Blinken wraps up Mideast tour with tepid, if any, support for pause in Gaza fighting
ANKARA, Turkey — U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was wrapping up a grueling Middle East diplomatic tour Monday after only limited success in his effort to forge a regional consensus on how best to ease civilian suffering in Gaza as Israel intensifies its war against Hamas.
In Turkey, Blinken met in the capital, Ankara, with Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan after a frantic weekend of travel that took him to Israel, Jordan, the occupied West Bank, Cyprus and Iraq to build support for the Biden administration’s proposal for “humanitarian pauses” to Israel’s relentless military campaign in Gaza.
“All of this is a work in progress,” Blinken said before leaving Turkey. “We don’t obviously agree on everything, but there are common views on some of the imperatives of the moment that we’re working on together.”
Blinken’s shuttle diplomacy came as Israeli troops surrounded Gaza City and cut off the northern part of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. If they enter the city as expected, the troops are likely to face militants fighting street by street using a vast network of tunnels. Casualties will likely rise on both sides in the month-old war, which has already killed more than 9,700 Palestinians.
Blinken hopes that pauses in the war would allow for a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza and the release of hostages captured by Hamas during its Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel — which killed more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians — while also preventing the conflict from spreading regionally.
“We’ve engaged the Israelis on steps that they can take to minimize civilian casualties,” Blinken said before leaving Ankara. “We’re working, as I said, very aggressively on getting more humanitarian assistance into Gaza.
The cutoff of the Gaza Strip’s northern half comes as Israel is expected to order its troops into dense Gaza City, where fighting will be fierce.
“We are very focused on the hostages held by Hamas, including the Americans, and we are doing everything possible to bring them home,” he added.
Blinken did not meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been highly critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is an outlier among NATO allies in not expressing full support for Israel’s right to defend itself.
As the Blinken-Fidan meeting got underway, dozens of protesters from an Islamist group carried Turkish and Palestinian flags and held up anti-U.S. and anti-Israel placards outside the Foreign Ministry. Police earlier in the day dispersed a group of students marching toward the ministry chanting, “Murderer Blinken, get out of Turkey!”
Also Monday, about 150 people rallied outside the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, carrying a large banner that read: “No to genocide!”
A Times special correspondent in Gaza offers a personal account of living in a place where nowhere feels safe.
It was the second day of protests denouncing Blinken’s visit. On Sunday, pro-Palestinian protesters clashed with Turkish riot police outside the U.S.-Turkish Incirlik military air base in the southern city of Adana. Police fired tear gas and water cannons as the demonstrators tried to cross fields to enter the base.
Blinken’s mission, his second to the region since the war began, has found only tepid, if any, support for his efforts to contain the fallout from the conflict. Israel has rejected the idea of pauses in the fighting while Arab and Muslim nations are instead demanding an immediate cease-fire as the casualty toll soars among Palestinian civilians under Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
U.S. officials are seeking to convince Israel of the strategic importance of respecting the laws of war by protecting noncombatants and significantly boosting deliveries of humanitarian aid to Gaza’s beleaguered civilian population.
It remained unclear, however, if Netanyahu would agree to temporary, rolling pauses in the massive operation to eradicate Hamas — or whether outrage among Palestinians and their supporters could be assuaged if he did.
A month after Hamas’ surprise attack nearly brought Israel to its knees, the country’s battered ‘peace camp’ is rising — or trying its best to do so.
Already, Jordan and Turkey have recalled their ambassadors to Israel to protest its tactics, and the tide of international opinion appears to be turning from sympathy toward Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7 to revulsion as images of death and destruction in Gaza spread around the world.
On Saturday, in the Jordanian capital of Amman, both the Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers appeared at a news conference with Blinken. The two said Israel’s war had gone beyond self-defense and could no longer be justified as it now amounted to collective punishment of the Palestinian people.
That sentiment was echoed by tens of thousands of demonstrators who marched in the streets of world capitals over the weekend to protest Israel and condemn U.S. support for Israel.
After finishing his talks in Turkey, Blinken will head to Asia, where the Gaza conflict will likely share top billing with other international crises at a series of events in Japan, South Korea and India, including Russia’s war on Ukraine and North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
L.A. residents have helped raise more than $100,000 for the Kfar Aza kibbutz in Israel, after the attack killed around 60 people.
On Sunday, Blinken flew from the occupied West Bank, where he held talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to Baghdad for talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Sudani.
When word spread of Blinken’s arrival in the West Bank city of Ramallah, dozens of Palestinians turned out to protest, holding signs showing dripping blood and with messages that included, “Blinken, blood is on your hands.” The meeting with Abbas ended without any public comment.
The Palestinian Authority administers semiautonomous areas of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It has not been a factor in the Gaza Strip since 2007, when Hamas seized control after winning in elections there a year earlier. Abbas himself is unpopular among Palestinians.
U.S. forces in the region face a surge of attacks by Iranian-allied militias in Iraq and elsewhere. U.S. forces shot down another one-way attack drone Sunday that was targeting American and coalition troops near their base in neighboring Syria, a U.S. official said.
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The Biden administration, while remaining the strongest backer of Israel’s military response to Hamas’ assault, is increasingly seeking to use its influence with Israel to try to temper the effect of Israel’s weeks of complete siege and near round-the-clock air, ground and sea assaults on Gaza, home to 2.3 million civilians.
Arab states are resisting American suggestions that they play a larger role in resolving the crisis, expressing outrage at the civilian toll of the Israeli military operations and believing Gaza to be a problem largely of Israel’s own making.
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