US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday “now is the time” to end the Gaza war, and urged Israel to avoid further escalation with Iran.
Israel is fighting Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and has vowed to retaliate against Iran for an October 1 missile attack.
In southern Lebanon, AFP correspondents reported several Israeli air strikes on the coastal city of Tyre, after the military told people to flee before it targets Hezbollah.
The warning sparked a new exodus from the once vibrant city, where AFPTV footage showed plumes of thick black smoke rising after strikes.
“The situation is very bad, we’re evacuating people,” said Mortada Mhanna, who heads Tyre’s disaster management unit.
“You could say that the entire city of Tyre is being evacuated,” said Bilal Kashmar, the unit’s media officer.
Blinken’s visit to the region is his 11th since the Gaza war erupted and his first since Israel-Hezbollah violence escalated to all-out war last month.
Previous US efforts to end the war and contain its regional fallout have failed.
The Gaza war began with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed 42,792 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry which the UN considers reliable.
The ministry added that more than 100,000 have been wounded, which represents over four percent of Gaza’s 2.4 million population.
– Blinken urges Israel-Saudi ties –
Blinken said Israel had “achieved most of its strategic objectives” in Gaza and now needed to build on those gains.
“Now is the time to turn those successes into enduring, strategic success,” Blinken said as he left Israel, after meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top officials.
Addressing Israel’s pledge to retaliate for Iran’s October 1 attack, he said: “It’s also very important that Israel respond in ways that do not create greater escalation.”
After Israel, Blinken began a visit to Saudi Arabia, which has put on hold talks towards a normalisation deal with Israel until a Palestinian state is created.
Blinken renewed his bid to broker diplomatic ties between them, urging Israel to seize an “incredible opportunity in this region to move in a totally different direction”.
Next, he is to travel to Qatar and Britain, where he will hold talks on the Gaza and Lebanon wars.
Speaking at a summit in Russia, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian urged members of the BRICS group of nations to help “end the war” in Gaza and Lebanon.
A Hamas official also told AFP that a delegation led by a top official in the movement arrived in Moscow on Wednesday for talks on the Gaza war and efforts to halt it.
– UN aid worker killed –
On aid to Gaza, Blinken said he saw “progress being made, which is good, but more progress needs to be made and, most critically, it needs to be sustained”.
His remarks come as concerns rise for tens of thousands of civilians trapped by fighting in the hard-to-reach north.
Israel launched a major air and ground assault in northern Gaza this month, vowing to stop Hamas militants from regrouping.
The only medical facility still partially functioning in the targeted area has “no medicine or medical supplies”, warned Hossam Abu Safia, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital.
“People are being killed in the streets, and we can’t help them. Bodies are lying on the streets.”
The World Health Organization said it was forced to postpone the last phase of a polio vaccination drive in Gaza due to “intense bombardment” and violence in the north.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees said another of its workers had been killed in Gaza, after a strike hit an UNRWA vehicle.
An AFP photographer reported a strike in the southern city of Khan Yunis, leaving a mangled aid truck and mourners gathered around two bodies.
– Over 800,000 displaced Lebanese –
After nearly a year of war with Hamas in Gaza, Israel shifted its focus to Lebanon last month, vowing to secure its northern border under fire from Hezbollah.
Israel has since ramped up its strikes on Hezbollah strongholds and sent in ground forces, in a war that has killed at least 1,552 people since September 23, according to an AFP tally of Lebanese health ministry figures.
Hezbollah on Wednesday confirmed the death of Hashem Safieddine, a cleric tipped to succeed the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, a day after the Israeli army announced his death.
A security source meanwhile said the Israeli army was prepared to keep fighting in both Gaza and Lebanon “for months”, adding “we will stay as long as necessary to ensure (Israel’s) security”.
The International Organization for Migration said this week it had registered about 809,000 internally displaced people in Lebanon.
Lebanese media said Israeli strikes hit areas of south and east Lebanon on Wednesday.
Hezbollah said it had fired rockets at an Israeli military intelligence base in Tel Aviv’s suburbs and a military base in the Haifa area.
It also claimed several attacks on Israeli troops in southern Lebanese villages.
A Western diplomat meanwhile told AFP that a number of Western countries have floated the idea of deploying international forces to Lebanon in the event of a ceasefire.
About 10,000 UN peacekeepers are already deployed in Lebanon’s south, but the diplomat said a separate multi-national troop deployment was under consideration.
AFP