Blinken Begins New Middle East Trip as US Strains with Israel Show

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken embarked on a Middle East mission on Wednesday as strain showed in the relationship between President Joe Biden’s administration and the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In Gaza, where hopes were dashed for a ceasefire in the nearly six-month-old war in time for Ramadan last week, residents of Gaza City in the north described the most intense fighting for months around the Al Shifa hospital.
Blinken was due in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday and Cairo on Thursday to talk to regional leaders about efforts to secure a truce. Unusually, no stop in Israel was announced at the outset of his trip, and Israel’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday it had not been notified to prepare for one.
Recent days have seen an intensification of fighting in northern parts of Gaza captured by Israeli forces early in the war, including Al Shifa, once Gaza’s biggest hospital, now one of the few even partially functioning in the north.
“We are living through similar dreadful conditions to when Israeli forces first raided Gaza City: sounds of explosions, Israeli bombardment of houses is non-stop,” Amal, 27, living around a kilometer from Al Shifa hospital, told Reuters via a chat app.
The Israeli prime minister on Tuesday rebuffed a plea from Biden to call off plans for a ground assault of Rafah, the city on the southern edge of Gaza sheltering more than half the enclave’s 2.3 million people.
Netanyahu told lawmakers he had made it “supremely clear” to Biden in a phone call “that we are determined to complete the elimination of these battalions in Rafah considered by Israel as the last major holdout of armed fighters from Hamas.