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Blinken flies in to Israel to meet Netanyahu as IDF pushes further into Gaza City Blinken to urge Israel to show restraint in campaign to destroy Hamas
(about 1 hour later)
US secretary of state expected to urge effort to minimise harm to civilians and call for pauses in fighting to allow aid to flow US secretary of state in Tel Aviv to call for pauses in fighting to allow more aid to enter Gaza
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has arrived in Israel, where he is expected to call for localised pauses in fighting to allow aid into Gaza, as Israel’s military said it had surrounded Gaza City and was moving further into the centre and fighting in close quarters. Anthony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has arrived in Tel Aviv to meet Israel’s war cabinet and urge it to show greater restraint in its campaign to destroy Hamas, starting by allowing more aid to enter Gaza and implementing humanitarian pauses.
As Blinken left Washington, he said he would discuss concrete steps to minimise harm to civilians in Gaza when he holds talks with Benjamin Netanyahu. It is his second meeting with Israel’s prime minister since the war began nearly a month ago, when Hamas militants killed 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, and took more than 240 hostages. Israel says it has Hamas surrounded in Gaza City and has shown no willingness to back a break in the fighting advocated by the US president, Joe Biden, let alone agree a ceasefire.
Since then, Israel’s retaliatory strikes on Gaza have killed at least 9,061 people, including 3,760 children, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said on Thursday, drawing warnings from independent United Nations experts that Palestinians in the territory were at “grave risk of genocide”. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 9,000 people have been killed in the territory since 7 October, when Hamas militants crossed into Israel and killed more than killed 1,400 people.
On my way to Tel Aviv for more diplomacy during an incredibly challenging time. We will continue to work with regional leaders to protect civilians and prevent the spread of conflict. We remain focused on two states and broader peace and security in the region. pic.twitter.com/V4wkXQXy6U In some of the strongest criticism of Israel by a leader of a European Union member state, the Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “something approaching revenge”.
“We call on Israel and its allies to agree to an immediate ceasefire. We are running out of time,” the group of UN special rapporteurs said in a statement. Blinken’s visit coincides with a long awaited speech by the head of the influential Iran-backed Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in which he is expected to broadly warn there are red lines that Israel must not cross if a fully fledged war across two fronts is to be avoided. Nasrallah has been unusually silent as he faces growing calls from Hamas to join the battle.
Blinken’s arrival came as thousands of cross-border Palestinian workers and labourers in Israel and the occupied West Bank were sent back to Gaza on Friday. In weeks-long skirmishing along the border between Lebanon and Israel, the Iranian funded Hezbollah has already lost 50 fighters, but it has not yet unleashed its full arsenal, partly fearing the consequences of all-out war on its organisation and Lebanon. Hezbollah is regarded as the jewel in Iran’s regional network of militia that terms itself the “axis of resistance”.
On Friday afternoon, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the influential Iran-backed Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah, will break weeks of silence with a broadcast from Beirut, which comes in the wake of a rise in violence on Israel’s northern border. Before the speech, shelling continued in southern Lebanon, with the outskirts of al-Qawzah, Aita al-Shaab, and Ramieh all under fire by Israeli artillery, the Lebanese state-run National News Agency reported.
Hezbollah said on Thursday it had simultaneously attacked 19 positions in Israel on Thursday evening. The clashes have so far been mostly contained to the frontier, and Hezbollah has used only a fraction of the firepower that Nasrallah has been threatening Israel with for years. The widespread expectation is that Hezbollah will hold back from declaring all-out war, but the slow escalation of violence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon is making the situation incredibly volatile. A United Arab Emirates foreign minister, Noura Al Kaabi, said the risk of regional spillover was growing and that would be used by extremists to “keep us locked in cycles of extremism”.
According to some estimates, about 50 Hezbollah fighters have died since 7 October in exchanges in which it has tried to target Israeli positions with anti-tank missiles. Blinken is walking a diplomatic tightrope since he will not want to say anything that detracts from US support for Israel’s right to self-defence, but at the same time he will stiffen his mantra that the way Israel conducts operations matters not only morally but in terms of retaining international support.
The US national security spokesperson John Kirby said of Nasrallah’s speech: “I don’t believe we’ve seen any indication yet specifically that Hezbollah is ready to go in full force. So we’ll see what he has to say.” Twenty-three Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ground offensive started. Early on Friday, Israel said it had killed Mustafa Dalul, the commander of Hamas’ al-Sabra Tal al-Hawa battalion, who took part in fighting against Israeli forces in Gaza.
