In Israel, Blinken seeks cease-fire and hostage deal to stave off Rafah attack

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

Looming over the visit were questions about whether the Biden administration can persuade the Israeli government to support an eventual Palestinian state, essential to winning Arab backing for a sweeping postwar plan that U.S. officials see as key to stabilizing the Middle East.

Blinken met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top leaders as Israel appeared poised to move on Hamas’s 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 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.

Israeli military officials say Hamas’s remaining battalions are holed up in Rafah, and they cannot eliminate the group’s military capacity without attacking its final stronghold. The Israel Defense Forces withdrew most of its troops from Gaza early last month, but it recently called up two battalions of reservists to deploy to the enclave and has stepped up airstrikes on Rafah.

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.”

President Biden has warned Netanyahu that the United States cannot support a Rafah attack unless Israel does more to safeguard civilians in Gaza. “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 made 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.

At Kerem Shalom, a border crossing point in southern Israel that has been a bottleneck for trucks awaiting Israeli security clearance, Blinken and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant were briefed on the entry and inspection process.

Shimon Freedman, a spokesman for COGAT, the Israeli government agency that handles Palestinian civil affairs, said the Israeli government hoped to increase the number of aid trucks entering Gaza daily to 500 - roughly the number that entered the Strip each day before the war. He cited what he said was a 450-truck backlog of supplies on the Gaza side of the border waiting to be distributed.

Blinken also toured Israel’s port of Ashdod, just 30 miles from the Gaza border, where Israel says it is clearing more aid to enter Gaza through the recently reopened Erez Crossing.

Following talks with U.N. humanitarian officials in Jordan on Tuesday, Blinken said he would press Netanyahu and other Israeli officials to improve the circulation of humanitarian aid in Gaza, especially in the north, where experts warn a famine may already be underway. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Blinken discussed the issue in a meeting Wednesday that stretched to about 2½ hours, far longer than originally scheduled.

U.S. officials say the flow of aid began increasing in early April after 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, for the first time, made an implicit threat to condition or suspend military aid to Israel if it did not to more to alleviate the suffering of Gazans.

Speaking to reporters at Ashdod before departing the country, Blinken said he had left Israeli officials with a list of steps the Biden administration believes should be taken to protect and assist civilians in Gaza, including improved deconfliction of military and humanitarian operations.

“The progress is real, but given the immense need in Gaza, it needs to be accelerated; it needs to be sustained,” he said.

Humanitarian assistance remains controversial among war hawks in Israel, including some far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s government. 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 later attacked when passing near an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, the government of Jordan said, with some of the trucks damaged and cargo dumped in the road. The trucks ultimately reached their destination.

An Israeli police statement said four men were under investigation in connection with the incident.

The secretary awoke Wednesday to protests outside his hotel by hostage families chanting: “S.O.S. U.S.A. - 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 agreement.

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 a hostage deal a priority even at the expense of a move into Rafah.

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

“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, 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 the eventual creation of a 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, conferring with Arab ministers whose nations could be asked to play a key 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 Arab world American officials hope would prompt other nations to make peace with the Jewish state.

Blinken said bilateral U.S.-Saudi components of a normalization deal, which is 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.