WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is taking a more measured approach than usual during a week of dramatic events. escalation Between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, with senior US officials reluctant to engage in full-blown crisis diplomacy for fear of escalating matters.
The general restraint comes after explosions at a camp of the armed group. Pagers and wireless devices and Israeli airstrike One of Hezbollah’s top operatives in Beirut, who threatens to spark an all-out war between Israel and its enemies in the Middle East and derail already faltering ceasefire negotiations in The conflict with Hamas in Gaza.
The escalation came as two Biden administration officials announced Stopped in the area This week, Israel called for calm. This reinforces the impression that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government is increasingly less concerned with the violence. Mediation efforts Its main ally, despite its dependence on the United States for weapons and military support.
“The United States now looks like a deer in the headlights,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “In terms of words, actions, and behaviors… it’s not leading events, it’s reacting to events.”
No US contact with Netanyahu has been publicly announced since senior White House official Amos Hochstein visited Israel on Monday to warn of escalation. First wave of hardware explosions The attack took place the next day and was blamed on Israel, which did not acknowledge responsibility.
The ceasefire negotiations in Gaza were at such a sensitive stage that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken only visited Egypt US officials said Netanyahu may decline to visit the region this week because traveling to Israel to support the deal could prompt Netanyahu to say something that would undermine the US-led mediation.
Asked Friday whether the United States still had hope for a deal in Gaza — which the administration describes as crucial to calming the regional conflict — President Joe Biden said he was hopeful and that his team was pushing for it.
“If you say this is not realistic, maybe we should leave,” Biden told reporters. “A lot of things don’t seem realistic until we get them done. We have to keep doing it.”
Meanwhile, the White House and the State Department declined to comment publicly on the matter. Hezbollah explosions The attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday killed at least 37 people and wounded thousands more, including civilians, in what analysts believe was a highly sophisticated Israeli intelligence operation.
They offered no assessment of Friday’s airstrike in a densely populated area of Beirut — the deadliest strike on the Lebanese capital in years — that killed a Hezbollah commander. The Israeli military said 10 other members were also killed. Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 14 people were killed.
Netanyahu and Hamas have followed up on previous rounds of direct US diplomatic engagement with Fiery speech Or surprise attacks that the United States sees as hampering efforts to reach a truce.
Blinken appears to have been setting off pager explosions while The latest example of this is.
“When mediators appear to be making progress on a Gaza deal, there is often an incident, something that makes the process more difficult, that threatens to slow it down, or stop it, or derail it,” Blinken said in Egypt, responding to reporters’ questions about the pager attacks.
U.S. officials familiar with the discussions, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s strategy, said high-level contacts with Netanyahu could take place when he travels to New York for next week’s U.N. General Assembly, which will be attended by world leaders. But the officials also acknowledge that the situation has become so fraught that taking a public stand either in support of or criticism of Israel could do more harm than good.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller responded to a question about whether the Biden administration’s most recent visits to the Middle East Without reaching a ceasefire agreement For them, it was a matter of making Blinken and other officials look like “furniture” in regional capitals.
“So far we’ve been successful in preventing this from turning into a full-blown regional war,” Miller said, crediting American messaging — sometimes through intermediaries — to Iran, its militia allies in the region and Israel.
The Biden administration has indicated that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has been in touch. This week with his Israeli counterpart Yoav Galant. However, Galant’s job is He is said to be in danger..
Critics accuse the administration of pushing for a Gaza deal that has repeatedly failed to win the approval of the warring parties and has been delayed by the growing conflict. Katulis, the Middle East Institute analyst, said the administration could do more diplomatically, including working harder to rally Middle Eastern countries to step up pressure on Israel, Iran and its proxies to stop the fighting.
US officials have rejected assertions that they have lost hope of reaching a ceasefire in Gaza or preventing the conflict from spreading into full-scale war in Lebanon.
“We’ll be the first to realize … that we’re no closer to achieving that than we were a week or so ago,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Friday.
“But no one is giving up,” Kirby said, stressing that the United States is working with other mediators Qatar and Egypt to develop a final proposal on Gaza to present to Israel and Hamas. “We are still working hard. We will continue to try to do this,” he added.
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Associated Press reporter Aamer Madhani contributed from Washington.
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