THE WASHINGTON POST: Blinken heads to Middle East in long-shot bid for Gaza cease-fire

With Israeli forces pounding targets in northern Gaza and Lebanon despite US objections, Secretary of State Antony Blinken embarked Monday for the Middle East to try to bring about a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas amid signs of Washington’s limited influence over Israeli policy.

The trip - Blinken’s 11th to the region since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel - is almost certainly the final one before the US election, and it was a sign of the Biden administration’s waning power that it received muted attention in Israel as Blinken left Washington. The Hamas-led assault that ignited the fighting killed 1,200 in Israel, its government says, and about 250 were taken hostage. More than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to local authorities.

Blinken’s trip is intended as a tour of the region to try to understand the likelihood of a cease-fire deal after Israel’s killing last week of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. The Biden administration once hoped his death could bring a close to Israel’s war in Gaza, but Israeli leaders say it is a demonstration that they have Hamas scrambling and should press onward. Similar dynamics are at play in Lebanon, where Israeli forces are escalating a campaign against Hezbollah with an ever-growing civilian toll after killing that group’s leader last month, spurring a top US envoy, Amos Hochstein, to declare Monday that “the situation has escalated out of control.”

Amid it all, Israel is planning an attack on Iran to respond to a massive October 1 Iranian ballistic missile barrage against Israel, risking regional war depending on whether it is large enough that Iran feels the need to respond in kind. A classified US intelligence assessment that appeared on an Iran-aligned Telegram account Friday showed that preparations are underway for a potentially major Israeli retaliation.

Despite the limited prospects for a breakthrough, top US diplomats said they would keep trying. Blinken is expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog on Tuesday before proceeding to other countries that have been involved in the negotiations. Blinken has pushed for increased humanitarian aid to flow into northern Gaza as UN authorities warn that Israeli authorities are blocking almost all of it.

“Throughout the region, Secretary Blinken will discuss the importance of bringing the war in Gaza to an end, securing the release of all hostages, and alleviating the suffering of the Palestinian people,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

Blinken “will continue discussions on post-conflict period planning and emphasise the need to chart a new path forward that enables Palestinians to rebuild their lives and realise their aspirations free from Hamas’s tyranny,” Miller said.

The administration’s Israel policy has emerged as a major domestic flash point ahead of the election, with many Arab American voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan declaring that they will not vote for Vice President Kamala Harris out of frustration with what they say is a decision to place Israeli interests over Palestinian lives. Other voters, meanwhile, have criticised President Joe Biden for being insufficiently pro-Israel.

The domestic anger spilled into Monday’s departure from the State Department, with antiwar protesters demonstrating in front of its main entrance as Blinken’s staff and travelling media left the building. They held signs saying “Palestinian human rights matter too” and poured jugs of fake blood on the street. Top Blinken aides saw and heard the messages.

The Biden administration is eager to capitalise on Sinwar’s killing to revive the stalled negotiations. On Friday, Biden assembled some of his top aides to focus on making progress on freeing the hostages, in a gathering that included CIA Director William J. Burns, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, said a US official familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration conversations.

A major concern for US and Israeli officials is the possibility of Hamas fighters killing or injuring the remaining hostages in response to Israeli’s killing of Sinwar, said two officials who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. Israel and the United States have asked Qatari and Egyptian mediators to relay a warning to Hamas not to harm the hostages.

“We’ve certainly expressed our strong desire to see what can be done to find a diplomatic path forward here to get the hostages home,” White House spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “I cannot sit here today and tell you that negotiations are about to restart. … But yes, we have started to begin to think about it here and have had some initial conversations with our Israeli counterparts.”

Netanyahu has offered safe passage to Palestinians who release hostages. The Israeli government has also dropped leaflets in Gaza written in Arabic saying, “Whoever drops the weapon and hands over the hostages will be allowed to leave and live in peace.”

The Israeli leader has declined to lay out a post-Sinwar strategy other than vowing to continue to fight until “victory.”

Blinken’s visit also invited some risks, as during previous high-level visits, Netanyahu has made remarks that embarrassed or contradicted US officials. As Biden and his aides have declared that it is time to end the war, Netanyahu has ramped up airstrikes in northern Gaza, killing at least 73 people Saturday, according to local health authorities, and bombing what Israeli officials described as Hezbollah’s financial institutions in Beirut’s southern suburbs Sunday.

