Blinken calls on ‘all parties’ to ‘stop escalatory actions,’ reach ceasefire in Gaza
Top US diplomat says Middle East on path ‘toward more conflict, more violence, more suffering, more insecurity, and it is crucial that we break this cycle’
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday urged “all parties” in the Middle East to stop “escalatory actions” and achieve a ceasefire in Gaza, as tensions continue to escalate in the ongoing fighting between Israel and Iran and its proxies.
Speaking in the Mongolian capital, Blinken warned that the Middle East was on a path “toward more conflict, more violence, more suffering, more insecurity, and it is crucial that we break this cycle.
“That starts with a ceasefire that we’ve been working on,” Blinken told reporters alongside his local counterpart. “And to get there, it also first requires all parties to talk, to stop taking any escalatory actions, it requires them to find reasons to come to an agreement.”
On Saturday, a rocket attack by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon killed 12 children playing soccer in the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. Days later, Israel assassinated Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut.
Then, just hours after Shukr was killed, Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of the Hamas terror group, was assassinated in Tehran, where he had just attended the inauguration of the new Iranian president.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reportedly ordered a direct attack against Israel in retaliation for the killing.
Western diplomats held urgent discussions after the assassination to prevent a full-blown war, and have been putting pressure on Iran not to escalate the situation, the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
“We don’t believe that an escalation is inevitable and there’s no sign that an escalation is imminent,” said US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on Wednesday.
Israel has not commented on Haniyeh’s death, but is assumed to be responsible. The country has been at war with the terror group since October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages.
It is believed that 111 of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of 39 confirmed dead by the IDF. In November, Hamas released 105 civilians in exchange for a weeklong truce and the release of hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners. Since then, however, ongoing negotiations to reach a second deal have been fruitless.
Blinken did not directly respond to Haniyeh’s death, apart from reiterating that the United States was not involved.
Both Israel and Hamas assented to a framework presented by US President Joe Biden in May, which would see the staged release of the captives in exchange for the release of hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners and a temporary ceasefire that, through negotiations, would be made permanent in the second of the deal’s three six-week stages.
In July, amid Israeli military advances in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued four nonnegotiable demands that were not specifically set out in the previous proposal, including a mechanism to prevent armed gunmen returning to northern Gaza and ongoing Israeli control of the Gaza-Egypt border corridor. Negotiators expressed concern about the new demands’ effect on the talks.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, echoing Blinken’s comments, that US officials believe Haniyeh’s killing will make reaching a deal more difficult, “but insist the talks aren’t dead.”
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani told Blinken he remains committed to the negotiations, the newspaper said, though in a public statement on X, the Qatari leader denounced the killing.
“How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on the other side?” he wrote.
