Secretary of State Antony Blinken declines to identify 'red line' for aid to Israel

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday declined to identify the Biden administration’s “red line” with Israel, despite President Joe Biden’s comments earlier this week that the U.S. will withhold certain military assistance if Israel launches an offensive on Rafah.

“What we’ve seen over the last few months is a deep concern on our part about the possibility of a major military operation in Rafah given the damage it would do to civilians there,” Blinken said Sunday during an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”

He added, “Absent a credible plan to get them out of harm’s way and to support them, the president’s been clear for some time that we couldn’t and would not support a major military operation in Rafah.”

His comments come days after Biden told CNN that if Israel goes into Rafah, “I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, that deal with the cities, that deal with that problem.”

Blinken told moderator Kristen Welker that the Biden administration doesn’t have a red line, but is “in active conversations with Israel about the provision of heavy or high-payload weapons — large bombs — because of the concern that we have about the effect these weapons can have when they’re used in a dense urban environment like Rafah.”

Blinken’s latest remarks come after the State Department on Friday issued a report to Congress that concluded it was “reasonable to assess” that Israel violated international law in Gaza.

Still, the report found that Israel hasn’t violated the terms of U.S. weapons agreements and Blinken defended the ambiguity of the report, saying it “makes clear that this is an incredibly complex military environment.”

“You have an enemy that intentionally embeds itself