The Biden administration has grown increasingly concerned that the Israeli effort risks radicalizing the civilian population in Gaza and throughout the region, hurting rather than helping Israel’s overall security situation in the long run.
Although Friday’s talks in Israel covered a range of issues regarding the country’s security situation following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, Blinken’s focus was on encouraging the Israelis to take “humanitarian pauses” to enable aid to safely flow into Gaza and to facilitate an effort to free hostages who remain captive there. The United States and other international partners are working to encourage Hamas to release its prisoners.
But Netanyahu rejected any effort to link hostage talks with a pause in the fighting, saying just minutes after Blinken publicly called for it that consideration of any cease-fire would happen only after all of the hostages were freed.
Netanyahu, speaking in a televised address, said he told Blinken that “we are continuing full force, and that Israel refuses a temporary cease-fire that does not include the return of hostages.” More than 200 Israelis and foreigners captured during the attack are believed to be held inside Gaza.
Although the terms have varied in recent weeks, Hamas has indicated most recently that it would release all civilian hostages in exchange for a five-day pause, according to diplomats familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive matter. Israeli military captives, whose precise number is unknown, would be retained, possibly to eventually be offered in trade for Palestinian prisoners in Israel.
Sporadic, indirect negotiations are being held in Doha, Qatar’s capital, where they have waxed and waned depending on the tempo of Israeli strikes. With Qatari officials as go-betweens, the United States has been variously represented by Barbara Leaf, the State Department’s assistant secretary for the Near East, and White House and State Department hostage negotiators, diplomats said. Representatives of Israel’s Mossad national intelligence agency, have also traveled to Doha. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s top political leader, who lives in Turkey, has participated, along with former leader and current head of Hamas diaspora affairs Khaled Meshaal, who lives in Qatar.
Lists of some but not all of the hostages’ names have been turned over, as Hamas maintains it still may not have located all of them, especially those who may be held by Islamic Jihad, a separate Gaza-based militant group. At various times, Hamas has said publicly, without providing any evidence, that some hostages have been killed by Israeli airstrikes.
Hamas has also demanded increases in humanitarian aid and fuel for, they say, civilian use inside Gaza.
A senior administration official, briefing reporters in Washington late Friday on the condition of anonymity imposed by the White House, confirmed that “indirect engagement” with Hamas “to try to find a framework to try to get the hostages out” was underway. It would require, the official said, “a very significant pause in the violence,” which he did not define.
The official said the earlier release of two American women hostages was “a pilot to see if it was possible,” and included a brief pause to allow them to be escorted to an Israeli border crossing by the International Committee of the Red Cross. “In the course of any military operation in an environment like this, it is fairly natural to build into a campaign pauses to allow civilians to move and ensure humanitarian aid is getting … to those who need it.” The pilot proved not only that the fighting could temporarily cease, but that the Hamas representatives they are indirectly dealing with had the power to make it happen on their side. The official said Blinken had discussed that concept with the Israelis during the visit.
“I can’t put a time frame on it. This is not a process in which two parties are sitting at a table to work something out. The difficulty of actually communicating with those actually responsible, for getting fidelity on how many and who would come out when” is “a very complex process.”
“The discussions have been intense, detailed, and we have proven that it is possible …[but] there is absolutely no guarantee if it is going to happen, or when,” the official said.
U.S. diplomats intend to continue to push Netanyahu, saying they are open to talks about the details of what a humanitarian pause might consist of. Blinken, said he felt that Israeli leaders had valid concerns.
“A number of legitimate questions were raised in our discussions today, including how to use any period of pause to maximize the flow of humanitarian assistance, how to connect a pause to the release of hostages and ensure that Hamas doesn’t use these pauses or arrangements to its own advantage,” Blinken told reporters after the meetings.
