TEL AVIV - Israel is recalibrating the next steps of its war against Hamas following warnings by President Biden that the United States will cut off offensive weapons shipments if the Israeli military advances into Rafah, the southern Gazan city that is harboring more than 1 million Palestinians.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to respond to Biden’s unprecedented policy shift. But Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu, said that the “surprise” warning has caught Israel off guard and will compel the war cabinet to reconsider whether and how it will enter Rafah - “if it will bear the consequence of going in without American support, or if it will stop the operation, which will allow Hamas to be unharmed in the area.”

The public rupture, which included Biden’s assertion that civilians have been killed by the U.S.-made munitions supplied to Israel, comes after months of disagreement between the two countries over Israel’s conduct in the war, and as cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas in Cairo teeter toward collapse.

On Thursday, Hamas said that it was sending its delegation back to Doha, Qatar, and that it remained committed to the cease-fire outline that it announced on Monday, even as Israel’s moves threatened negotiations. Israel maintains that the agreement Hamas approved is different from the one on the table.

Several Israeli officials did respond to Biden’s threat and repeated Israeli vows to dismantle Hamas’s four remaining battalions in Rafah and seal off the border with Egypt, where Israel says Hamas has a subterranean tunnel network designed to facilitate the smuggling of weapons.

“Israel will continue to fight Hamas until its destruction,” Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz wrote Thursday on X, without mentioning the crisis. “There is no war more just than this.”

Israel’s envoy to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, described Biden’s decision as “disappointing and frustrating.” It could “harm Israel’s ability to obtain one of this war’s main objective - toppling Hamas, for a better future for the entire region,” he said in a radio interview.

“Any pressure on Israel, any limitations on it, even from close allies who care for our interests, are being interpreted by our enemies … as something that gives them hope,” he added.

The far-right members of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition were more defiant in their responses, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich insisting that Israel would still “achieve complete victory in this war despite President Biden’s pushback and arms embargo.”

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir was blunter, tweeting, “Hamas [heart emoji] Biden,” suggesting that the militant group loves the U.S. president. The two ministers are key to the ruling coalition but not part of Israel’s war cabinet.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu announced that the Israeli military, with full agreement of the war cabinet, had seized the border area near the Rafah crossing to provide “military pressure that is a necessary condition for the return of our hostages” and to “destroying Hamas.”

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israeli communities that killed about 1,200 and resulted in 253 hostages, Israel has vowed to destroy the militant group.

In the course of seven months of fighting, more than 34,000 Gazans have been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Biden said that 2,000-pound bombs supplied by the United States have been among those dropped by Israel in densely populated neighborhoods.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah - they haven’t gone into 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,” Biden said. “We’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”

Amidror, the former adviser to Netanyahu, said that on the tactical level, Israel could continue the fight in Gaza, and even later in Lebanon, but that the lack of American support would “harm Israeli military readiness in the long term.”

He said that it was also unclear for Israel if Biden “was speaking categorically, or if he was saying that the United States would not support Israel in Rafah if it does not evacuate the civilian population” - which the Israeli military has said it was committed to achieving.

Overnight Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces raided and conducted airstrikes in Gaza City, in the northern part of the Strip, targeting 25 locations that included “military structures, terror tunnels, observation posts, sniper posts, and additional terror infrastructure,” the IDF said in a statement.

An estimated 80,000 people have evacuated from eastern Rafah in recent days, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the largest aid agency in the enclave. The Israeli incursion has shut the two main crossings into southern Gaza, Rafah and Kerem Shalom. While Israeli authorities said Kerem Shalom has been reopened, keeping their promises to the U.S. administration, aid agencies say trucks are not going through.

Hamas has also periodically targeted the Kerem Shalom crossing, including on Sunday, when four Israeli soldiers were killed in what Israeli described as a Hamas mortar attack.

The United States has repeatedly urged Israel to allow more aid into the enclave, especially in the north, which the World Food Program said has been subject to a “full-blown famine.”

For months, the United States has said that it would refuse to support a wide-scale IDF offensive in Rafah without a comprehensive plan to ensure the protection of the more than 1 million civilians who have taken shelter there. The Israeli army has said it has been in discussions with the U.S. officials and with international aid organizations over strategies to relocate civilians to “humanitarian islands” in the center of the Strip. The U.S. administration, however, has said that it has yet to be presented with satisfactory plans.

The administration has also clashed with Israel over its lack of a long-term strategy in the war and its vision for the governing and rebuilding of Gaza after the war is over.

A majority of Israelis believe that the “absolute victory” against Hamas repeatedly promised by Netanyahu is unlikely, according to a February poll by the Israel Democracy Institute.

Hazem Balousha in Cairo contributed to this report.