Biden says worried about rising Middle East tensions, trying to prevent all-out war
US president says administration ‘pushing hard’ to avoid Israel-Hezbollah conflict from spreading across region; White House blames Sinwar for holding up hostage-ceasefire deal
US President Joe Biden told querying journalists Sunday that he was worried about rising tensions in the Middle East and that his administration was working to prevent them from boiling over into a regional conflict.
Biden was quizzed about his position as fighting between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group heated up after 11 months of simmering deadly conflict across the border, alongside open war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“We’re going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out. And we’re still pushing hard,” he told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House.
Hezbollah says it is attacking in support of Gaza, where Palestinian terror group Hamas prompted an ongoing war by leading a massive October 7 attack on Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
Qatar, Egypt, and the United States have for months tried to secure a ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza, although the sides remain far apart on key issues.
Biden administration officials in the past few days sent the draft text of a new proposal to Israel and, via Qatari and Egyptian mediators, to Hamas, Channel 12 news reported Sunday, citing an Israeli and an American source.
Israel has expressed reservations, including over clauses relating to the Philadelphi Corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border and the Netzarim Corridor that divides between northern and southern Gaza, the report said.
But it said Hamas flatly rejected the draft text and said it would not accept any deal that differs from a previous proposal presented by Biden at the end of May.
Biden’s May presentation was, in fact, based on an Israeli proposal, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that, in its response, Hamas sought to make 29 changes. For his part, Netanyahu has in recent months repeatedly invoked a series of nonnegotiable conditions for a deal that are not specified in the May proposal. Those included retaining control of the Philadelphi Corridor to prevent Hamas from smuggling in weapons from Egypt.
Channel 12’s report suggested that Hamas’s firmly negative response to the latest US ideas may have been tied to White House National Security spokesman John Kirby’s comments earlier Sunday blaming Hamas for talks stalling.
“It doesn’t appear that Mr. Sinwar is prepared at all to keep negotiating in good faith, especially after he murdered six hostages in a tunnel, execution style,” Kirby said on ABC’s “This Week.” He also called for a diplomatic solution amid heightening cross-border tensions between Israel and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terror group.
“It doesn’t appear as if he’s willing to move this forward,” Kirby said.
The IDF recovered the bodies of six hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 from a tunnel in southern Gaza’s Rafah at the beginning of the month, just days after they were murdered by their captors.
.@GStephanopoulos: “It appears that the Gaza cease-fire talks have gone cold. Is that right?”
White House's John Kirby: “I would say that we are not achieving any progress here in the last week to two weeks … Not for lack of trying.” https://t.co/D2DfoLK09n pic.twitter.com/xNJwIwBF6T
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) September 22, 2024
In the interview, Kirby also said that a regional military escalation isn’t in Israel’s “best interest,” adding that the United States was “saying this directly to our Israeli counterparts.”
“The tensions are much higher now than they were even just a few days ago,” Kirby said, though he added, “We still believe that there can be time and space for a diplomatic solution here and that’s what we’re working on.
“We’ve been working since the beginning of this conflict, October 8th and on, to try to prevent an escalation, to prevent a broadening of this conflict there in and around Israel, but also in the region,” Kirby said.
Earlier in the day, Netanyahu vowed to return tens of thousands of residents of northern Israel displaced from their homes by nearly a year of Hezbollah attacks.
An escalating war is “certainly not going to be in the best interest of all those people that Prime Minister Netanyahu says he wants to be able to send back home,” Kirby said.
The war in Gaza began when Palestinian terror group Hamas led a devastating October 7 cross-border attack on southern Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Israel responded with a military offensive to destroy Hamas in Gaza and save 251 hostages who were abducted from Israel on October 7 and taken as captives to Gaza. Of those, 97 remain in captivity, with about a third of them believed no longer alive.
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there.
That fighting, which had already raised fears it could escalate into a war on another front, ramped up intensity last week as Israel killed several top Hezbollah commanders in a Beirut airstrike. Last week also saw the mass detonation of pagers, walkie-talkies and other devices used by Hezbollah operatives, in which dozens were killed and thousands were injured. The operation, on which Israel hasn’t commented, has been widely attributed to the Jewish state in what was reportedly a far-reaching and innovative endeavor that displayed extensive capabilities.
Over the weekend Hezbollah launched multiple barrages of rockets at northern Israel, aiming deeper into the country than it had in the past. Israel meanwhile bombed hundreds of Hezbollah launchers and sites.
Sunday overnight rocket fire from Lebanon reached Kiryat Bialik on the edge of north Israel’s biggest city Haifa, leaving a building in flames, another pockmarked with shrapnel, and vehicles incinerated.
So far, the skirmishes in the north have resulted in 26 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 22 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
Hezbollah has named 505 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. Another 79 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and dozens of civilians have also been killed.
