Blinken in Israel seeks cease-fire and hostage deal to stave off Rafah move

JERUSALEM — Secretary of State Antony Blinken, visiting Israel on Wednesday at a moment described by U.S. officials as the last chance to head off a new surge of fighting, urged Hamas to accept a cease-fire proposal and pushed the Israelis to do more for Gaza’s civilians.

Looming over the visit are questions about whether the Biden administration can persuade the Israeli government to support an eventual Palestinian state so as to clinch a sweeping agreement that U.S. officials envision stabilizing the Middle East.

Blinken met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top leaders as Israel appeared poised to move on Hamas’ final enclave in southern Gaza and mediators awaited the Palestinian militant group’s response to Israel’s latest offer to stop the fighting in exchange for the release of hostages.

“We are determined to get a cease-fire that brings the hostages home and to get it now, and the only reason that wouldn’t be achieved is because of Hamas,” Blinken said before meeting Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Tel Aviv. “There is a proposal on the table, and as we’ve said, no delays, no excuses. The time is now.”

The Biden administration sees the current hostage talks, which have collapsed repeatedly in recent months, as probably the only remaining hope of securing a cease-fire before Israel fulfills its pledge to resume full-scale warfare with an attack on the southern Gazan city of Rafah.

Israelis say Hamas’ final remaining battalions are holed up in Rafah and that Israel cannot achieve its goal of wiping out the group’s military capacity without attacking its final stronghold. Israel, which withdrew most of its Gaza troops early last month, recently called up two battalions of reservists.

But an international chorus of allies and aid agencies is beseeching Israel not to endanger more than a million civilian refugees sheltering in and around the city. A ground operation in Rafah would be “nothing short of a tragedy beyond words,” U.N. humanitarian chief Martin Griffiths said in a statement Tuesday. “No humanitarian plan can counter that.”

For the hundreds of thousands of people who have fled to Gaza’s southernmost point to escape disease, famine, mass graves and direct fighting, a ground invasion would spell even more trauma and death.

President Biden warned Netanyahu that the United States could not support a Rafah attack unless Israel does more to safeguard ordinary Gazans. “We have not yet seen a plan that gives us confidence that civilians can be effectively protected,” Blinken said Monday in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

The American team planned two stops Wednesday along the pop-up humanitarian supply chain that Israel and aid agencies are building to surge more food and medicine into the enclave. Blinken will tour the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel into Gaza, which has been a bottleneck for trucks waiting security clearance.

He will also visit Israel’s port of Ashdod, just 30 miles from the Gaza border, where Israel says it clearing more aid to enter Gaza through the recently reopened Erez Crossing, just about 30 miles to the south.

Blinken, following talks with U.N. humanitarian officials in Jordan on Tuesday, said he would press Netanyahu and other Israeli officials to improve the circulation of humanitarian aid in Gaza.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that Blinken discussed aid delivery in a meeting Wednesday that stretched to about two and a half hours, far longer than originally scheduled. Blinken noted recent increases in aid delivery, Miller said, and “the importance of accelerating and sustaining that improvement.”

U.S. officials say the flow into Gaza of critical aid supplies such as food and medicine has increased since early April, when Biden issued an ultimatum following the Israeli military’s killing of seven aid workers in airstrikes. The moment was an inflection point in already strained U.S.-Israeli ties, as Biden threatened to alter U.S. policy toward Israel if Netanyahu’s government did not take steps to alleviate civilian suffering. After months of criticism over his support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, Biden for the first time made an implicit threat to condition or suspend military aid.

“We have seen measurable progress in the last few weeks,” Blinken said Tuesday, citing the opening of new border crossings into Gaza and progress on establishing a maritime route to deliver aid. “But it is not enough. We still need to get more aid in and around Gaza.”

Humanitarian assistance remains controversial among some in Israel. A protest group that has blocked trucks trying to cross at Kerem Shalom appeared Wednesday at the Allenby Bridge crossing from Jordan, where officials are creating a new aid route to Gaza.

The two Jordanian aid convoys were attacked when crossing Israeli territory early Wednesday, the government of Jordan said, with some of the trucks damaged and some cargo dumped in the road.

Blinken had visited the convoys in Jordan on Tuesday as they were being prepared. The convoys ultimately reached their destination.

An Israeli police statement said four men were under investigation after they allegedly blocked humanitarian aid trucks on a road near Maale Adumim, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and damaged them.

The secretary awoke Wednesday to protests outside his hotel by hostage families chanting: “SOS USA — Bring our children home today!” Many carried signs critical of Netanyahu, whom they blame for failing to achieve a cease-fire accord that would free their relatives after almost seven months in captivity.

Blinken met privately with a group of families, then spoke briefly to demonstrators outside.

“Bringing your loved ones home is at the heart of everything that we try to do, and we will not rest until everyone — man, woman, soldier, civilian, young, old — is back home,” he told a small crowd.

Netanyahu is politically pinched between hostage advocates taking to the streets in ever-greater numbers to press for a hostage-release deal and far-right members of his coalition threatening to bring his government down if he reaches such an accord.

Public cracks in his coalition and the five-member emergency war cabinet have widened in recent days. War cabinet members Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, both former military chiefs of staff, have made reaching a hostage deal a priority even at the expense of a Rafah action.

But in an interview on Israeli radio Wednesday, Orit Struck, a minister from the Religious Zionist Party, blasted the idea of trading a cease-fire for hostages as a waste of Israel’s military achievements against Hamas so far.

“We’re throwing that into the trash in order to now save 22 people or 33 people or I don’t know how many?” Struck said.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, of the same party, has threatened to topple Netanyahu’s fragile governing coalition if the prime minister agrees to a cease-fire deal.

“Accepting the deal that is currently on the table means unequivocally waving a white flag and granting victory to Hamas,” he said at a party meeting Tuesday.

These views from inside the Israeli government itself, as well as Netanyahu’s own categorical rejection of a two-state solution, pose a serious obstacle to Blinken’s plan to stabilize the region through an eventual Palestinian state.

One aspect of that hoped-for arrangement would enlist Arab nations in helping to secure and rebuild Gaza once fighting with Israel stops. Blinken began his latest Middle East tour, his seventh since Oct. 7, in Riyadh with talks with Arab ministers whose nations could be asked to play a role in that scenario.

U.S. officials say they have made progress in outlining what governance and security plans might look like for what they term “day-after” Gaza. They also acknowledge that, as foreign ministers from Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia insisted, any role for Israel’s Arab neighbors in peacekeeping operations in Gaza cannot occur without a clear path to a Palestinian state.

Blinken’s talks in Riyadh also addressed another plank of that plan: the quest to secure normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, whose weight in the Islamic world American officials hope would prompt other nations to make peace with the Jewish state.

Blinken said that bilateral U.S.-Saudi components of a normalization deal, expected to include a bilateral defense deal and arrangements permitting Saudi Arabia to establish a nuclear power program with U.S. backing, are nearing completion.

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Lior Soroka in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.