders said it was “extremely concerned” for the safety of patients and medical staff in the hospital compound. In a statement on Monday, the organization urged “all warring parties to respect the grounds and perimeter of the hospital and ensure the safety of medical personnel, patients and civilians.”

Israel has said that the hospital complex doubled as a secret Hamas military command center, calling it one of many examples of civilian facilities that Hamas uses to shield its activities.

Four months ago, Israeli forces stormed the complex and found a tunnel shaft they said supported their contention that the armed group had used it to conceal military operations.

Since then, Israel has withdrawn many troops from northern Gaza and has shifted the focus of its invasion to the south. As a result, lawlessness has increasingly taken hold in the north, prompting international aid organizations to suspend operations despite a dire humanitarian crisis.

The Biden administration has grown increasingly critical of Israel’s conduct of the war and its toll on civilians. On Monday, President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said that “more innocent civilians have died in this conflict, in this military operation, than in all the wars in Gaza combined, including thousands of children.”

“A humanitarian crisis has descended across Gaza, and anarchy reigns in areas that Israel’s military has cleared but not stabilized,” he said.

Gabby Sobelman and Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

— Cassandra Vinograd

The U.N. human rights chief says Israel may be using starvation as a war weapon.

The United Nations human rights chief, Volker Türk, blamed Israel on Tuesday for what he said was the entirely preventable catastrophe of starvation and famine unfolding in Gaza, urging international pressure on the country to allow for the unimpeded entry of humanitarian aid.

International alarm has been growing over the hunger crisis in Gaza, with food experts predicting an imminent famine in the north of the enclave and foreign leaders and diplomats becoming increasingly blunt in pointing the finger at Israel.

Israel’s spy chief returns home as cease-fire talks continue in Qatar.

The head of Israel’s delegation has returned home from cease-fire talks in Qatar, an Israeli official said on Tuesday, but talks there are continuing amid another intensive diplomatic push to secure a pause in the fighting in Gaza as famine looms.

Warnings from the United Nations that a “famine is imminent” have added urgency to efforts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, and get more humanitarian aid into Gaza. In addition to the discussions in Qatar, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will visit Saudi Arabia and Egypt this week to discuss postwar plans for Gaza and the wider Middle East.

The top U.S. diplomat will make his sixth wartime trip to the Middle East

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will visit Saudi Arabia and Egypt this week, a trip that comes as the Biden administration tries to broker a hostage deal that would pause Israel’s offensive in Gaza and allow more humanitarian aid into the Palestinian territory.

Speaking to reporters during a stop in Manila on Tuesday, Mr. Blinken said his discussions would include postwar plans for Gaza and the wider Middle East, including a potential agreement that would normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel and lay the groundwork for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.

Israel blocks the head of the U.N. agency for Palestinians from visiting Gaza

Israel denied the chief of UNRWA, the United Nations agency that supports Palestinians, entry to the Gaza Strip on Monday, according to the agency and the foreign minister of Egypt.

Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner general, said on social media on Monday that Israeli authorities had blocked him from making a visit that was “supposed to coordinate & improve the humanitarian response.” UNRWA, formally the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, is the largest aid group on the ground in Gaza and a critical lifeline for more than 2.2 million people struggling to survive under a near-total Israeli siege.

A White House official says Israeli forces killed a senior Hamas military leader in Gaza

Israeli forces have killed one of Hamas’s highest-ranking military leaders in the Gaza Strip, a senior White House official said on Monday.

Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’s military wing, “was killed in an Israeli operation last week,” Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters at a White House briefing.

A senior Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said Israel had not confirmed Mr. Issa’s death but that there were many indications he had been killed.

Israeli officials have said that Mr. Issa was targeted by an Israeli airstrike on the night of March 9-10. Though they have stopped short of saying whether Mr. Issa was killed in the attack, Israeli officials have hinted at his possible death — the Israeli military chief of staff said on Sunday that Hamas was trying to “hide” the fate of senior Hamas officials, without directly naming him.

In the attack, Israeli warplanes struck an underground space in the Nuseirat neighborhood of central Gaza that had been used by Mr. Issa and another senior Hamas military official responsible for the group’s weapons, a spokesman for the Israeli military, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said a week ago.

Hamas — which has announced the deaths of just a few of its members since the war began — did not immediately comment on Mr. Sullivan’s remarks. The Israeli military declined to comment on the remarks on Monday.

The death of Mr. Issa, a key figure in its Qassam Brigades, would represent a victory for Israel, whose leaders have vowed to wipe out the Hamas leadership in Gaza — although the group has swiftly replaced such leaders in the past, and many of Hamas’s top political leaders live outside the enclave.

One of the most senior Hamas officials to have been confirmed dead since the start of the war is Saleh al-Arouri, a founder of the group’s armed wing. Hamas said he was killed in an Israeli attack in Lebanon on Jan. 2.

But despite an Israeli military campaign that has battered Hamas over the last five months, the group’s leader in Gaza and the presumed mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, Yahya Sinwar, has eluded Israeli forces. Mohammed Deif, the top commander of the Qassam Brigades, is also believed to be alive.

Admiral Hagari has said that Mr. Issa helped plan the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack and last week called him a part of “the main triangle of terror” in Gaza, alongside Mr. Sinwar and Mr. Deif.

— Adam Rasgon