Biden Says Middle East Conflict Distractive, As Israel Pounds Gaza with Heavy Airstrikes Early Monday
Israeli warplanes unleashed a series of heavy airstrikes at several locations in Gaza City, as US president, Joe Biden hinted that Middle East and Central Asia conflicts constitutes a distraction from US foreign policy priorities.
One of US’ main foreign policy priorities include competition with China, according to him.
In the meantime, diplomatic efforts to end the conflict showed little sign of advancing.
Explosions rocked the city from north to south for 10 minutes early Monday in an attack that was heavier, on a wider area and lasted longer than a series of air raids 24 hours earlier in which 42 Palestinians were killed.
The attack was the deadliest single attack in the latest round of violence between Israel and the Hamas militant group that rules Gaza. The earlier Israeli airstrikes flattened three buildings.
In a brief statement, the Israel Defense Forces says only that “IDF fighter jets are striking terror targets in the Gaza Strip.”
Local media reports said the main coastal road west of the city, security compounds and open spaces were among the targets hit early Monday. The power distribution company said the airstrikes damaged a line feeding electricity from the only power plant to large parts of southern Gaza City.
A West Gaza resident, Mad Abed Rabbo, 39, was quoted by France24 to have expressed “horror and fear” at the intensity of the onslaught.
“There have never been strikes of this magnitude,” he said.
There were no immediate reports of injuries.
The new strikes came after the UN Security Council and Muslim nations convened emergency meetings Sunday to demand a stop to civilian bloodshed.
President Joe Biden gave no signs of pressuring Israel to agree to an immediate cease-fire despite new calls from some Democrats for the Biden administration to get more involved.
His ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told an emergency high-level meeting of the Security Council that the United States was “working tirelessly through diplomatic channels” to stop the fighting.
But as fighting in Israel and Gaza surged to its worst levels since 2014 and the international outcry grew, the Biden administration — determined to wrench US foreign policy focus away from the Middle East and Afghanistan — showed no immediate sign of deepening its involvement.
Diplomatic appeals by other countries for Hamas and Israel to stop their fire showed no sign of progress.
Thomas-Greenfield warned that the return to armed conflict would only put a negotiated two-state solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict even further out of reach. And in Israel, Hady Amr, a deputy assistant dispatched by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to try to de-escalate the crisis, met with Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who thanked the US for its support.
Blinken himself headed out Sunday on an unrelated tour of Nordic countries. He made calls from the plane to Egypt and other nations working to broker a cease-fire, telling Egypt that all parties “should de-escalate tensions and bring a halt to the violence.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, Democratic chairman of the House intelligence committee, on Sunday joined Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, in calling on Biden to step up pressure on both sides to end current fighting and revive talks to resolve Israel’s conflicts and flashpoints with the Palestinians.
“I think the administration needs to push harder on Israel and the Palestinian Authority to stop the violence, bring about a cease-fire, end these hostilities, and get back to a process of trying to resolve this long-standing conflict,” Schiff, a California Democrat, told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Biden administration officials have urged calm but said nothing publicly about prodding Israel immediately to go along with a push by Egypt and others for a cease-fire. Thomas-Greenfield said US diplomats were engaging with Israel, Egypt and Qatar, along with the UN.
Israeli airstrikes on Gaza City flattened three buildings and killed at least 42 people Sunday, medics said, bringing the toll since Hamas and Israel opened their air and artillery battles to at least 188 killed in Gaza and eight in Israel. Some 55 children in Gaza and a 5-year-old boy in Israel were among the dead.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Israelis in a televised address Sunday that Israel “wants to levy a heavy price” on Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers. That will “take time,” Netanyahu said, signaling the war would rage on for now.
Representatives of Muslim nations met to demand Israel halt attacks that are killing Palestinian civilians in the crowded Gaza strip.
The meeting of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation also saw Turkey and some others criticize a US-backed push under which the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and other Islamic nations signed bilateral deals with Israel to normalize their relations, stepping over the wreckage of moribund international efforts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians long-term.
“The massacre of Palestinian children today follows the purported normalization,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said.
At the virtual meeting of the Security Council, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the UN was actively engaging all parties for an immediate cease-fire.
Returning to the scenes of Palestinian militant rocket fire and Israeli airstrikes in the fourth such war between Israel and Hamas, “only perpetuates the cycles of death, destruction and despair, and pushes farther to the horizon any hopes of coexistence and peace,” Guterres said.
Eight foreign ministers spoke at the Security Council session, reflecting the seriousness of the conflict, with almost all urging an end to the fighting. Efforts by China, Norway and Tunisia to get the UN’s most powerful body to issue a statement, including a call for the cessation of hostilities, have been blocked so far by the United States, Israel’s closest ally. Diplomats say the US is concerned it could interfere with diplomatic efforts to stop the violence.
Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, had thrown US support solidly behind Israel, enthusiastically welcoming Netanyahu as an ally in Trump’s focus on confronting Iran. Trump gave little time to efforts by past US administrations to push peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians, instead encouraging and rewarding Arab nations that signed two-country normalizations deals with Israel.
Biden, instead, calls Middle East and Central Asia conflicts a distraction from US foreign policy priorities, including competition with China.
He’s sought to calm some conflicts and extricate the US from others, including ending US military support for a Saudi-led war in Yemen, planning to pull US troops from Afghanistan, and trying to return to a nuclear deal with Iran.
Biden officials haven’t listed deeper Israel-Palestinian peace efforts at the top of their agenda.
SOURCE: FRANCE 24
Share your thoughts on the story Biden Says Middle East Conflict Distractive, As Israel Pounds Gaza with Heavy Airstrikes Early Monday with Nigerian Sketch in the comments section below.
We are not blind to what’s happening. What’s going on now is massacre/genocide. If the media has chosen to be blind to the evil being perpetrated in Palestine, we are not blind and Allah is watching.
What a shame to be involving Hamas militants when we all know they are targeting unarmed and helpless civilians.
We have watched real uncensored videos of the monsters actions, they should remember that even the worst of kings and pharaohs are not now six feet down.