The Gaza War: When Do We Need It? Israeli Humanitarian Pauses, Israeli Attacks, and a United Nations Demand for a Tribifold
The official Palestinian news agency said that Mr. Abbas called for a halt in the war in Gaza and an end to Israeli attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
Israel has raised some important questions about how humanitarian pauses work, and the U.S. is working to answer those, said Blinken on Sunday.
“It was very important to send a very clear message to anyone who might seek to take advantage of the conflict in Gaza to threaten our personnel here or anywhere else in the region: Don’t do it,” Mr. Blinken said in a brief address at the Baghdad airport.
Several buildings in the densely populated residential area in the central Gaza Strip were destroyed by an explosion overnight that appeared to have killed and wounded many people.
He says the mounting civilian deaths in Gaza are behind the growing calls for a cease-fire — as well as the Biden administration’s push to tell Israel that “you need to really find a way to allow the war to be fought in a more discriminate way that does not necessarily affect all of these civilians.”
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 agency issued a rare joint statement, repeating their calls for a cease-fire and the release of all hostages.
“Enough is enough. The heads of the World Health Organization, UN, and the High Commissioner for Refugees are part of a group that wrote a letter saying this must stop now.
Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington, D.C., this weekend to demand a cease-fire in one of the nation’s largest pro-Palestinian protests since the conflict began. Others have taken place in New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco — as well as cities throughout the United Kingdom, Europe and Latin America.
Several progressive House Democrats introduced aresolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in early October, and a dozen lawmakers have signed on since then. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., became the first senator to call for one last week, emphasizing that it should only happen after all of the hostages are released.
Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected calls for a cease-fire. The return of the hostages cannot happen without them, he stated in his address on Friday.
“This should be completely removed from the lexicon,” he said. “We say this to our friends and to our enemies. We will simply continue until we defeat them. We do not have an alternative.
U.S. President Biden’s confrontation with Israel and Ukraine: The mighty vengeance of the Oct. 7 attacks, a frustrated military commander, and the israeli prime minister
The U.N. defines a cease-fire as “a suspension of fighting agreed upon by the parties to a conflict, typically as part of a political process … Its goal is to allow both parties to engage in dialogue and discuss possible solutions to political problems.
The US asked Israel to stop operations in certain areas of the Gaza Strip so that aid could be delivered and hostages freed.
The U.N. office said that 450 aid trucks had entered Gaza since the reopening of the Rafah border crossing. The number of confirmed trucks crossing through is less than before the conflict.
Daalder says that one is temporary and designed to achieve something on the ground. “The other is designed to be permanent and to end the military phase of the conflict.”
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 stated that Biden and Netanyahu spoke about the possibility of tactical pauses to provide civilians with opportunities to leave areas of ongoing fighting, to ensure assistance is reaching civilians in need, and to enable potential hostage releases. It said the two agreed to speak again in the coming days.
After four weeks of terror and retaliation in Israel and Gaza, and 20 months of war in Ukraine, President Biden is confronting the limits of his leverage in the two international conflicts defining his presidency.
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 the aides to Mr. Biden agree that Russia andUkraine are unable to move the front lines in any meaningful 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 U.S. presidents realizing they don’t have as much leverage over Israel as they thought,” said Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat and former Marine who served four tours in Iraq. And he said the same applies to Ukraine, “where this is first and foremost their fight, even if we have huge stakes in the outcome.”
History, geography and American national interests separate these two radically different conflicts, though it was Mr. Biden himself who joined them in a speech to the nation two weeks ago after returning from a visit to Israel, where he mourned the loss of 1,400 people in the Oct. 7 attacks and vowed to join in the dismantling of Hamas.
“Hamas and Putin represent different threats,” he said that evening, “but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy — completely annihilate it.”