Amidst a week of intense escalation between Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, the Biden administration is remaining relatively silent. Senior U.S. officials are hesitant to engage in full-scale crisis diplomacy out of concern for exacerbating the situation.
A senior Hezbollah operative in Beirut was targeted in an Israeli airstrike, and the militant group’s pagers and walkie-talkies went off, threatening to escalate tensions between Israel and its Middle Eastern enemies and derail the already shaky cease-fire talks between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. As a result, the public has been restrained.
The two officials from the Biden administration who visited the area last week to call for calm were themselves escalated, adding fuel to the fire. It adds fuel to the fire that the hard-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is increasingly ignoring its main ally’s mediation attempts, even though Israel relies on the United States for military hardware and support.
“The United States looks like a deer in the headlights right now,” commented Brian Katulis, a senior scholar for U.S. foreign policy at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington. “Regarding words, actions, and words alone… it’s not event driving, it’s event reacting.”
Since senior White House official Amos Hochstein warned against escalation during his Monday visit to Israel, there has been no publicly recognized U.S. contact with Netanyahu. The following day, a flurry of device explosions occurred; Israel was widely believed to be responsible, although the country denied the accusation.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited only Egypt during his trip to the region this week due to the delicate nature of the Gaza cease-fire negotiations. U.S. officials said that traveling to Israel in support of a deal could lead Netanyahu to say something that undermines the U.S.-led mediation, so avoiding Israel was their decision.
On Friday, President Joe Biden was asked if the United States still had optimism for a solution in Gaza. He said that he did, and that his staff is fighting for one. The administration considers a deal in Gaza important to settling the regional violence.
“We might as well leave if I ever said it wasn’t realistic,” Biden told reporters. Prior to their completion, many things do not appear feasible. We must persevere.
Meanwhile, neither the White House nor the State Department have made any public statements regarding the Hezbollah explosive devices that went off on Tuesday and Wednesday, injuring thousands more—including civilians—and killing at least 37 people. Analysts believe that this was all part of a highly orchestrated Israeli intelligence operation.
Furthermore, they will not comment on the airstrike that killed a Hezbollah commander on Friday in a heavily populated area of Beirut, the worst attack on the capital of Lebanon in years. According to the Israeli military, fifteen other operatives were also slain. According to Saturday’s report from Lebanon’s health ministry, a total of 31 individuals, including 7 females and 3 juveniles, were killed in the hit.
The United States views the recent rounds of direct diplomatic outreach between Netanyahu and Hamas as a setback to the truce attempt because they have responded with angry rhetoric or unexpected assaults.
It seemed like Blinken was using the most recent pager explosions as an example of that.
Blinken told reporters in Egypt that whenever mediators appear to be making headway in a Gaza solution, “incidents, something that makes the process more difficult, that threatens to slow it, stop it, derail it.” This was in reference to the pager attacks.
According to unidentified U.S. sources familiar with the matter, Netanyahu may yet have high-level contacts before next week’s United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York, when world leaders gather. The leaders do concede, however, that the current state of affairs is so unstable that a public stand either supporting or criticizing Israel would likely backfire.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller sidestepped a question regarding whether Blinken and other officials were being treated like “furniture” in regional capitals due to months of Biden administration trips to the Middle East without a cease-fire deal to show for them in Washington.
The issue has not escalated into a full-scale regional conflict, according to Miller. He said that Iran, its militia supporters in the area, and Israel were all involved in the United States’ propaganda, which was done through intermediaries at times.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has been in touch with his Israeli colleague, Yoav Gallant, this week, according to the Biden administration. But rumor has it that Gallant’s job is under danger.
The administration is under fire from some who believe it is rushing a deal on Gaza through the negotiating tables despite the fact that the war has escalated and neither side has shown any signs of wanting to support it. According to Katulis, an analyst from the Middle East Institute, the United States may take a more diplomatic approach, for example by actively seeking out support from Middle Eastern nations in order to increase the pressure on Iran, Israel, and their proxies to end the conflict.
Reports that the United States has given up on achieving a ceasefire in Gaza or preventing the crisis from escalating into a full-scale war in Lebanon have been denied by American officials.
According to national security spokesperson John Kirby, “We’d be the first ones to recognize… that we are not closer to achieving that than we were even a week or so ago.” This statement was made on Friday.
According to Kirby, the United States is continuing its efforts with Qatar and Egypt as mediators to finalize a plan for Gaza that can be presented to both Israel and Hamas. We will continue to maintain the shoulder to wheel ratio. We will continue to attempt this.