Blinken returns to Middle East amid ‘real, high’ risk of regional conflict
Joel Gehrke
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Israel and the Palestinian-populated West Bank in yet another diplomatic tour intended to mitigate the risk of a “region-wide conflagration” arising from the war against Hamas.
“The risk is real. The concern is high,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Thursday. “It has always been real, and the concern has always been high. And that’s why the tempo of activity you have seen from this administration to try to lower the risk of widespread regional conflagration has also been high from the beginning.”
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Blinken’s nine-stop tour of the eastern Mediterranean and Gulf Arab region will proceed as the risk of an expanding conflict with Iran-backed terrorist organizations — the so-called Axis of Resistance to the existence of the state of Israel — expands on multiple fronts. His trip comes on the heels of another senior U.S. official’s visit to Israel as President Joe Biden’s administration tries to avert the prospect of a major confrontation between the Jewish state and Lebanese Hezbollah.
“We find ourselves at a junction,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told U.S. special envoy Amos Hochstein during a Thursday meeting. “There is a short window of time for diplomatic understandings, which we prefer. We will not tolerate the threats posed by the Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, and we will ensure the security of our citizens.”
That is just one aspect of a fraught and multifaceted crisis. The Yemen-based Houthis conducted their 25th attack on a ship trying to transit the Red Sea on Thursday, the same day that U.S. forces killed an Iran-backed militia leader in Iraq.
“It is in no one’s interest, not Israel’s, not the region’s, not the world for this conflict to spread beyond Gaza,” Miller said. “[We] have had direct conversations with countries about not taking steps that could unnecessarily escalate the conflict. And it’s what the secretary will do in this trip.”
Israel and Lebanon have exchanged fire repeatedly in the months since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that ignited the war in Gaza. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has rebuffed pressure from Hamas to open a large-scale conflict but has touted the military pressure created by intermittent rounds of rocket fire.
“We have been acting on the front with calibrated moves,” he said Wednesday. “Those who think of going to war with us will regret it. War with us will come at a very high cost.”
Netanyahu likewise has signaled his desire to deter a conflict on the northern border. The war in Gaza remains a priority, and Hezbollah’s vast arsenal of rockets would ensure a fearsome cost to such a clash. Yet Israel’s killing of senior Hamas official Saleh al Arouri in Beirut underscores the latent potential for more intense violence as Israel exacts revenge on the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 attack.
“In practice, he was responsible for a whole range of activities to include leading a lot of Hamas military operations in the West Bank,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Nicholas Carl, the Middle East portfolio manager for the D.C.-based think-tank’s Critical Threats Project, told the Washington Examiner. “Arouri also played an extraordinarily prominent role in managing ties between Hamas and the rest of Iran and Iran’s Axis of Resistance. So, this is a character who is deeply involved in a lot of the coordination with the Axis of Resistance, a lot of military operations against Israel.”
Nasrallah faces pressure from the Lebanese government not to escalate the conflict. “We don’t like a regional war because it’s dangerous to everybody,” Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib told CNN on Wednesday. “It’s not like we can order them. We’re not claiming that but we can convince them and I think it is working in this direction.”
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Netanyahu wants Hezbollah to withdraw beyond Lebanon’s Litani River, as required by a 2006 United Nations Security Council resolution that aimed to establish a buffer zone between Israel and the Iranian proxy.
“There is only one possible result — a new reality in the northern arena, which will allow for the secure return of our citizens,” Gallant said.