The Australian / AFP | Adel Zaanoun – Joseph Boyle | 9 January 2024
Top US diplomat Antony Blinken was due in Israel on Monday night for difficult talks on the war in Gaza as fears grow that the conflict could engulf the wider region.
Speaking in Qatar overnight on Sunday, Mr Blinken said Palestinians displaced by the three-month-old war must be allowed to “return home”, while warning the violence could “easily metastasise” into a regional conflict.
Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, violence has escalated in the disputed West Bank and on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, while Yemen’s Houthi rebels have launched more than 100 drone and missile strikes toward targets in the Red Sea and Israel.
On his fourth tour of the region since the war began, the US Secretary of State was scheduled to visit the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia on Monday before arriving in Israel, where he will hold talks with Israeli leaders on Tuesday.
“This is a moment of profound tension in the region. This is a conflict that could easily metastasise, causing even more insecurity and even more suffering,” Mr Blinken told a news conference in Doha alongside Qatar’s Prime Minister, Sheik Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani.
The war started when Hamas, designated a terrorist organisation by the US and Australia, on October 7 launched an unprecedented attack on Israel that resulted in about 1140 deaths, most of them civilians. The militants also took around 250 hostages, 132 of whom remain in captivity, according to Israel. At least 24 are believed to have been killed.
In response, Israel has carried out a relentless bombardment and ground invasion that have killed at least 22,835 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
Mr Blinken warned it was “imperative” Israel put a “premium on protecting civilians”, ensuring operations were “designed around protecting civilians … and around getting humanitarian assistance where people need it”.
Amid the deepening humanitarian crisis and mass displacement in Gaza, Mr Blinken said civilians “must be able to return home as soon as conditions allow”.
“They cannot, they must not be pressed to leave Gaza,” he said, after two Israeli minsters suggested Palestinians should be encouraged to emigrate.
In the West Bank deadly violence has surged in recent months to levels unseen in nearly two decades.
An Israeli strike on Sunday killed seven Palestinians in the northern city of Jenin, the Ramallah-based Palestinian health ministry said, also reporting an eighth fatality by Israeli fire in a separate incident.
An Israeli border police officer was killed when a roadside bomb hit her vehicle during a raid on Jenin, and an Israeli civilian was killed in a separate shooting near Ramallah, Israeli officials said.
Later, Israeli police said officers responding to a car-ramming attack at a West Bank checkpoint shot a Palestinian girl, with medics confirming the three-year-old child’s death.
Violence persisted along Israel’s northern border, with Hezbollah saying on Saturday it had fired 62 rockets at an Israeli military base, days after it blamed Israel for a strike in Beirut that killed Hamas’s deputy leader, Saleh al-Arouri. The Israeli military said it had struck Hezbollah “military sites” in response, while army spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari warned the Hamas ally against “dragging Lebanon into an unnecessary war”.
Mr Blinken arrived in Qatar following stops in Jordan, Turkey and Greece. He went on to Abu Dhabi late on Sunday, and on Monday was due to travel to Saudi Arabia where he was due to meet Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Saudi desert city of al-Ula, said a US official on condition of anonymity.
Qatar, a wealthy Gulf emirate that hosts the largest US military base in the Middle East, also hosts Hamas’s political office and is the main residence of the Islamists’ self-exiled leader, Ismail Haniyeh.
The Qatari premier said talks with Hamas on a fresh truce in Gaza were “ongoing” with US backing.
Doha mediated a one-week break in fighting in November that led to the release of scores of Israeli and foreign hostages, as well as aid being allowed to enter the besieged Gaza Strip.
However, Sheik Mohammed said the strike in Lebanon last week that killed Arouri had affected “the complicated process”.
“Yet we are not giving up. We are moving forward,” he said.
At Lebanon’s main airport in Beirut, hackers used the departures and arrivals screens to display an anti-Hezbollah message. “Hassan Nasrallah, no one will support you if you drag the country into war,” said the message, addressing Hezbollah’s leader.