Israeli bombs target Gaza’s crowded Rafah as the US warns Israel against sending troops there

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israel bombed targets in overcrowded Rafah early Friday, hours after Biden administration officials warned Israel against expanding its Gaza ground offensive to the southern city where more than half of the territory’s 2.3 million people have sought refuge.

Airstrikes overnight and into Friday hit two residential buildings in Rafah, killing eight Palestinians, and a third strike targeted a kindergarten-turned-shelter for the displaced in central Gaza, killing at least four people, according to hospital officials and AP journalists who saw bodies arriving at hospitals.

U.S. President Joe Biden said Thursday that Israel’s conduct in the war, ignited by a deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack, is “over the top,” the harshest U.S. criticism yet of its close ally and an expression of concern about a soaring civilian death toll in Gaza.

Israel’s stated intentions to expand its ground offensive to Rafah also prompted an unusual public backlash in Washington.

“We have yet to see any evidence of serious planning for such an operation,” Vedant Patel, a State Department spokesman, said Thursday. Going ahead with such an offensive now, “with no planning and little thought in an area where there is sheltering of a million people would be a disaster.”

John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, said an Israel ground offensive in Rafah is “not something we would support.”

The comments signaled intensifying U.S. friction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who pushed a message of “total victory” in the war this week, at a time when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Israel to press for a cease-fire deal in exchange for the release of dozens of Hamas-held hostages.

With the war now in its fifth month, Israeli ground forces are still focusing on the city of Khan Younis, just north of…