The United Nation Against a Non-Proliferation Reaction of the Hamas Regime: U.S. Senator Blinken, the Prime Minister, and the Israeli Prime Minister
The U.S. has publicly supported Israel’s right to defend itself and similarly opposed a cease-fire, with Blinken saying that one would allow Hamas to “regroup and repeat what it did on October 7th.”
Israel continues to strike Gaza from the air and on the ground, seeking to remove Hamas from power in response to its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, in which militants killed some 1,400 people and took another roughly 240 as hostages.
The heads of 18 United Nations agencies issued a rare joint statement on July 15 calling for an immediate cease-fire and the release of all hostages.
“Enough is enough. This must stop now,” wrote the signatories, which include the heads of the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the High Commissioner for Refugees.
Tens of thousands of people rallied in Washington this weekend to demand a cease-fire in the conflict between Palestinians and Israel. In addition to New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Europe and Latin America, others have taken place there.
Richard J. Durbin of Illinois last week became the first Democratic senator to call for a cease-fire, which he said he would support under certain conditions, including Hamas first agreeing to release hostages. His decision reflected a shift underway on Capitol Hill that has coincided with changes in Mr. Biden’s public messaging on Israel.
The Israeli prime minister said in his televised address that he had told Blinken: “We are continuing full force, and that Israel refuses a temporary cease-fire that does not include the return of hostages.”
He said that this should be removed from the vocabulary. “We say this to our friends and to our enemies. We will simply continue until we defeat them. We have no alternative.”
The United States and Israel are Working Together on a U.S.-Israel Strategy for Ending the GHV/Gaza Conflict
A humanitarian pause is a cessation of hostilities solely for humanitarian reasons, and usually in a defined geographic area.
After meeting with Netanyahu and his war cabinet in Tel Aviv, Blinken told reporters “We provided Israel advice that only the best of friends can offer on how to minimize civilian deaths while still achieving its objectives of finding and finishing Hamas terrorists and their infrastructure of violence.”
In the last week, top U.S. officials have asked the Israeli government to stop its operations in certain parts of Gaza to facilitate the release of hostages and deliver aid.
More than 400 aid trucks entered Gaza since the reopening of the border crossing, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It said the daily number of confirmed trucks crossing through is less than 19% what it was before the current conflict.
“One is temporary and designed to achieve something that’s happening on the ground,” Daalder says. The other is intended to end the military phase of the conflict.
Blinken told reporters on Sunday that Israel has raised “important questions” about how humanitarian pauses would work, and the U.S. is working to answer them.
He said on Monday that the two countries are engaged “on the particular practicalities” of humanitarian pauses, and called those efforts — both to make progress on hostages and increase aid to Gaza — a work in progress.
The White House said Biden and Netanyahu spoke on Monday morning, including about the “possibility of tactical pauses to provide civilians with opportunities to safely depart from areas of ongoing fighting, to ensure assistance is reaching civilians in need, and to enable potential hostage releases.” The two were going to talk in the next few days.
Mr. Biden is the main supplier of arms and intelligence for his allies so his influence over how that is prosecuted seems more restricted than expected. But because the United States is so tied to both struggles, as Israel’s most powerful ally and Ukraine’s best hope of remaining a free and independent nation, the president’s legacy is tied to how those countries act, and how the wars end.
It hasn’t. Mr. Netanyahu rebuffed Mr. Biden’s push for greater efforts to avoid civilian casualties in a phone call on Monday. And he has pushed ahead with what he has called “mighty vengeance” for the Oct. 7 attacks, using huge bombs to collapse Hamas’s network of tunnels, even if they also collapse whole neighborhoods in Gaza.
In Ukraine, the country’s most senior military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, uttered the word last week that American officials carefully avoided for the better part of a year: stalemate. Many of Mr. Biden’s aides agree that Ukraine and Russia are dug in, unable to move the front lines of the battle in any significant way.
But they fear that General Zaluzhny’s candor will make it harder to get Republicans to vote for aggressive funding for the war — and may encourage President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to dig in, hoping former President Donald J. Trump or a Republican with similar views will be elected next year and pull back American support.
“There is a long history of US presidents believing that they don’t have as much leverage as they thought in regards to Israel,” said Representative Moulton, who has served four tours in Iraq. He said that even if there were huge stakes in the outcome of the fight, it was still first and foremost their fight.
Mr. Biden was joined in his speech by the nation as he mourned the loss of 1,400 people in Israel, but history, geography and America’s national interests separate these two conflicts.
He said that he and Putin both wanted to kill a neighboring democracy.
Democrats in Congress, torn between their support for Israel in its war with Hamas and concern about civilian suffering in Gaza, are struggling with how far to go in calling for measures to mitigate civilian casualties as the left wing of the party escalates pressure for a cease-fire.
“You’ve got to have a pause in the bombing. Immediate disaster is what you have to take care of. Israel’s got to change its strategy,” Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and a prominent Jewish progressive, said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. I don’t know how you can have a permanent cease-fire with an organization like Hamas that is dedicated to chaos and destruction of the state of Israel.
The comments drew a backlash from some progressive activists that highlighted the cross pressures Democrats are dealing with on the issue. Their dilemma, which mirrors the one President Biden has been facing as he confronts growing hostility on the left to his backing of Israel, could carry political consequences for the party overall. Democrats will be heavily reliant on strong support and turnout among their liberal core supporters in their push to hold the White House and the Senate, and win control of the House, in the 2024 elections.
A majority of Democrats favor a cease-fire as well as evidence that younger people and people of color are critical of the Biden administrations stance on the war, which is what lead to the change in tone.
Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan and the only Palestinian American in Congress, put a sharp point on the disconnect last week in a video that accused Mr. Biden of supporting a genocide in Gaza and threatened him with electoral consequences in 2024 if he failed to call for a cease-fire.
International law defines genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in times of war or peace. Top Israeli officials have said they are targeting Hamas, not the Palestinian people.
The video also featured pro-Palestinian protesters in Michigan chanting “from the river to the sea,” a rallying cry referring to the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that many regard as calling for the eradication of Israel.
“None of us, especially elected leaders, should amplify language that inflames a tense situation & makes it harder for our communities to find common ground,” wrote Ms. Slotkin, a centrist who is Jewish. “If I knew that a phrase I’d used had hurt any of my constituents, I would apologize & retract it, no matter its origin. I would ask the same from you.
The phrase means to eradicate Israel and Jews. Period,” she wrote in a post on X. “Only a return of hostages, eliminating Hamas and liberating Gaza from oppressive terror will save civilian lives and secure the peace, justice and dignity you seek.”
Ms. Tlaib defended the slogan as “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.” In a statement, she also accused her colleagues of focusing on pillorying her at the expense of saving lives.