Antony Blinken in high stakes trip aimed at truce, Saudi-Israel ties

As well as securing a ceasefire, the Antony Blinken’s trip to the Middle East is aimed at advancing over a plan to establish diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh. Picture: AFP.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken launched an uphill push here Monday to pause the bitter conflict in the Gaza Strip as it takes a heavy toll on civilians, inflames anti-Israel sentiment in the U.S. and complicates President Biden’s path to re-election.

The White House’s immediate goal is to secure a ceasefire that would delay an Israeli invasion of Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than a million displaced Palestinians are sheltering. The Israeli military says Rafah is the last bastion for Hamas battalions in the besieged territory.

But Blinken’s goals go far beyond a ceasefire. He also is seeking to advance talks with top Saudi officials over an ambitious post-war plan that would lead to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, lay the groundwork for an Arab force to stabilise Gaza and define a diplomatic pathway leading to the creation of a Palestinian state.

The multifaceted deal under discussion would also include deeper security co-operation between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, American support for Riyadh’s development of civilian nuclear power, and curbing Chinese influence in the Middle East.

The intense diplomatic effort taking place over three days in Saudi Arabia Monday and then Jordan and Israel later this week highlights the urgency for Biden as he heads into a difficult re-election fight against former President Donald Trump. A wave of protests over the war on U.S. college campuses has heaped pressure on Biden from progressives to do more to end the conflict, threatening the president in states like Michigan that have large populations of Arab Americans.

For months, the Biden administration’s priority has been to cement a deal that would lead to a temporary halt to the fighting and the release of hostages held by Hamas, while creating an opening for talks about Gaza’s future and facilitating greater delivery of humanitarian aid to desperate Palestinians.

Blinken said Hamas was holding up a ceasefire agreement. “Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel,” he said at a World Economic Forum meeting in Riyadh. “And in this moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire is Hamas.” Hamas declined to comment. The group has blamed Israel for the lack of an agreement. Hamas representatives arrived in Cairo on Monday for talks with Egyptian and Qatari authorities, officials from those countries said.

But with Arab-brokered talks about a ceasefire deal yet to yield results, the U.S. is also discussing with Israeli officials how Israel plans to reduce the risk to civilians if its Rafah offensive goes ahead, U.S. officials said.

U.S. officials say the Israeli plan to safeguard civilians remains sketchy and needs further work. The U.S. wants Israel to demonstrate adequate arrangements and a realistic timetable for providing shelter, food and medical care for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who would be displaced by an operation in Rafah.

“In the absence of a plan to ensure that civilians will not be harmed, we can’t support a major military operation in Rafah,” Blinken said. “And we have not yet seen a plan that gives us confidence that civilians can be effectively protected.” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan said Monday that bilateral agreements with the U.S. were “very, very close,” but that details for advancing toward the creation of a Palestinian state, a Saudi condition for normalising relations with Israel, still needed to be worked out. The discussions in Saudi Arabia culminated Monday in a meeting between Blinken and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the day-to-day ruler of the kingdom.

Blinken’s next stop is Jordan, where he is expected to stress that progress has been made in channelling humanitarian assistance to Gaza. The U.S. says a further expansion of aid deliveries is necessary to meet the population’s needs.

The final stop is Israel. Biden set the stage for that visit in a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, in which Biden reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to defend Israel but also repeated the White House’s reservations about an all-out ground offensive in Rafah.

Meeting with Gulf Arab foreign ministers Monday morning, Blinken said Biden reiterated to Netanyahu that he wants Israel to take concrete steps to ease suffering in Gaza.

Israeli officials have said the Rafah operation needs to go ahead to dismantle what they say are the four Hamas battalions operating there and the group’s leadership hiding there.

The U.S. diplomatic effort reflects the high stakes for Biden and Israel itself as anger builds about the heavy civilian casualties in the conflict sparked by Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, which killed around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities.

Palestinian health authorities say that more than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza, roughly 1.5% of the total pre-war population. Their figures don’t say how many were combatants.

The protests on U.S. college campuses has disrupted graduation plans and led to tense interventions by police, who have made more than 200 arrests. Israel, meanwhile, risks a deepening international isolation and fraying ties with its main ally, the U.S.

Pressure also is building in the Arab world to de-escalate a conflict that is generating domestic unrest, distracting from ambitious economic goals and threatening regional security.

Arab leaders gathering in Riyadh warned that an Israeli operation in Rafah would be catastrophic and have urged a long-term ceasefire and eventually a lasting peace process.

Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told the World Economic Forum meeting that ultimately a diplomatic peace process needed to be revived aimed at a lasting resolution of the conflict based on a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Otherwise, he said, “this crisis will continue and it will never stop and it will harm everybody in this region.” Madbouly said there was progress on some issues in the latest round of ceasefire talks in Cairo but that fundamental issues remain unresolved. Internal conflict in the Israeli government and within Hamas is making compromise difficult from both sides, he said.

Egypt worked with Israel on a reworked ceasefire proposal that it presented to Hamas over the weekend, according to Egyptian officials. While Hamas’s political wing initially responded positively, the group later complained that the terms lack any explicit reference to ending the war, which is a key demand from the group, Egyptian officials familiar with the talks said.

Hamas also expressed concerns over comments by Israeli officials reported in the country’s media denying they are willing to discuss the end of war or withdrawing forces from Gaza, the officials said.

The Israeli prime minister’s office declined to comment on the proposals. Jordanian Prime Minister Bisher Khasawneh said that in addition to averting a Rafah operation and securing a ceasefire, there needs to be a paradigm shift away from trying to manage the situation in Gaza.

“What we have to look at is an irreversible pathway towards realising the two-state solution in the context of irreversible steps,” he said, “so that we’re not in this bind again in a couple of years and in a manner that would fundamentally drag the region and perhaps the entire world into further tension and endanger global peace and global security.” – Summer Said contributed to this article.

Dow Jones