Blinken Pushes for More Aid for Gaza in Talks With Israel’s Netanyahu

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday for talks aimed at ensuring more aid flows into Gaza, amid increasingly tense relations between the two allies over the six-month-old war.

In Gaza, Israel claimed to have killed or captured hundreds of Hamas terrorists in a five-day operation at the Al Shifa hospital complex, the largest medical facility in the Palestinian enclave before the war.

Blinken, on his sixth trip to the Middle East since the war broke out on Oct. 7, has been engaged in an intense round of diplomacy since arriving in the region on Wednesday, meeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and foreign ministers and officials from Arab nations in Cairo on Thursday.

Parallel meetings are also taking place in Doha on Friday aimed at securing a ceasefire in the conflict.

The top US diplomat’s latest visit to Israel comes at a time of strained ties between the two countries, with US President Joe Biden calling Israel‘s campaign in Gaza “over the top” and saying it has had too great a toll on civilian lives.

Prior to the meeting with Netanyahu, which lasted about 40 minutes, Blinken said he would address the growing gap between the two countries in his one-on-one conversation. He also met with the Israeli war cabinet.

Blinken said he would push Netanyahu to take urgent steps to allow more aid into the enclave.

The war was triggered by a raid into southern Israel by Hamas terrorists who killed 1,200 and took 253 hostages in a massacre that included mass rape and other atrocities.

US officials say the number of aid deliveries via land needs to increase fast and that aid needs to be sustained over a long period. Israel says it is not restricting aid.

“A hundred percent of the population of Gaza is experiencing severe levels of acute food insecurity. We cannot, we must not allow that to continue,” Blinken told a news conference late on Thursday.

Israeli Colonel Moshe Tetro, head of Israel‘s Coordination and Liaison Administration for Gaza, said the military does not believe there is a food shortage in the enclave.

“As much as we know, by our analysis, there is no starvation in Gaza. There is a sufficient amount of food entering Gaza every day,” he told reporters.

Blinken is also expected to discuss Israel’s intention to launch a ground offensive on Rafah, the Hamas terror group’s last stronghold in Gaza and where more than half of the enclave’s population is now sheltering.

Washington has repeatedly objected to such a plan. Netanyahu told Biden in a phone call on Monday that Israel sees no other way to defeat Hamas terrorists it says are holed up there.

Last week, the leader of Biden’s Democratic Party in the US Senate called Netanyahu an obstacle to peace and said Israelis should vote him out. Biden called it a “good speech”; Netanyahu called it “inappropriate” and later held a video conference with lawmakers from Biden’s Republican opposition.

RAFAH ALTERNATIVES

The discussion on Friday will likely lay the groundwork for meetings in Washington between senior Israeli and US officials next week, when the United States will present to the Israelis alternative ways to hunt down Hamas without resorting to a full-on assault that would endanger more civilian lives.

Talks in Qatar on a truce are focused on a proposal for a six-week halt to fighting during which some 40 Israeli hostages being held by Hamas would be released, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli jails.

However, Israel is only prepared to commit to a temporary pause to the conflict and has repeatedly said it will push on with its campaign to achieve its aim of eradicating Hamas, which controls Gaza. Hamas wants a permanent end to the war and for Israeli troops to withdraw.

Blinken on Thursday said the gaps were narrowing.

In Gaza, fighting has been concentrated in recent days on the Al Shifa hospital complex.

Israeli troops entered the facility on Monday and have been combing through the sprawling complex, which they say is connected to a tunnel network used by Hamas.

Israel said it had killed hundreds of fighters and detained more than 500 suspects in its operation on Al Shifa, including 358 members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian terrorist group. It said three senior Islamic Jihad military commanders and two Hamas officials responsible for operations in the West Bank were detained, as well as other Hamas internal security officials.

“Those who did not surrender to our forces fought against our forces and were eliminated,” Israel‘s Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told a briefing late on Thursday.