During his second trip to the Middle East — and fourth stop in Israel — since the Hamas attack, Blinken declared that the United States will continue to robustly back its ally and what he described as Israel’s “obligation” to engage in self-defense. But he also said that the Jewish state must think carefully about how to dismantle Hamas as a security threat in a way that would avoid Gaza residents being drawn to the “siren song of nihilism” in the future.
“As long as the United States stands, Israel will never stand alone,” Blinken told reporters in Tel Aviv after a day of meetings with Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and the country’s war cabinet.
But “as Israel conducts its campaign to defeat Hamas, how it does so matters,” he said. “It matters because it’s the right and lawful thing to do. It matters because failure to do so plays into the hands of Hamas and other terrorist groups.”
Neither Israel’s prime minister nor its president appeared fully receptive to his message.
Israeli leaders also declared that their country has the right to push Gazan residents to clear out of the northern part of the territory to facilitate an assault on Hamas, something that the United Nations and other international organizations have rejected as violating the rights of civilians.
Herzog detailed the message authorities were giving to Gazan citizens.
“Please move out, because we have the right to self-defense,” he said. “We want you to go out of the premises from where missiles and guns and bombs and mortars are shelled at our people and from where the horrendous atrocious attacks went out. So you move out, so we can go in, according to international law and defend our people.”
Herzog said that 1.2 million pamphlets have been dropped on Gaza with the warning, and that Israeli authorities have made 28,000 calls and sent 6 million recorded messages and 4 million texts.
As Herzog and Blinken met, chants could be heard from outside the meeting from families of hostages, who were demanding that no cease-fire take place until their family members were freed.
Blinken held firm to what he said the United States believed was in Israel’s own security interest.
Israel’s offensive against Hamas is “also about defeating an idea, a perverted idea. But an idea that we have to combat with a better idea, with a better future,” Blinken said. “Because in the absence of that, even after Hamas, those who sing the siren song of nihilism will find open ears.”
Blinken also took aim at what he said was extremist settler violence in the West Bank, and said that in discussions, Israeli leaders had committed to dealing with it.
The United Nations and other international organizations have criticized the Israeli military response for failing to appropriately protect civilians and have said that the order to move south is creating a humanitarian crisis, which the Israeli government denies.
Blinken’s trip was a reprise of his other visits last month, beginning just days after Hamas’s attack on Israel. This time, though, the top U.S. diplomat was pressing the Israelis more forcefully to ease the growing humanitarian situation in the densely populated territory of Gaza, where the United Nations estimates that more than half the 2.3 million population has been displaced by the Israeli assault.
President Biden has also called for “humanitarian pauses” in the Israeli offensive that would facilitate aid getting in and foreign nationals in Gaza getting out, after the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt finally allowed people through this week.
The Biden administration has offered robust military support to Israel in its effort to respond to the Hamas attack, but it has increasingly urged Israeli leaders to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza and to hold back from a full-scale invasion.
Blinken spoke of the civilian toll in unusually personal terms, appearing near tears when he talked about a video that Israeli authorities had shown him of a Hamas assault on an Israeli family at home, as a father tried to protect his two young children while a Hamas fighter threw a grenade into the residence, killing the man.
Blinken — who also has two young children — said he also thought of them when he watched videos of Palestinian children in Gaza being pulled out of the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli airstrikes.
The administration is trying to prevent the conflict from escalating into a regional war, and officials have been keeping a careful eye on Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement as well as Tehran itself. Underscoring the risk, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah spoke Friday at the same time as Blinken, declaring his support for Hamas’s cause, though he stopped short of calling for a full war against Israel.
Blinken said he is pushing for long-term planning for regional security, reiterating that a two-state solution is the best way Israel can ensure its safety.
U.S. diplomats pushed hard to facilitate the opening of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt to enable U.S. citizens, other foreign nationals and wounded civilians to leave starting Wednesday.
Blinken departed Israel Friday afternoon for Amman where he plans to meet with Jordanian leaders on Saturday. His counterpart from Qatar is also expected to attend, diplomatic officials said.
DeYoung reported from Washington.
