WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden said in an MSNBC interview on Saturday that Israel’s threatened invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza would be his “red line” for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but then immediately backtracked, saying there was no red line and "I’m never going to leave Israel."
In a somewhat contradictory exchange with his interviewer, Biden said "they cannot have 30,000 more Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after" Hamas militants.
Biden and his aides have urged Netanyahu in strong terms not to launch a major offensive in Rafah until Israel crafts a plan for mass evacuation of civilians from the last area of Gaza it has not yet invaded with ground forces. More than half of Gaza's 2.3 million people are sheltering in the Rafah area.
“There's other ways to deal, to get to, to deal with ... the trauma caused by Hamas,” Biden said, referring to the Islamist group’s Oct. 7 rampage in southern Israel in which 1,200 people were killed.
(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
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