As Israel prepares for a ground assault on the Gaza Strip, the Pentagon has quietly ordered roughly 2,000 troops to prepare for deployment to Israel for non-combat roles.
According to Defense Department officials, the troops are expected to be tasked with missions such as medical support and advisory roles for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). They have not indicated from which units the troops would be pulled, only that they are currently deployed in the Middle East and in Europe.
In retaliation, Israel has completely closed off Gaza from the world, severing electrical, water, and fuel lines into the enclave, and launched a bombing campaign that has killed more than 3,000 people in Gaza. On Tuesday, Gaza’s health ministry said an Israeli bomb had landed on the Al-Ahli Arabi Baptist hospital in central Gaza city, where people injured in previous bombings as well as refugees were being sheltered. At least 500 are feared dead.
The IDF has amassed some 350,000 troops outside Gaza and ordered 1.1 million Palestinians in the enclave’s north to relocate to the south, before it launches an all-out attack on the city aimed at destroying Hamas.
According to the US State Department, while in Israel, Biden “will receive a comprehensive brief on Israel’s war aims and strategy” and “hear from Israel how it will conduct its operations in a way that minimizes civilian casualties and enables humanitarian assistance to flow to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not benefit Hamas.”
In addition, the US has pledged to restock Israel’s supply of Tamir missiles after firing thousands of munitions from its Iron Dome air defense system in an attempt to shoot down rockets fired at Israeli cities by Hamas. The militant group has devised tactics to get around the Iron Dome, allowing it to strike cities dozens of miles from the Gaza-Israel border.
It’s unclear how regional nations will respond to a US deployment to Israel during the fighting. In October 1973, when the US rushed urgently-needed weapons into Israel after Egypt and Syria launched a successful sneak attack on the IDF, the Arab world responded with a boycott of petroleum sales to the US and several other Western nations that had supported Israel. The boycott lasted for six months, at the end of which the price of crude oil had increased by 300% and Western capitalist economies were in a recession.