Following Joe Biden’s stated support for a pause in fighting to allow time for hostage releases, Kirby said on Thursday the White House was exploring the idea of “as many pauses as might be necessary to continue to get aid out and to continue to work to get people out safely, including hostages”. In advance of his meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Tel Aviv, Blinken said he would seek “concrete measures” from Israel to ensure that harm to Palestinian civilians was reduced. Israel says the high death toll is due to the way Hamas fighters hide among civilians and set up roadblocks that make it difficult for civilians to move south to relatively safer areas in Gaza.
The White House has said any pauses in fighting should be temporary and localised, and insisted they would not stop Israel defending itself. The British security minister Tom Tugendhat said he was not going to get into discussions about whether particular strikes breached international law.
Blinken is due to meet Jordan’s foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, in Amman on Saturday. In a statement, Safadi said Israel must end the war on Gaza, where he said it was committing war crimes by bombing civilians and imposing a siege. In an attempt to justify its refusal to allow fuel into Gaza, the Israeli army released a recording of a conversation that it said featured a Hamas health ministry official who admitted that the organisation kept fuel stockpiles beneath Shifa hospital in Gaza City.
Reuters journalists said thousands of Palestinian workers in Israel and the occupied West Bank were sent back to Gaza on Friday. Some of the workers returned through the Kerem Shalom crossing east of the Rafah border crossing between the besieged Gaza Strip and Egypt, they said. In the recording, the official is heard saying, “They have a million [litres] underground.” The authenticity of the recording is unknown.
Workers crossing into the Palestinian enclave said they have been detained and ill-treated by Israeli authorities after the 7 October Hamas attack on southern Israel. Some still had plastic stickers carrying numbers around their legs. Blinken is also seeking details of how many hostages Israel believes are still alive, and an update on the talks between Israel and Hamas mediated by Qatar for their release. The US secretary of state has said he believes it is not too early to discuss what happens when the Israeli operation ends.
“We used to serve them, work for them, in houses, in restaurants, and in markets in return for the lowest prices and despite that we were humiliated,” said Jamal Ismail, a worker from the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza Strip. After meeting the Israelis, Blinken will fly to Jordan, a country that has cut off ties with Israel, and is at the centre of the Arab calls for an immediate ceasefire.
Those from areas in northern Gaza would have to stay in the south after Israeli forces completed cutting off roads late on Thursday, according to Palestinian officials. The pressure to show greater restraint is not coming only from the US. In a statement, France said it “condemns the attacks against United Nations sites and humanitarian personnel”, reflecting French disapproval of Israeli strikes on the Jabalia, the largest refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.
Israel said late on Thursday it would “sever all contact with Gaza”, sending back all Palestinian workers who came from the territory. “Those workers from Gaza who were in Israel on the day of the outbreak of the war will be returned to Gaza,” the Israeli security cabinet said, without specifying how many people would be sent back. A government spokesperson said: “France condemns the attacks against United Nations sites and humanitarian personnel whose work is essential to the civilian populations of Gaza.”
Before the Israel-Hamas conflict started, Israel had issued work permits to 18,500 people from Gaza, according to Cogat, the Israeli defence body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs. Varadkar, the Irish PM, told journalists during a visit to South Korea: “I strongly believe that … Israel has the right to defend itself, has the right to go after Hamas, that they cannot do this again.
In Gaza, mounting casualties among Palestinian civilians, along with acute shortages of food, water, medicine and fuel, have intensified calls by global leaders for a pause in fighting or a ceasefire. “What I’m seeing unfolding at the moment isn’t just self defence. It looks, resembles something more approaching revenge. That’s not where we should be. And I don’t think that’s how Israel will guarantee future freedom and future security.”
Israel has dismissed those calls, saying it targets Hamas fighters whom it accuses of intentionally hiding among the population and civilian buildings. The White House has also rejected calls for a ceasefire.
Israel has said it has lost 18 soldiers and killed dozens of militants since ground operations expanded on Friday.
The Rafah crossing from Gaza to Egypt was due to open for a third day on Friday for limited evacuations under a Qatari-brokered deal aimed at letting some foreign passport holders, their dependants and some wounded Palestinians out.
According to border officials, more than 700 foreign citizens left for Egypt via Rafah on the two previous days. Dozens of critically injured Palestinians were to cross, too. Israel asked foreign countries to send hospital ships for them.
More than one-third of Gaza’s 35 hospitals are not functioning, with many turned into impromptu refugee camps.
“The situation is beyond catastrophic,” said the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, describing packed corridors and many medics who were themselves bereaved and homeless.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse