WH officials make it clear: Biden's Israel remarks were no 'senior moment'

House Speaker Mike Johnson said he hoped President Joe Biden was having a "senior moment" when he declared he would withhold weapons from Israel if it proceeded with a planned invasion of Rafah.

On Thursday, administration officials made clear the president meant every word.

The White House said Biden could finally threaten Israel ahead of the possible invasion because Hamas has been significantly degraded over seven months of fighting. Biden’s announcement was the clearest conditioning of aid since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza and it immediately sparked outrage from some Republicans who accused the president of going back on his word and suddenly abandoning a long-held ally.

But Biden administration officials said Biden’s antipathy toward a large-scale Rafah invasion has been consistent for months, and he now has the space to withhold bombs and artillery because Hamas doesn’t pose as big a threat.

"Hamas didn't feel, and hadn't suffered, the kinds of pressure and the kinds of casualties that they have suffered now," National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Thursday. "The picture of Hamas today is not what it was six months ago, and is a result of the pressure that the Israelis have put on it."

The decision not to send weapons Israel could use to flatten Rafah was not a case of the president freelancing, aides said, but a strategy meant to push Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu off the course of ordering troops into the city’s most populated areas.

"Israel has not yet launched such an operation, so he was talking about what would happen in the future," Kirby said. "That's a choice that Israel will have to make, and it's one we hope they don't."

The relationship between Biden and Netanyahu has grown increasingly strained since the start of the war in Gaza after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. Biden has urged Netanyahu — first privately, then publicly — to do more to limit the deaths of Palestinian civilians as it sought to destroy the terror organization, particularly as Israel prepared in recent weeks for an invasion of Rafah, a densely packed city of 1.7 million people.

That warning spilled out into the open in a nationally televised interview Wednesday night.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem,” Biden said in an interview on CNN.

A number of Republicans, including its leaders in both houses of Congress, accused the Biden administration of reneging on its promise to Israel by threatening to cut the supply of weapons just weeks after billions of dollars of aid in the national security supplemental was finally signed into law.

Johnson told POLITICO right after Biden’s declaration that he hoped it was “a senior moment” because the condition of aid was, he claimed, “a complete turn from what I have been told even in, you know, recent hours.”

But the White House pushed back on that assertion.

"The president and his team have been clear for several weeks that we do not support a major ground operation in Rafah,” Kirby said.

Biden first warned Netanyahu in an April 4 phone call to not go into Rafah and the president’s announcement this week was a "continuation" of that policy, according to two U.S. officials not authorized to speak publicly about private matters. As Israel continued to prepare for the invasion, Biden quietly directed his team last week to halt shipments of massive bombs to Israel, hoping to deliver a message to Netanyahu that no operation should move forward without a civilian protection plan in place.

After that order leaked to the public, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed it Wednesday in testimony before Congress. Hours before Biden’s CNN interview, Austin acknowledged that the Pentagon had pumped the brakes on the shipment of 2,000- and 500-pound bombs to Israel.

“We’re going to continue to do what’s necessary to ensure that Israel has the means to defend itself,” Austin told the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subpanel. “But that said, we are currently reviewing some near-term security assistance shipments in the context of unfolding events in Rafah.”

Many Republicans were outraged. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said the communication should have remained private.

“If we have a concern about an ally and their conduct of a war against a brutal enemy, then that's something that should be done privately. I think it was very unfortunate,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who co-authored a letter of protest with Johnson, claimed Biden was bowing to pressure from the college campus protests out of fear they could sabotage his reelection bid.

“The president is old enough to remember 1968, but he seems to have learned the wrong lessons from that pivotal year,” McConnell said Thursday. “Caving to the college radicals will only whet their appetite to spend the summer demanding anti-Israel concessions at his party’s convention.”

And Johnson accused Biden of “defying the will of Congress,” claiming the president was “trying to dictate and micromanage the war, the defense effort in Israel, as a condition of supplying the weapons that we all know that they desperately need.” But Democrats noted that it was the Republican infighting over Ukraine funding that held up the national security supplemental that included $14 billion billion for Israel.

Biden has been steadfastly supportive of Israel since the Oct. 7 attack and in a speech this week affirmed U.S. support while warning of a ferocious rise in antisemitism. But the administration has also gradually soured on Netanyahu’s handling of the war. And in his interview with CNN, Biden for the first time also acknowledged that American-made weapons have killed civilians in Gaza.

While Biden said the U.S. would stop sending offensive weapons to Israel were it to launch an invasion, it would continue to provide protective weapons, including for its Iron Dome air defense system, which helped repel recent rocket and drone attacks from Iran and its allies.

Jennifer Haberkorn contributed to this report.