A medical dispensary was affected by the blast wave from a deadly airstrike in a densely populated neighborhood near Lebanon’s largest public hospital in southern Beirut on Tuesday.
Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

Blinken Presses Israel for Truces in Gaza and Lebanon

The U.S. secretary of state, visiting Israel, said the killing of Hamas’s leader last week could create an opening for peace, and he pushed the Israeli prime minister to allow more aid into Gaza.

by · NY Times

Amid rocket attacks by the militant group Hezbollah into Israel and Israeli bombardment around Beirut, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken began a tour of the Middle East on Tuesday, making renewed calls for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and a diplomatic solution to the escalating conflict in Lebanon.

Meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Mr. Blinken pressed Israel “to capitalize on” the killing last week of Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, and to end the war with Hamas in Gaza, a State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said in a statement.

On his 11th trip to the Middle East since the conflict began a little more than a year ago, Mr. Blinken met with Mr. Netanyahu for two and a half hours. His visit was bracketed by the sounds of air-raid sirens in multiple locations across Israel during the morning and afternoon as the military tracked what it called Hezbollah “projectiles” coming from Lebanon. The morning attack, on an Israeli military base near Tel Aviv, sent residents fleeing into shelters but caused no casualties or significant damage, officials said.

In Beirut, the Lebanese capital, rescue workers pulled bodies from the rubble of buildings hit overnight by the Israeli military, killing at least 18 people, including four children, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The buildings were near Rafik Hariri University Hospital, the largest public health center in Lebanon, which was also damaged.

On Tuesday afternoon, a separate Israeli airstrike leveled a building in the Dahiya area, south of Beirut, minutes after a Hezbollah spokesman briefed reporters nearby. The Israeli military described the target as Hezbollah intelligence headquarters, with 25 Hezbollah members present.

The spokesman, Mohammad Afif, told reporters that Hezbollah had taken responsibility for an aerial attack that targeted Mr. Netanyahu’s house in Caesarea, in coastal Israel, on Saturday, which his office has called an assassination attempt. Israeli censors on Tuesday allowed the release of images showing drone damage to what the Israeli news media described as a bedroom window above a swimming pool.

As Mr. Blinken met with Israel’s leaders, the Israeli military confirmed it had killed Hashem Safieddine, the presumed successor to Hezbollah’s assassinated leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Speculation about Mr. Safieddine’s fate had swirled since Israeli warplanes unleashed strikes targeting a meeting of senior Hezbollah leadership around midnight on Oct. 3.

The Israeli military said it also killed Hussein Ali Hazima, head of Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters, in the same strike.

As news broke about Mr. Safieddine’s death, a new wave of Israeli airstrikes sounded across the Lebanese capital on Tuesday.

President Biden and his administration have repeatedly tried to calm the widening regional conflict. In addition to fighting Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — both groups are backed by Iran — Israel is said to be weighing retaliation against Iran for an Oct. 1 missile barrage that Tehran said had been payback for the killing of Mr. Nasrallah.

Both Mr. Netanyahu and the militant groups have repeatedly rebuffed entreaties to show more restraint and reach a cease-fire.

In his meeting with Mr. Blinken, the prime minister agreed that “the elimination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is likely to have a positive influence on the return of the hostages, the achieving of all the objectives of the war and the day after the war,” his office said in a statement. But it said nothing about whether the killing created an opening for a cease-fire in the near term.

Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Blinken, according to statements by the United States and Israel, discussed one of the biggest unanswered questions about the conflict: How will Gaza be governed after the war.

Mr. Miller said Mr. Blinken had “emphasized the need for Israel to take additional steps to increase and sustain the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza and ensure that assistance reaches civilians throughout Gaza.”

During his meetings on Tuesday, including one with Israel’s minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, Mr. Blinken pressed his hosts on what steps they were taking in response to a letter from the Biden administration this month insisting that Israel do more to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza, according to a senior State Department official. The letter warned that U.S. military aid could be at risk if Israel did not increase aid levels by mid-November.

The official said that the Israeli leaders had responded that they were taking steps to increase aid levels, and Mr. Blinken acknowledged to them that the United States had seen some recent improvement but that much more needed to be done.

The senior State Department official said that U.S. officials also told Mr. Netanyahu on Tuesday that a public perception existed that Israel had been pursuing a policy in northern Gaza, known as “the General’s Plan,” which aimed to push out civilians from the area and deny aid to anyone who remained, on the theory that they must be Hamas fighters.

Mr. Netanyahu and Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, denied in the meeting that Israel had such a policy and said the perception had been damaging to them. The U.S. officials urged their Israeli hosts to make that clear publicly to dispel the confusion.

Mr. Netanyahu has vowed that the war in Gaza will not end until Hamas is destroyed. Hamas has said it will continue fighting until Israel agrees to a permanent cease-fire and the complete withdrawal of its forces from Gaza, while Hezbollah has promised to keep firing at Israel until the conflict in Gaza is over.

One possibility discussed by Israel’s security cabinet in recent days was a truce of roughly a week and a half, similar to the weeklong truce between Israel and Hamas last November that saw more than 100 hostages and 240 Palestinian prisoners freed, according to two Israeli officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.

But it is far from clear that such a pause would be acceptable to Hamas, which has said it will hold on to the remaining hostages until Israel ends its devastating offensive in Gaza.

Israeli forces have pressed on with their campaign in Gaza in an attempt to root out what they say is a renewed Hamas insurgency in Jabaliya, in the north. Little aid has entered northern Gaza through Israeli-controlled crossings since the beginning of the month, leading humanitarian officials to warn of a brewing crisis in the devastated zone.

In Lebanon, about a fifth of the population has been displaced and more than 2,500 Lebanese have been killed over the past year in the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, most of them in the past few weeks, according to the country’s health ministry.

On Tuesday morning, search teams and local residents listened for the ringtones of trapped people’s phones emanating from under the debris of buildings destroyed in the Israeli airstrike near the Hariri hospital.

“We’re hearing his phone ringing; it keeps ringing under the rubble,” said Mpsati Mi, 30, an Ethiopian national who was searching for her friend Aamal. “He’s not only a neighbor, but a brother to me,” she added.

“I tried to call,” said another local resident, Ahmad Kalash, a Syrian national who had already visited hospitals to see if he could find his friend Hussein. “I’m waiting to hear anything from the rescuers.”

The attack was not preceded by an evacuation notice from the Israeli military, which said it had targeted a “Hezbollah terror target” in the area and not the hospital. Several residential buildings were destroyed.

The powerful blast shattered windows and rooftop solar panels of the hospital, a lifeline amid Lebanon’s chronic power shortages. Rows of sand bags now lined the underground parking lot as hospital workers made preparations for further strikes. Many of them were in an uproar, saying they did not have the staff numbers and supplies they needed.

At the site of the strike, residents described panic and terror when the buildings were hit.

“The shock wave pushed us — I felt I was flying,” said Ahmad al-Hassan, 48, who was at home with his wife and children when the blast struck. His house survived the explosion but was badly damaged.

Hassan Hakim stood waiting at the site for news about his friend Mohamed, who was still trapped under the rubble, along with his two children.

“I saw a hand,” said Mr. Hakim. “I don’t know whether it’s Mohamed or not.”

Reporting was contributed by Euan Ward, Gabby Sobelman, Johnatan Reiss and Diego Ibarra Sanchez.

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