GAZA/TEL AVIV/CAIRO (Reuters) -U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday urged Israeli leaders to avoid harming civilians as it presses its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and told them creation of a Palestinian state was key to a long-term solution.
Even as he spoke, fighting was intense in south and central parts of the enclave. Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants also exchanged fire on the Lebanon-Israel border.
Blinken was making his fourth visit to the Middle East since the war between Hamas and Israel erupted in October.
International concern has mounted over the huge Palestinian death toll from the Israeli assault on the densely populated enclave as well as a humanitarian crisis afflicting hundreds of thousands of people.
The Israeli air and ground assault has now killed 23,210 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, and obliterated large areas from north to south.
The U.S. and other countries are anxious to prevent the war from spreading through the Middle East.
Blinken met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Tel Aviv’s Kirya military base, and then with Netanyahu’s war cabinet.
The U.S. diplomat stressed “the importance of avoiding further civilian harm and protecting civilian infrastructure in Gaza,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said.
Blinken repeated the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s right to defend itself and to prevent a repeat of the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on southern Israel which killed 1,200 people and triggered the offensive on Gaza.
Israel has vowed to wipe out Hamas, which rules Gaza and is sworn to Israel’s destruction.
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told Blinken that Israel’s offensive in Gaza’s southern Khan Younis area will “intensify and continue until Hamas leadership is detected and Israeli hostages return home safely,” according to an Israeli defence ministry statement.
As well as trying to contain the war, Blinken has been discussing plans for future governance of Gaza when the war eventually ends.
In the meeting with Netanyahu, Blinken “reiterated the need to ensure lasting, sustainable peace for Israel and the region, including by the realization of a Palestinian state,” the State Department spokesman said.
In the days prior to his Israel visit, Blinken held talks in Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, focused on seeking a longer-term approach to the decades-long Israel-Palestinian conflict.
He said Washington’s Arab allies wanted closer relations with Israel but only if that included a “practical pathway” to a Palestinian state.
U.S.-brokered talks on a Palestinian state in territory now occupied by Israel collapsed almost a decade ago. Right-wing leaders in Israel’s current ruling coalition oppose Palestinian statehood.
With U.S. support, Israel established diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in 2020 and was working to do the same with Saudi Arabia until the Gaza conflict broke out.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, speaking on Tuesday at a conference in Qatar, cited Israel’s normalisation of regional relations with Arab states “at the expense of the Palestinian cause” as one of the reasons for the Oct. 7 attacks.
HEAVY FIGHTING IN SOUTH GAZA
After weeks of U.S. pressure to ease its assault, Israel says it was moving from full-blown to more targeted warfare in northern Gaza while maintaining intensive combat in southern areas.
It said that since Monday, its troops had killed around 40 Palestinian fighters and raided a militant compound and tunnels in Khan Younis, the main city in the south. It said nine Israeli soldiers had been killed, mostly in engineering units tackling tunnels, one of their deadliest days of the ground assault.
The health ministry in Gaza said 126 Palestinians had been killed and 241 wounded in the previous 24 hours.
Sean Casey, World Health Organization Emergency Medical Teams coordinator in Gaza, said the health system was collapsing fast. He accused Israel of denying access to more of Gaza for relief trucks.
“Every day we line up our convoys, we wait for clearance, and we don’t get it – and then we come back and we do it again the next day.”
Medical staff and patients were fleeing, including an estimated 600 patients from one facility, and 66 health workers were in detention. Only about a third of Gaza’s hospitals, all in southern and central Gaza, are even partially functional, he said.
Casey said many staff at the main Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis had fled to shelters in the strip’s southernmost tip, leaving just one doctor for more than 100 burn victims.
HEZBOLLAH ‘DOES NOT WANT TO EXPAND WAR’
The conflict has rippled to Lebanon, where the Hezbollah militia has been firing rockets into Israel in support of Hamas. Both groups are supported by Iran, Israel’s sworn enemy.
Three members of Hezbollah were killed on Tuesday in a strike in the south of Lebanon, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters, after a Hezbollah commander was killed in the area on Monday.
Hezbollah said it had deployed explosive drones against an army base in northern Israel in response to the killing of senior Hezbollah figure Wissam Tawil, and that of deputy Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut last week.
Hezbollah deputy leader Naim Qassem said in an address his group did not want to expand the war from Lebanon, “but if Israel expands (it), the response is inevitable to the maximum extent required to deter Israel”.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the assassinations. The army said an unspecified northern base had experienced an aerial attack without damage or casualties.
Israel’s Gallant said it was preparing “military alternatives” should diplomatic efforts fail to address the escalation along the frontier with Lebanon.
(Reporting by Arafat Barbakh and Fadi Shana in Gaza, Simon Lewis in Tel Aviv, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; writing by Kevin Liffey and Angus MacSwan;Editing by Peter Graff, Mark Heinrich and David Gregorio)
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