President Joe Biden has pledged to stop sending weapons to Israel if the country launches a full invasion of Rafah, the most southern city in Gaza and the heart of northern Gaza’s refugee population.

"I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven’t gone into Rafah yet — if they’re going to Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used, historically, to deal with — that problem," Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an interview that aired Wednesday night on "Erin Burnett OutFront."

"It’s just wrong," he said. "We’re not gonna supply the weapons and artillery shells used."

Biden also acknowledged that U.S.-made and U.S.-supplied munitions have killed civilians in Gaza.

"Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers," the president said.

Israel began launching strikes on the outskirts of Rafah on Monday. Biden said that, in conversations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of the Israeli war cabinet that, if Israel begins a ground offensive on Rafah’s population centers, the U.S. will be "walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas."

But, he said, the U.S. won’t abandon its support of Israel’s defense systems.

"We’re going to make sure Israel is secure, in terms of Iron Dome and their abiity to respond to attacks," such as Iran’s strike against Israel last month, a response to an Israeli strike that killed two Iranian generals at a building in Syria. Iran fired about 170 drones, more than 30 cruise missiles and more than 120 ballistic missiles toward Israel and Israeli-occupied territories. Only one Israeli citizen, a young girl, was critically injured in the attack, with dozens more sustaining minor injuries.

Israel’s war with Hamas, the anti-Israeli, anti-Western Palestinian faction governing the Gaza Strip, began on Oct. 7, when Hamas-led militants killed nearly 1,200 people in a surprise attack. More than 250 people were taken prisoner. In response, Israel fiercely retaliated, launching long-range strikes, bombing campaigns and a ground invasion, with the goal of destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages.

Since Israel began its military operations, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 14,000 children, according to the World Health Organization. Civilian infrastructure and cultural centers alike have been destroyed, and northern Gaza is now in a state of famine, according to a representative of the United Nations World Food Program.

Widespread protests, seeking the end of both public and private U.S. involvement in the war, have wracked college campuses across the country. Earlier this week, Biden took a stance against antisemitism, violence and lawlessness that have occurred at the protests.

"There’s a legitimate right to free speech and protest," Biden said. "There’s not a legitimate right to use hate speech. There's not a legitimate right to threaten Jewish students. There's not a legitimate rate for blocking people’s access to class. That's against the law."

But Biden seems to understand the sentiment behind the anger — all of the anger. He saw the aftermath of the atrocities that took place on Oct. 7, reviewed pictures and heard stories of the worst violence against the Jewish community since the Holocaust.

"So when I went over immediately after that happened, I said to Bibi, don’t make the same mistake we made in America," Biden said, using a nickname for Netanyahu. "We wanted to get Bin Laden, and we’ll help you get some more…but when we went into Afghanistan, it made sense to go get [Osama] bin Laden. But it made no sense to try and unify Afghanistan. Made no sense, in my view, to engage in thinking that in Iraq, they had a nuclear weapon. Don’t make the same mistakes."

The goal, Biden suggested, should be to complete the operation against Hamas while thinking through what might be next — and transitioning to a two-state solution, maintaining peace and order to determine the next phase of the Palestinian Authority.

It’s unclear how his handling of America’s role in the war may affect his reelection efforts. According to polls, the war is far less important than the economy.

Biden — who was in Wisconsin to celebrate Microsoft's promise to create techonolgy jobs related to AI in the area — feels he has Trump beat economically, emphatically pointing to recover from the COVID-era recession.

"He’s never succeeded in creating jobs, and I’ve never failed," Biden said. "Herbert Hoover is the only other president who lost more jobs than he created in his four-year term." Job creation numbers from the time period are, of course, somewhat skewed by the effects of the pandemic, though analysts have suggested that Biden’s American Rescue Plan and other economic proposals have boosted the recovery.

But the president bristled when asked if he had time to turn around low confidence in the economy before the election.

"The polling data has been wrong all along," Biden said. "The idea that we’re in a situation where things are so bad — I mean, we’ve created more jobs, we’re in a situation where people have access to good paying jobs…when I started this administration, people were saying we are going to be a collapsing economy — we have the strongest economy in the world."