Israel complicates election’s final stretch, an issue Democrats hoped would fade

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hoped the ongoing violence in the Middle East might simmer below the surface in the final weeks of the presidential race, but fresh Israeli military offensives are making that virtually impossible, U.S. officials and campaign aides say.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has set the Gaza Strip ablaze with a renewed bombing campaign and launched a ground invasion into Lebanon alongside aerial strikes in Beirut aimed at annihilating the militant group Hezbollah. He is expected to order an imminent attack on Iran’s military facilities in response to its missile strike on Israel this month.

The rapid escalation has tied the Biden administration in knots, resulting in the United States first calling for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon only to reverse that policy nine days later and openly endorse Israel’s ground offensive.

The whiplash has caused confusion and consternation among Washington’s European and Arab allies who are pushing for the United States to restrain its closest ally in the Middle East. But administration officials remain loath to pick a public fight at such a tenuous moment politically.

“They clearly want to avoid any public confrontation with Netanyahu over Lebanon or Gaza that could result in blowback from Israel’s supporters before the election,” said Frank Lowenstein, a Biden ally and former Middle East negotiator in the Obama administration.

“At the same time, they are sensitive to losing critical Arab American votes in key swing states if their rhetoric leans too far in Israel’s direction,” he added.

The administration has issued statements in response to recent incidents that have drawn international backlash, including Israel’s attacks on U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon; its deadly bombing of Gaza’s al-Aqsa hospital, which engulfed nearby tent camps in flames; and a U.N. report indicating no food has entered northern Gaza in nearly two weeks. Yet those remarks have been carefully calibrated to avoid portraying a sharp break with Netanyahu.

The latest opportunity to do so came Tuesday, when Israeli media published the contents of a confidential letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin urging Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza or face potential restrictions on U.S. military assistance. Within hours of the letter’s disclosure, spokespeople for the White House and State Department clarified that it “was not meant to be taken as a threat” and that no action would be taken in the next 30 days — pushing any potential punitive action until after the election. They declined to say if weapons restrictions were even on the table.

This account of the Biden administration’s handling of ballooning violence in the Middle East during the election’s final weeks is based on interviews with more than two dozen officials from the United States, Europe and the Middle East as well as Harris’s campaign. The dynamic they conveyed is of an improvisational White House that has followed Israel’s lead into a widening regional war while only marginally influencing Netanyahu’s actions. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their observations.

The war’s spread has alarmed the Harris campaign, which sees the images of dead civilians as complicating her path to victory in key swing states with sizable Arab American and Muslim populations.

“It’s a huge concern. It comes down to people saying, ‘I can’t support anyone who supports a genocide,’” a person who advises the campaign said.

Israel denies that its military operations in Gaza constitute genocide.

‘Look at our track record’

The Biden administration contends that critics underestimate the impact it has had in reducing the scale of Israel’s invasion into Lebanon, increasing the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza and preventing a full-scale war with Iran. Officials say they are constantly working to dissuade Netanyahu from bombing Beirut and scale back his planned counterattack on Iran, which some fear could include strikes on nuclear or oil facilities, a prospect that could upend the global economy.

“Look at our track record of intervening to get humanitarian assistance in,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters Tuesday. “When we have seen the results not measure up to the standards that we expect, we have intervened with them.”

But according to the administration’s own assessment, the amount of aid delivered to Gaza has dropped by more than 50 percent since the spring. In Lebanon on Wednesday, Israeli airstrikes resumed near Beirut’s southern suburb, hitting what the Israeli military called an underground weapon storage facility used by Hezbollah. Other Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon hit government buildings in Nabatieh, killing at least six people, including the mayor.

Israeli officials say they will not kowtow to the United States about targets in Lebanon, where more than 1,700 people have been killed and 1.2 million displaced since fighting intensified in mid-September. “We will continue to hit Hezbollah mercilessly in all parts of Lebanon — also in Beirut,” Netanyahu said.

No final decision has been made about targets to strike in Iran, Israeli officials say, but an attack is expected in the coming days.

In Gaza, most U.S. officials concede the two sides will not reach a cease-fire-hostage deal by the end of the year. That process was bogged down amid demands from Hamas about prisoner exchanges and Israel on keeping its troops along the Gaza-Egypt border.

The dilemma has caused current and former officials to reflect on how Washington could have avoided the quagmire.

Andrew Miller, who recently stepped down as the State Department’s top official for Israeli-Palestinian issues, said the United States was too quick to accept Israel’s expanding operations without understanding their scope.

