What began as a “bear hug” strategy of intense support by President Biden has become one in which U.S. officials, facing growing blowback at home and internationally, have distanced themselves from scorched-earth Israeli tactics and pushed for a more targeted battlefield approach.
The warnings have grown more urgent, with measured public language reflecting messages delivered more forcefully in private. In a Thursday meeting in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Blinken said that Israel had the right to protect itself “in compliance with international humanitarian law and urged Israel to take every possible measure to avoid civilian harm,” his spokesman said, a shift from the conflict’s opening weeks when U.S. support was much less restrained.
Blinken also told Netanyahu to carefully plan the expected next phase of the assault on Hamas in southern Gaza, accounting for “humanitarian and civilian protection needs … before any military operations there,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
“We do not support a move to the south unless or until they have adequately accounted for the protection of innocent human life,” White House spokesman John Kirby said after the Wednesday meetings. “There’s a whole heck of a lot more innocent civilians in southern Gaza than there were a week or two ago, because the Israelis opened up corridors for them to move south.”
Blinken also is trying to jump-start thinking about a governance plan for Palestinian territories once the fighting ends.
For now, the U.S. effort includes pushing for an extension of the combat pause that began last week to enable the release of additional hostages held by Hamas. But although Blinken and other American officials in the region, including CIA Director William J. Burns, have advocated a longer pause, the administration continues to support the war’s eventual resumption and Israel’s overarching goal of dismantling Hamas, officials said.
“From day one, we have been focused relentlessly on trying to secure the release of hostages from Gaza, from Hamas,” Blinken said in Tel Aviv alongside Israeli President Isaac Herzog. “And we have seen over the last week the very positive development of hostages coming home, being reunited with their families, and that should continue today. It’s also enabled a significant increase in humanitarian assistance to go to innocent civilians in Gaza who need it desperately. So this process is producing results, it’s important, and we hope that it can continue.”
Blinken arrives at a delicate moment in the conflict. Israel has been agreeing to day-by-day extensions of the pause, raising the prospect it could resume hostilities while the top U.S. diplomat is still here. Tensions and violence continue, with an overnight raid earlier this week by Israeli forces on the West Bank city of Jenin and its main hospital, and a deadly shooting Thursday morning carried out by Palestinian members of Hamas at a busy intersection that leads into Jerusalem.
Israeli authorities said three people were slain and that the two gunmen, identified as residents of East Jerusalem, were killed by off-duty soldiers and a civilian who fired on them at the scene. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack, congratulating “our martyrs” for the “heroic attack in Jerusalem.”
Israeli leaders have offered mixed messages about their willingness to reconsider tactics, and after meeting with Blinken, Netanyahu pointed to the Thursday attack as evidence that his country needed to take a tough approach.
“I have just concluded a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, shortly after Hamas murderers murdered people here in Jerusalem. I told him that it is the same Hamas … that is trying to murder us everywhere,” Netanyahu said in a video statement after the meeting. “We have sworn, I have sworn, to eliminate Hamas. Nothing will stop us. We will continue this war until we achieve the three goals: Freeing all of our hostages, completely eliminating Hamas and ensuring that no threat like this will ever come from Gaza again.”
Hamas, the militant organization that has governed Gaza since 2007, has released dozens of Israeli women and children and foreign nationals who were taken captive during last month’s cross-border assault. In exchange, Israel has freed more than twice as many Palestinian prisoners, all women and teenagers. U.S. officials, among others, are eager for the two sides to broaden the focus of their negotiations to encompass the release of hostages who are men and military personnel as well.
Hamas official Basem Naim said the group was open to negotiating the release of Israeli civilian men as part of an extended, “comprehensive truce” with Israel, though he stressed this would not be possible if fighting continues.
“It could begin with civilian men and be continued to other categories,” Naim said in a WhatsApp voice message, without elaborating.
The effort to pressure the Israelis to shift their fighting tactics whenever they resume the war has gained urgency as the Israel Defense Forces prepare to sweep into Gaza’s southern regions, where most of the enclave’s more than 2 million residents have gathered to escape the fighting in the north. The Biden administration says the current tactic of large strikes has imperiled far too many civilians. That has been a theme of U.S. conversations with Israeli officials for weeks.
U.S. officials fear that if Israel uses the same measures as it did in the north, the civilian toll will grow even worse.
“There is tension between, on the one hand, destroying Hamas while, on the other hand, minimizing civilian casualties,” said Jonathan Rynhold, the head of Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Political Studies.
The IDF “will need to be very, very cautious,” said Michael Milshtein, the former chief of Palestinian affairs to Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories and a senior fellow at Reichman University. “It will not be easy.”
Still, he said, the Israeli public supports the government’s effort to fight Hamas, meaning that Netanyahu is unlikely to agree to a full shift in strategy.
“Right now the only condition the Israeli public has put forward to the leadership is that Netanyahu should be serious enough and really consistent about the goal of eradicating Hamas’s political and military capabilities,” he said. “For many Israelis, this is an existential threat. Nothing less than that.”
Blinken also met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where he continued conversations for what he has called “both the day after and the day after the day after” the conflict, as Israel, Palestinians and the world contemplate the short- and long-term future of postwar Gaza. Blinken has spoken of his desire for a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority to run both the West Bank and Gaza and, ultimately, for there to be an independent Palestinian state.
Both those aspirations face major headwinds. The Palestinian Authority is largely discredited among Palestinians, who see it as weak and feckless. Netanyahu, meanwhile, has resisted a two-state solution, and even moderate Israelis are skeptical. And whatever peace emerges will be deeply marked by the fighting that is happening now, making planning even more complicated.
Khalil Shikaki, a political scientist and director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, a polling organization based in Ramallah, said that in thinking about how to shape its broader Israel-Palestinian strategy, the United States must “base its current policy regarding the pursuit of the war and the means to reach the day after on that same design.”
Sudilovsky reported from Jerusalem. Shira Rubin and Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv, Sarah Dadouch in Beirut, Jennifer Hassan and William Booth in London and Andrew Jeong in Seoul contributed to this report.