Israel has rejected calls for respite in the Gaza Strip, stating that there would be no short-term ceasefire until some 240 hostages held by Hamas get released, as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken pushed Tel Aviv to allow for a temporary stoppage to the ongoing bombardment.
“During a trip to Israel, America’s top diplomat pushed Tel Aviv to agree to limited ‘humanitarian pauses’ to allow aid into Gaza and facilitate negotiations for Hamas to release prisoners. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said there would not be a temporary pause in the fighting.
On Friday, Secretary of State Blinken met with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv for the second time since Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7th. During the face-to-face with Netanyahu, the American diplomat requested that Israel allow for humanitarian pauses to take place in Gaza.
After the Hamas attack, Tel Aviv ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip. The region’s 2.3 million residents have had their communication, food, water, and fuel cut off by Israel. Tel Aviv has allowed only a small percentage of humanitarian assistance needed to sustain the enclave’s population.
Blinken explained that humanitarian pauses could be utilized to deliver crucial aid to the Palestinian people and facilitate the release of prisoners held by Hamas.
‘We believe that each of these efforts would be facilitated by humanitarian pauses, by arrangements on the ground that increased security for civilians and permit the more effective and sustained delivery of humanitarian assistance’, he said. ‘We see it as a way also and – and very importantly – of creating a better environment in which hostages can be released’.
The diplomat argued that the aid could be delivered without benefitting Hamas. ‘A number of legitimate questions were raised in our discussions today, including how to use any period of pause to maximize the flow of humanitarian assistance, how to connect a pause to the release of hostages, how to ensure that Hamas doesn’t use these pauses or arrangements to its own advantage’, Blinken said.
A humanitarian pause is different from a ceasefire. While a ceasefire would bring an end to fighting, the pause proposed by the White House would only halt fighting in select areas of Gaza for a few hours at a time. Still, Netanyahu rejected the proposal. ‘Israel refuses a temporary ceasefire that does not include the return of our hostages’, he said.
The death toll in Gaza has crossed 9,000, including nearly 4,000 children. Israeli strikes have targeted communication centers, ambulances, densely populated refugee camps, and bakeries distributing humanitarian aid. Nearly 25 percent of all buildings in northern Gaza have received some damage from the Israeli bombing campaign.
A senior U.S. official told NBC News this has caused the White House to want to hedge its support for Tel Aviv. ‘If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements’, they said.
The change in rhetoric does not appear to reflect a genuine shift in policy”. -Kyle Anzalone, Antiwar
It appears as though Israel’s closest allies in the West have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the raised Gazan civilian death toll, particularly on the heels of two rounds of Israeli airstrikes that inflicted significant damage upon a large refugee camp in the city of Jabalia.
While close to ten thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its campaign to eliminate Hamas, according to Palestinian officials, more than 1,400 people were killed and more than 240 others taken hostage during Hamas’s surprise attack on southern Israel on October 7th, according to Israeli officials.