Saudi-Israel ties are dependent on the steps towards a Palestinian state
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Blinken and a War Cabinet: Israel and Hezbollah in the Context of General Relativity
Blinken did not offer specifics on potential contributions. Any plan could benefit from financial and in-kind support from the United Sates and Saudi Arabia.
Blinken said he was coming to Israel with promises from four Arab nations and Turkey to help in rebuilding Gaza after the war. Those nations want to see an end to the fighting in Gaza and concrete steps towards creation of a Palestinian state with Israel, something Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed not to allow.
U.S. officials say they expect to see some of the most difficult talks with Netanyahu and the War Cabinet of Blinken’s last four trips to the Middle East.
Three people were killed when a car they were in was hit by an Israeli drone in southern Lebanon, according to the state news agency. There was no immediate word on the identities of the three.
Hezbollah said that its drone strike on the base in Israel on Tuesday was a response to the bombing of its commander in northern Israel on Monday.
As Blinken arrived in Israel, exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah continued their spiral since last week’s killing of Hamas deputy leader Saleh Arouri in Beirut.
The Gaza Campaign in the War Between Hamas and the State of Israel: A Counterattack on the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip
The World Health Organization could not deliver its supplies to the north for two weeks. Plans to deliver medical supplies and fuel to water and Sanitation facilities were rejected by the military.
The situation in northern Gaza is even worse because Israeli forces cut off the territory in late October. There are so many people there that they have a shortage of food and water.
The fighting is complicating aid deliveries, warns the U.N. humanitarian office. The military ordered the evacuate of several warehouses, distribution centers and health facilities. Some bakeries in the central city of Deir al-Balah have been forced to shut down. A staffer was killed when a U.N. warehouse was hit last week, with five other staffers being held by the military.
Throughout the night and into Tuesday morning, warplanes struck multiple areas in and around Khan Younis. The Nuseirat refugee camp was the scene of Israeli shelling and gunfire that echoed through it, according to one resident. They were facing heavy resistance from gunmen in the camp, he said.
Nuseirat was built during the 1948 war in Gaza to house Palestinians who had been evicted from their homes, and it has been used as a densely populated town ever since.
Since the war began, Israel’s assault in Gaza has killed more than 23,200 Palestinians, about two-thirds of them women and children, and more than 58,000 have been wounded, according to the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. The number of deaths doesn’t differentiate between fighters and civilians. Nearly 85% of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have been driven from their homes by the fighting, and a quarter of its residents face starvation, with only a trickle of food, water, medicine and other supplies entering through an Israeli siege.
Large swaths of the cityscape have been demolished in northern Gaza as a result of the dismantling of Hamas infrastructure by the Israeli military. But fighting continues there against what Israel says are pockets of militants. The offensive’s focus has shifted to the southern city of Khan Younis, where ground troops have been fighting militants for weeks, and a number of urban refugee camps in central Gaza.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and his right-wing government have rejected the notion of a Palestinian state, and Mr. Netanyahu said years ago that Israeli officials should support a strong Hamas in Gaza in order to undermine the Palestinian Authority and the idea of a unified Palestine. He has also rejected any substantial role for the authority in Gaza.
But there were at least two conditions for that, Mr. Blinken said: an end to Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, and Israel’s agreeing to take practical steps toward establishing a Palestinian state.
The Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, had a meeting in Al Ula with Mr. Blinken and told him that the Saudis still had a clear interest in trying to end the conflict.
After his meeting with Mr. Abbas he was going to fly to the kingdom for more talks about the war. The Bahrain stop was a last-minute addition to his multiday diplomatic mission across the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East that began last Friday. Mr. Blinken plans to meet in Cairo later in the trip with the president of Egypt, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The Status of the Middle East: A Brief Report on Mr. Blinken and the Israel-Israel Joint Operation ”October 7”
He said that to ensure that Oct. 7 can’t happen again, we have to get through this challenging moment.
“I look forward to sharing with you some of what I’ve heard from countries around the region,” he said in public remarks to Israel Katz, the foreign minister, before the start of their meeting on Tuesday morning. “I know your own efforts, over many years, to build much better connectivity and integration in the Middle East, and I think there actually are real opportunities there.”
But Mr. Blinken pressed forward on Tuesday, dangling the potential for normalized ties in an apparent effort to try to get Israel to curtail military operations in Gaza and consider a wide-reaching political solution.
The massacre of over 1,100 people in southern Israel by Hamas on October 7 made many Israelis reluctant to grant Palestinians more rights or concede to a Palestinian state.
Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, the prospects for a three way agreement among those two countries and the United States have diminished, and Arab citizens of Saudi Arabia and other parts of the world are angry at Israel.
In their meeting, Mr. Abbas told Mr. Blinken that the Palestinians would not accept what he called Israeli plans to keep Gaza separate from the West Bank, according to Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency. The agency quoted him as saying the Gaza Strip is part of the state of Palestine.
The seat of the authority in the Israeli-occupied West Bank was traveled in a convoy from Tel Aviv to Ramallah. The two men shook hands outside the authority’s headquarters and sat down for talks with their aides.