The Israeli airstrikes on the Lebanese capital area continued Monday as Blinken was in the air, with Israeli evacuation warnings coming shortly beforehand. Lebanese health authorities said that four people died, including a child, and 24 were injured in a strike near the entrance to the capital’s main public medical facility, Rafik Hariri University Hospital.

Israeli authorities also said the Sahel General Hospital in the southern suburbs was sitting atop a Hezbollah bunker filled with cash, forcing its evacuation. The hospital’s director, Fadi Alameh, told the Aljadeed television station that the Israeli allegation was untrue.

The Biden administration has not held back military support and has in fact expanded it, announcing Monday that an advanced anti-ballistic missile system was in place in Israel and ready to be made operational “very quickly,” according to Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, in an effort to deter further Iranian attacks. About 100 US troops are needed to operate the system, significantly deepening the direct US military involvement inside the country.

The top US diplomat has made the calculation that despite the strong headwinds against progress, it is still worth trying to get a sense of Israeli and Hamas thinking about the state of the conflict. Qatari and Egyptian leaders may be able to open a window into the thinking inside Hamas about who will succeed Sinwar and whether that person is interested in making a deal to wind down the conflict.

US officials acknowledged that any significant progress in the next two weeks is probably impossible, predicting that the leaders of any regional actor will probably hold back on any action that could be interpreted as a win for the White House so that credit can be handed to the next US president, whether it is Harris or former president Donald Trump.

Still, the more times Blinken visits the region without the ability to advance US goals, the more he risks becoming “part of the political furniture, the more the parties take you for granted,” said Aaron David Miller, a former senior US diplomat involved in Middle East diplomacy who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The Israelis clearly understand, Netanyahu clearly understands, that they are at a point of maximum leverage over the administration,” he said, with the impending election limiting Biden’s and Blinken’s ability to promote any policy that could harm Harris at the ballot box.

“Even now the Biden clock is ticking much faster than the Netanyahu clock and the Hamas clock,” Aaron David Miller said.

Since Sinwar’s death, Israeli officials have straddled a line between optimism that his killing opens the door to a new dynamic at the negotiating table and insisting they will not stop the fighting until Hamas is “destroyed.”

The prime minister’s security cabinet, largely seen as a rubber stamp for Netanyahu’s preferred policies, met for several hours Sunday to debate possible avenues toward a post-Sinwar settlement. “New ways to reach a (hostage-release) deal were discussed,” an Israeli official told The Washington Post.

As Blinken headed for Israel on Monday, Netanyahu’s far-right allies - ultranationalist members of his governing coalition that he depends on to keep his hold on power - held a provocative conference near the border of Gaza to promote their plans to bring Jewish settlements back to the enclave once the fighting stops. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the far-right leaders, described the movement’s intent to permanently occupy Gaza as “inevitable.”

“It’s clear to me that there will eventually be Jewish settlements in Gaza,” Smotrich said at the event that was attended by several members of Netanyahu’s Likud party, according to local media.

Amid the fighting, some countries are floating new ideas to advance the hostage talks. Egypt is pushing a three-week cease-fire during which time Hamas would release the remaining Israeli hostages, humanitarian aid would be surged into Gaza and a number of Palestinian prisoners would be released from Israeli jails, according to a former senior Egyptian official with knowledge of negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about internal discussions.

Israel now has another bargaining chip: Sinwar’s body, the former official said.

“The Palestinians would love to have him again to bury him in Palestine,” the former Egyptian official said. Egyptian officials discussed this proposal with Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence service, when he visited Egypt on Sunday - a trip Egypt interpreted as an indication that Israel is ready to enter into talks again.

Hamas might be swayed to accept the prospect for a major influx of humanitarian aid, because “in Gaza the situation is so horrible,” and if Hamas were to turn down a deal, they risk drawing the ire of Gazans who are exhausted and hungry after a year of war, the official said.

But after Sinwar’s death, it remained unclear who on the Hamas side might be able to speak for the organisation and command any shift in its direction, the official acknowledged.

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