After vetoing multiple demands for a ceasefire at the UN Security Council, and then abstaining from others, Washington saw on Monday the adoption of its call for a three-phase deal to end hostilities between Israel and Hamas and see an exchange of captives.

Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, was back in the region this week to try to push Hamas and Israel to accept the deal. Washington’s top diplomat pointed to the former as the intransigent party, even though Benjamin Netanyahu still insists on seeing through the war until “the elimination of Hamas.”

Hamas, by contrast, welcomed the proposal laid out by US President Joe Biden in a 31 May speech in which he warned Israel against an “indefinite war in pursuit of an unidentified notion of total victory.”

He said this “will only bog down Israel in Gaza, drain the economic, military and human and human resources and further Israel’s isolation in the world.”

On Wednesday, Blinken demonstrated his utter deficiency in the art of diplomacy by singularly blaming Hamas for not immediately accepting the Biden plan, which the US has described as an Israeli proposal, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Consistent

Hamas insists that it only seeks minor changes to Washington’s proposal, including guarantees from mediators so that Israel does not “evade its responsibilities” as Osama Hamdan, a senior official with the resistance party, said on Wednesday.

Hamas, based on the demands of Palestinians who have endured months of genocide in Gaza, seeks a permanent ceasefire; a complete withdrawal of the Israeli military from the territory; an exchange of captives; no reduction of Gaza’s territory or altering of its demographics; and the return of internally displaced people to their homes.

Speaking at a conference organized by an Israel lobby group in Washington, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, said that the administration still shares Netanyahu’s goal of removing Hamas as a governing authority.

Biden “explicitly said that the path forward is a Gaza where Hamas is no longer in power,” Sullivan said during the American Jewish Committee Global Forum on Tuesday.

Sullivan added that a ceasefire in Gaza would yield “calm in Lebanon” and allow Israelis displaced from the north to return to their homes (tens of thousands of people have been displaced in Lebanon too, but that appears to be of less concern to Sullivan).

A cooling of Israel’s so-called northern front would be no small thing. The US is attempting to de-escalate after Hizballah launched more than 200 rockets and drones into Israel on Wednesday, and attacked nine military sites on Thursday, following the killing of a senior resistance commander on Tuesday.

This week saw the largest volley of fire from the Lebanese resistance group towards Israel since a medium-intensity conflict began after 7 October. The cross-border attacks have killed more than 300 Hizballah fighters, around 80 civilians in Lebanon and 18 soldiers and 10 civilians in Israel, according to Reuters.

Sullivan also said that a deal in Gaza would also usher in the involvement of Arab states “in both stabilizing and reconstructing” the territory and pave the way for normalization with Israel.

This “day after” plan shows that the Biden administration is still committed to bypassing Palestinian self-determination and to regime change in Gaza.

Israel’s current use of starvation as a weapon of war and the use of humanitarian aid as a bargaining chip is a natural evolution from the siege it imposed in 2007. That blockade was an attempt to turn the people against Hamas but only succeeded in plunging Palestinians in Gaza into poverty and despair.

The siege and Israel’s repeated military offensives in Gaza, characterized by the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, paved the way for the genocide unfolding today. The impunity afforded to Israel by the US is a primary factor for the situation in Gaza deteriorating to such an unimaginable point that only gets worse by the day.

Shocking

Washington’s complicity in and co-authorship of the genocide has been well-established but the way it is manifested remains shocking.

Both Sullivan and Blinken praised an Israeli military operation in which four Israeli captives were rescued in Gaza and nearly 300 Palestinians were killed in the process.

Demonstrating the Biden administration’s total disengagement from the horrific reality endured by Palestinians on the ground, and the normalization of carnage in Gaza, Sullivan commended the actions of the Israeli military. He described the “daring operation” as “successful,” making no mention of the Palestinians gunned down and bombed without warning.

The US official’s praise came while much of the world reeled in horror from videos and photos that soon emerged from the operation showing civilians gunned down in the road and children, both dead and alive, with their organs exposed.

Sullivan’s tone was more sober when he did the Sunday talk show circuit the following day, acknowledging that “innocent people were tragically killed in this operation.” He blamed Hamas for “operating in a way that puts them in the crossfire” and holding “hostages right in the heart of crowded civilian areas.”

But nothing that Sullivan said about Hamas would relieve Israel of its obligations under the laws of war, as former State Department official Brian Finucane stated on social media.

Following the Nuseirat massacre, the office of the UN human rights chief said that the holding of “hostages, most of them civilians” by Palestinian armed groups in Gaza “is prohibited by international humanitarian law.”

The UN office added that holding the captives in densely populated areas puts “the lives of Palestinian civilians, as well as the hostages themselves,” at added risk.

But the office said it was “profoundly shocked at the impact on civilians” during the raid in Nuseirat.

“The manner in which the raid was conducted in such a densely populated area seriously calls into question whether the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution – as set out under the laws of war – were respected by the Israeli forces,” the UN office added.

An initial report by three Palestinian human rights groups states that at least 274 people were killed in around 75 minutes, during which Israeli forces operated disguised as civilians, “which may amount to the war crime of perfidy.”

“Bizarre dance”

The line still being repeated by Biden officials – perhaps in response to the widespread belief that the US president can order Netanyahu to end the war with a single phone call – is that Hamas can stop the bloodshed with a single word by agreeing “yes” to Washington’s proposal.

“The fighting could stop today – and hostages could come home today – if Hamas agreed to the deal,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden’s ambassador to the UN, said on Monday, while insisting that Israel has agreed to the deal even though it hasn’t.

He said that it also appears to be an attempt by the US to “wrest control of the process away from the UN … and distract the world from Israel’s ongoing atrocities.”

According to Mokhiber, these efforts are “not working.”

But the US efforts are prolonging Israel’s genocidal war, during which more than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.

Many of the Israelis and foreign nationals captured on 7 October and held in Gaza have lost their lives as well.

The father of a Russian-Israeli man freed from captivity in Gaza on Saturday said that he and his wife had hoped that their son would be freed through diplomatic means, though they lost hope of this when no deal materialized.

Lamenting the deaths of Palestinians killed during the operation, he said that “if there was such a possibility to avoid these victims, it would be much better.”

The possibility was always there, had the US been willing to act as anything other than Israel’s chief enabler.

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• Antony Blinken
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