Israel, Hamas, and the Israeli-Palestinian Interaction: Antony J. Blinken meets Mahmoud Abbas
Blinken did not offer specifics on potential contributions. Financial and in-kind support from the UAE and Saudi Arabia could be essential to the success of any plan.
Blinken said he was coming to Israel with promises from four Arab nations and Turkey to help in rebuilding Gaza after the war. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed not to allow concrete steps toward a Palestinian state alongside Israel because of its opposition to ending the fighting in Gaza.
Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, met on Wednesday with Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, to discuss Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and the role that the authority might play there when the conflict ebbs.
The state news agency said that an Israeli drone hit a car in southern Lebanon on Tuesday, killing three people inside. There was no immediate word on the identities of the three.
Hezbollah said its drone strike on the base in northern Israel on Tuesday was further retaliation for the killing of Arouri and of a senior Hezbollah commander in an Israeli bombing Monday.
At the same time, Blinken is trying to prevent an all-out war between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. After a presumed Israeli strike last week hit Beirut, killing Hamas’s deputy leader, the two sides have stepped up their exchanges.
The Gaza War: The U.S. and Israel Are Fighting in a Country with a Heavy Armed Forces, As reported by World Health Organization
The World Health Organization has been unable to deliver supplies to the north for two weeks. According to OCHA, five attempted aid convoys to the north were rejected by the military.
The situation in northern Gaza is even worse since Israeli troops cut off the territory late last year. Tens of thousands of people who remain there face shortages of food and water.
The fighting was affecting the delivery of aid, according to the UN. The military’s orders to evacuate have caused problems for several warehouses, distribution centers, health facilities and shelters. Some bakeries in the central city of Deir al-Balah have been forced to shut down. A U.N. warehouse was hit last week, killing a staffer, and five other staffers were detained by the military, with two still held.
Families in Nuseirat’s northern neighborhoods were fleeing to other parts of the camp, Moustafa said by phone, with the sound of sporadic gunfire in the background. He said that there were people who tried to go south on the Gaza’s main north-south road but were turned back by Israeli tanks. In leaflets, the military had told people evacuating to use another road, along the coast.
Nuseirat was built to house Palestinians who were displaced from homes during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation and has now become a densely populated town housing refugees and their descendants.
The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza says that more than 23,200 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of the war, and over 50,000 have been wounded. The death toll does not correspond to either combatant or civilians. Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has been reduced to 85%, and a quarter of its residents are facing starvation because of the Israeli siege.
The Israeli military says it has dismantled Hamas infrastructure in northern Gaza, where large swaths of the cityscape have been demolished. But fighting continues there against what Israel says are pockets of militants. The offensive’s focus has shifted to the southern city of Khan Younis, where ground troops have been fighting militants for weeks, and a number of urban refugee camps in central Gaza.
When and if the current Hamas rulers are defeated, the U.S. and Israel are at odds about how Gaza will be run. The American officials have told the Palestinian Authority that they need to take control of Gaza. Israeli leaders have rejected that idea but haven’t put forward a concrete plan beyond an open-ended military control over the territory.
But there were at least two conditions for that, Mr. Blinken said: an end to Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, and Israel’s agreeing to take practical steps toward establishing a Palestinian state.
The Saudi ruler had told Mr. Blinken before he flew to Israel that the kingdom had a clear interest in pursuing a diplomatic solution.
The leaders of the Arab World are making a concerted effort to end the war. The situation in Gaza will be on the agenda at the upcoming summit between Abbas, el- Sisi of Egypt and King Abdullah II of Jordan. Mr. Blinken also plans to meet with Mr. Abbas on his trip.
The Israeli-Jewish Connection: a Challenge for the Dialogue Between the Middle East and the United States after the Oct. 7 Crisis
“But we have to get through this very challenging moment and ensure that Oct. 7 can never happen again and work to build a much different, and much better, future,” he added.
“I look forward to sharing with you some of what I’ve heard from countries around the region,” he said in public remarks to Israel Katz, the foreign minister, before the start of their meeting on Tuesday morning. “I know your own efforts, over many years, to build much better connectivity and integration in the Middle East, and I think there actually are real opportunities there.”
But Mr. Blinken pressed forward on Tuesday, dangling the potential for normalized ties in an apparent effort to try to get Israel to curtail military operations in Gaza and consider a wide-reaching political solution.
And many Israelis are reluctant to give the Palestinians greater rights or concede to a Palestinian state, with its own military and arsenal, given the horrors of Oct. 7, when Hamas fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians, according to Israeli officials.
The prospects for the kind of three-way agreement among those two countries and the United States, floated by the Biden administration early last year, have dimmed because of the war: Citizens of Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab world are incensed at Israel, given the destruction of most of Gaza and the killings of around 23,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
In their meeting, Mr. Abbas told Mr. Blinken that the Palestinians would not accept what he called Israeli plans to keep Gaza separate from the West Bank, according to Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency. “The Gaza Strip is part and parcel of the state of Palestine,” the agency quoted him as saying.
Mr. Blinken traveled in a convoy from Tel Aviv in Israel to Ramallah, the seat of the authority, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Two men shook hands and sat down to talk to their aides, outside the authority’s headquarters.