“What we did had the effect of endorsing Israel’s military campaign before understanding whether Israel had a viable exit strategy,” he said in an interview. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the administration who could say with a straight face Israel had a clearly defined end-state.”

Inside the Harris campaign, concerns are particularly acute in Michigan, home to one of the nation’s largest Arab American and Muslim populations, with about 300,000 people who claim ancestry from North Africa or the Middle East.

Polls show Harris and her Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump, effectively tied there and in other battleground states that will decide the election. Harris’s clearest path to victory is in the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and she has few paths to the presidency without winning the Wolverine State, where she is holding five events in three days this week.

When Harris first entered the race, her advisers hoped the fact that she had distinguished herself from Biden by speaking more forcefully about Palestinian suffering would help win over a sizable segment of Arab American and Muslim voters who are angry over the administration’s support of Israel.

But winning their support has become more difficult as Israel’s military campaign has intensified with U.S. backing.

Israeli officials say the assaults are needed to prevent another Oct. 7, the day in 2023 that Hamas-led fighters killed 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostage. The American political calendar is not a factor in the sequencing of the war, an Israeli official told The Washington Post. “The timing of strikes is solely determined by operational considerations, nothing else,” the official said.

The botched cease-fire

Despite a year’s worth of failed efforts to end hostilities in Lebanon and Gaza, U.S. officials saw their last best opportunity during the U.N. General Assembly in New York late last month.

Biden’s envoy, Amos Hochstein, had been holding calls with Lebanese negotiators in Beirut into the early hours of the morning on Sept. 26 as he consulted with Israeli officials in New York on the language of a cease-fire statement.

Eventually, U.S. and French officials received enough positive signals from Israeli and Lebanese counterparts to release a joint U.S.-French statement calling for a 21-day cessation of hostilities. U.S. officials touted the statement to reporters as a “breakthrough.” The optimists in Biden’s inner circle thought a cease-fire in Lebanon could open a backdoor to one in Gaza, ending hostilities just before the election.

Diplomats discussed the details of a possible U.N. Security Council resolution, including semantics like whether to use the word “cease-fire” or “truce,” a Western diplomat said.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu instructed his armed forces to “continue fighting at full force” in remarks that embarrassed U.S. officials who leaned on the prime minister’s top aide, Ron Dermer, to issue a statement in support of the cease-fire discussions.

French and Lebanese officials believed the various sides were close to entering a truce while U.S. officials said they were still days away from implementing an agreement due to discrepancies, including rules for Hezbollah and Israeli troops movements.

Then on Sept. 27, a fleet of Israeli F-15s dropped dozens of bombs on a building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, killing Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah and his top aides. The attack eliminated one of Israel’s most ruthless foes, a dominant political and military figure in Lebanon for decades. It also killed any chance for the U.S.-France cease-fire proposal.

“It all went up into thin air,” the Western diplomat said.

Israeli officials said that Netanyahu was never interested in a cease-fire and that a miscommunication occurred between the White House and the prime minister’s office. U.S. officials say the prime minister changed his mind, either as a result of pressure from his right-wing cabinet or upon receiving actionable intelligence about Nasrallah’s whereabouts.

The next phase

Sensing an opportunity to build on the decapitation of Hezbollah’s leadership, Netanyahu authorized a ground invasion of Lebanon on Oct. 1 to destroy the infrastructure the group used to fire rockets into Israel.

In a televised address, Netanyahu said the people of Lebanon could oust Hezbollah or suffer the fate of Gaza, where more than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to local health authorities. “You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the abyss,” Netanyahu said.

Privately, administration officials were outraged and said Netanyahu’s threats risked uniting Lebanon’s fractured society against the invasion. “He’s an unbelievably flawed messenger,” a senior U.S. official said.

But Biden and his top advisers agreed with Netanyahu’s premise that the weakening of Hezbollah could be exploited to reshape Lebanon’s politics and appoint a new president. A limited incursion was backed by Blinken, Hochstein, Austin, Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, said officials familiar with the matter.

But like with other Israeli promises, the mission expanded, including major bombardments of towns and villages involving civilian casualties that U.S. officials say they strongly oppose.

Analysts are skeptical that the lofty goals of the United States and Israel in Lebanon are achievable before Biden leaves office.

“I don’t think there’s enough time left to accomplish that,” said Andrew Miller, the former State Department official. “At the most, you could potentially see the appointment of a new president, but even that’s going to be extraordinarily difficult.”

El Chamaa reported from Beirut. Kareem Fahim in Beirut and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.