US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday to seize on the killing of Hamas’s leader to work towards a ceasefire in Gaza, also calling for more aid to reach the war-battered territory.
Blinken is on his 11th trip to the Middle East since Hamas’s attack on Israel more than a year ago triggered the Gaza war, and his first since Israel’s conflict with Iran-backed Hezbollah escalated late last month.
During his meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Blinken “underscored the need to capitalise” on the Israeli military’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar last week, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
This would be done by “securing the release of all hostages and ending the conflict in Gaza in a way that provides lasting security for Israelis and Palestinians alike,” he added.
Netanyahu told Blinken that Sinwar’s death “could have a positive impact on the return of the hostages” seized by Hamas during the October 7 attack last year, according to a statement from the Israeli leader’s office.
Blinken also pressed for more aid to be allowed into the besieged Palestinian territory as concerns rise for tens of thousands of civilians trapped by fighting in the hard-to-reach north.
Washington has warned it may suspend some of its military assistance if Israel does not quickly improve humanitarian access to the area.
Previous US efforts to end the Gaza war and contain the regional fallout have failed, as did a bid spearheaded by President Joe Biden and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron to secure a temporary ceasefire in Lebanon.
As Israel weighs its response to Iran’s missile attack on October 1, Netanyahu’s office said that “the Iranian threat and the need for both countries to unite forces against it were raised” during the meeting with Blinken.
Blinken also again called for a “diplomatic resolution” in Lebanon and compliance with a UN resolution that ended an Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006.
Under Security Council Resolution 1701, Hezbollah should have withdrawn from areas in south Lebanon near the Israeli border, leaving only the country’s military and UN peacekeepers deployed there.
– Night of strikes –
Fighting meanwhile raged in Lebanon, with Israeli air strikes flattening buildings in south Beirut as the number of dead rose over 1,500 in the last month.
After nearly a year of war in Gaza, Israel shifted its focus to Lebanon, vowing to secure its northern border to allow tens of thousands of Israelis displaced by the cross-border fire to return to their homes.
Israel ramped up its air strikes on Hezbollah strongholds around the country and sent in ground troops late last month, in a war that has killed at least 1,552 people since September 23, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures.
An Israeli air strike near a Beirut hospital overnight killed 18 people, four of them children, according to the Lebanese health ministry.
Another 60 people were wounded in the strike near the Rafic Hariri Hospital, Lebanon’s biggest public health facility, which is located outside Hezbollah’s traditional strongholds, the ministry said.
The strike flattened four nearby buildings, an AFP correspondent reported.
– UN rights chief ‘appalled’ –
Resident Ola Eid said she was tossing children chocolate and candy from her balcony when her neighbourhood was bombed.
“Before they could even catch them, the first strike hit, then a second. I saw the children ripped apart,” she told AFP.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk said he was “appalled” by the strike.
The strike on Monday night came as Israel targeted Beirut’s southern suburbs with heavy fire after issuing evacuation warnings for multiple districts.
One Israeli strike on Tuesday came just minutes after a Hezbollah official cut short a news conference in response to an Israeli warning, an AFP correspondent said.
The strike hit a few hundreds of metres (yards) away just minutes after journalists left, the correspondent said.
In the heavily bombarded south, the Lebanese Red Cross said an Israeli strike wounded three of its paramedics in the city of Nabatiyeh as they were responding to reports of casualties from an earlier strike.
Hezbollah said it launched attack drones at an Israeli military base south of the coastal city of Haifa on Tuesday, with the group also saying it struck seven tanks at the border.
Hezbollah spokesman Mohammed Afif confirmed that the group carried out a drone attack targeting Netanyahu’s home last week, after the prime minister decried an assassination attempt.
Afif also acknowledged that some of Hezbolla’s fighters had been captured by the Israeli army.
– ‘We will die of hunger’ –
In the Gaza Strip, Israel launched a major air and ground assault in northern Gaza earlier this month, vowing to stop Hamas militants from regrouping in the area.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said four Palestinians were killed in strikes on Monday, while several homes were blown up in the northern area of Jabalia, a focal point of the recent fighting.
A displaced resident said Jabalia “is being wiped out”.
“If we don’t die from the bombing and gunfire, we will die of hunger,” said 42-year-old Umm Firas Shamiyah, demanding aid be sent to the north.
Despite the exodus of tens of thousands of civilians, around 400,000 have been trapped by the fighting, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned last week.
The war was sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7 last year, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed 42,718 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry which the UN considers reliable.
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