Blinken back in Mideast as fears of regional war surge anew

A version of this story appeared in the Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each Wednesday.

The threat of an expanding clash between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon loomed Sunday as U.S. and European diplomats engaged in shuttle diplomacy across the Middle East to try to prevent Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza from engulfing the region.

With Israel and Hezbollah trading rocket fire Saturday in some of the most intense cross-border fighting in months, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the European Union’s diplomatic chief Josep Borrell were on separate trips to the region, seeking ways to halt the violence.

In addition to the spillover of violence into Lebanon, the Blinken and Borrell visits were occurring against a backdrop of surging attacks by other Iran-backed proxies in the region, most notably Yemen-based Houthi militants who have ratcheted up attacks on commercial shipping vessels in the Red Sea in recent weeks.

All the while, international criticism of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has continued to mount, with a Palestinian humanitarian crisis spiraling and uncertainty growing over the campaign’s endgame.

The conflict has threatened to grow more complex over the past week amid the prospect of a two-front Israeli war as the operation in Gaza continues to the south while fighting grows in the north on the Israel-Lebanon border.

“It is absolutely necessary to avoid Lebanon being dragged into a regional conflict,” Mr. Borrell said Saturday during a visit to Beirut, where concerns over an all-out Israel-Hezbollah war have soared since the killing, presumably by Israel, of a top Hamas leader in the Lebanese capital last week.

Tuesday’s killing of Saleh Arouri — Hamas’ deputy political leader and a close ally of Hezbollah militants in Lebanon — triggered a swift escalation between Hezbollah and Israel.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has said that if his group didn’t strike back to avenge the Arouri killing, all of Lebanon would be vulnerable to future Israeli attacks.

Saturday saw Hezbollah fire dozens of rockets toward an Israeli air surveillance base on Mount Meron, with Israel returning fire against the militants inside Lebanon.

While those tensions churned Sunday, Mr. Blinken was on his fourth visit to the region since the current round of violence exploded when the Palestinian militant group Hamas carried out its deadly terror assault against Israel on Oct. 7.

The secretary of state met Sunday with Jordanian King Abdullah II and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi seeking buy-in for U.S. efforts to tamp down fears that the three-month-old war could engulf the region.

Mr. Blinken used the meetings as a platform to stress the need for Israel to adjust its military operations in Gaza to reduce Palestinian civilian casualties there. The Associated Press reported that he also called for a significant increase in the amount of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza, while highlighting the importance of preparing detailed plans for the post-conflict future of the territory, which has been decimated by intensive Israeli airstrikes and ground offensives.

Jordanian officials said that during Mr. Blinken’s visit, King Abdullah “warned of the catastrophic repercussions” of the war in Gaza and called on the U.S. to press for an immediate cease-fire, something the Biden administration thus far has avoided as it upholds a broader policy of backing Israel’s right to defend itself through a military campaign aimed at crushing Hamas.

Jordan and other Arab states have been highly critical of Israel’s actions and have eschewed public support for long-term planning, arguing that the fighting must end before such discussions can begin. They have demanded a cease-fire since mid-October as civilian casualties began to skyrocket. Israel has refused, and the U.S. has instead called for specified temporary “humanitarian pauses” to allow aid to get in and people to get to safety.

Despite the ongoing U.S. support for the Israeli campaign, Mr. Blinken has appeared during his Mideast visit to be moving toward increasing pressure on Israel to move soon toward curtailing its operations in Gaza. The Israeli military signaled Sunday that it has wrapped up major combat in northern Gaza, saying it has completed dismantling Hamas’ military infrastructure there.

But the campaign continues in the Palestinian enclave’s southern reaches. 

The Biden administration, meanwhile, has pressed Israel for weeks to allow greater amounts of food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies into Gaza, and the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution on Dec. 22 calling for an immediate increase in deliveries.

Mr. Blinken, who began his trip Saturday by meeting with Turkish and Greek leaders in Istanbul and Crete, spent time Sunday visiting the World Food Program’s Regional Coordination warehouse in Amman.

The facility has emerged as a central hub for packing trucks with aid to be delivered to Gaza through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings. During his visit, the secretary of state commended the work of the WFP and other UN agencies as well as the government of Jordan to get assistance into Gaza.

“The efforts right here to collect and distribute food to people in need are absolutely essential,” Mr. Blinken said, according to the AP. “The United States has worked from day one to open access routes into Gaza.”

“We continue to work on that every single day, not only to open them but to multiply them, to maximize them and to try to get more assistance, more effectively,” Mr. Blinken said. “We’re determined to do everything we possibly can to ameliorate the situation for the men, women and children in Gaza.”

Still, the rate of trucks entering has not risen significantly. This week, an average of around 120 trucks a day entered through Rafah and Kerem Shalom, according to U.N. figures, far below the 500 trucks of goods going in daily before the war and far below what aid groups say is needed.

Almost the entire population of 2.3 million depends on the trucks coming across the border for their survival. One in four Palestinians in Gaza is starving, and the rest face crisis levels of hunger, according to the U.N.

• This article is based in part on wire service reports.