Whatever Joe Biden told Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has no better option than to strike at Hamas’s redoubt in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, argues Richard Kemp:

Many supposed military experts say Israel should not mount an offensive in Rafah. I have not heard any of them put forward a single viable alternative. The White House is apparently recommending a strategy based on pinpoint, clinical strikes into the city, targeting Hamas leaders. Its template seems to be U.S. special-forces operations in Afghanistan, and we all know how that ultimately worked out: the Taliban survived, gained strength, and eventually re-conquered the country.

Much of the estimated 1.4 million population of Rafah will have to be evacuated before the IDF begins a major offensive—and the IDF has planned for this. It is worth noting that the international community, including the UN, though always eager to parade its humanitarian concerns, has been deliberately frustrating Israeli plans for that. Even before the ground war began, Israel identified al-Mawasi, a sixteen-square-kilometer coastal area of southwest Gaza, as a humanitarian area. . . . But the UN and other aid agencies refused to establish this safe zone which could have been done with the assistance of Egypt, saving many lives. . . . It is hard to escape the conclusion that the UN and other players would prefer to see Israel fail in Gaza than to save human life.

There is another reason why Israel must achieve total victory in Gaza. The defeat of Hamas may well reduce the need for a major war in Lebanon if Hizballah is deterred by the destruction of its fellow Iranian proxies in Gaza—for the time being at least. And if the West doesn’t care much about Israel’s security, a victory for Hamas in Gaza will certainly energize the global jihadist threat. Even if for no other reason, our countries should give their full backing to Israel’s operation in Rafah.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].