US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a media conference after a meeting of NATO foreign ministers at the Czernin Palace, in Prague, Czech Republic, May 31, 2024. Photo: Peter David Josek/Pool via REUTERS
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday called for a final push for a ceasefire and hostage-release deal to halt fighting in Gaza before outgoing President Joe Biden leaves office on Jan. 20.
“We very much want to bring this over the finish line in the next two weeks, the time we have remaining,” Blinken told a news conference in South Korea when asked whether a deal was close.
While it remains unclear exactly how close Israel and Hamas are to an agreement, Jerusalem has reportedly sent a team of officials to Qatar for talks brokered by Qatari and Egyptian mediators.
Foreign media on Monday published a list of 34 hostages to be released as part of an Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement. According to the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, Jerusalem had submitted the list to mediators in July.
Israel’s Channel 12 News reported that Hamas had agreed in principle to the list but was refusing or unable to confirm whether the listed hostages were alive. However, a Hamas official told Reuters the Palestinian terrorist group had cleared the list of who could be freed in the initial phase of a truce.
Of the 251 hostages kidnapped by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists during their invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, approximately 100 remain in captivity — at least a third of whom are believed to be dead.
Blinken’s latest comments came after he told the New York Times in an interview published over the weekend that Hamas, not Israel, has been the biggest impediment to achieving an elusive ceasefire deal to end the ongoing war in Gaza.
Blinken batted down allegations that Israel walked away from opportunities to secure an end to the conflict, arguing that Hamas leadership purposefully prolonged the war to the detriment of their Gazan civilian population. He added that placing on Israel and focusing primarily on its conduct only made achieving a ceasefire more difficult, claiming that the Hamas terrorist group used the perception of “public daylight between the United States and Israel” as leverage against the Jewish state in negotiations.
“The two biggest impediments to getting that over the finish line — and we’ve been so close on several occasions and as we speak today, we’re also very close — there have been two major impediments, and they both go to what drives Hamas,” Blinken said.
“One has been whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel, we’ve seen it: Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a cease-fire and the release of hostages,” he said. “And so there are times when what we say in private to Israel where we have a disagreement is one thing, and what we’re doing or saying in public may be another. But that’s in no small measure because with this daylight, the prospects of getting the hostage and cease-fire deal over the finish line become more distant.”
Blinken also argued that Hamas believed that prolonging the conflict could eventually spark a broader regional war involving Iran and its Hezbollah terrorist proxy.
“The other thing that got Hamas to pull back was their belief, their hope that there would be a wider conflict, that Hezbollah would attack Israel, that Iran would attack Israel, that other actors would attack Israel, and that Israel would have its hands full and Hamas could continue what it was doing,” Blinken said.
Hezbollah relentlessly pummeled northern Israeli communities with a barrage of missiles, rockets, and drones in the months following the Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel perpetrated by Hamas. Estimates suggest that Hezbollah, an Iranian-proxy terrorist organization, fired between 100-200 missiles into northern Israel nearly every day for over a year. As a result, roughly 80,000 Israelis were forced to evacuate Israel’s north due to the unrelenting attacks.
Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a ceasefire deal in November, effectively ending a 14-month period of war between the two parties.
During his latest interview, Blinken also refuted notions that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “walked away” from opportunities to broker a ceasefire, saying that Israel oftentimes had understandable rationales for taking bold actions such as eliminating Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
“What we’ve seen time and again is Hamas not concluding a deal that it should have concluded. There have been times when actions that Israel has taken have, yes, made it more difficult. But there’s been a rationale for those actions, even if they’ve sometimes made getting to a conclusion more difficult,” Blinked said.
The State Department leader also expressed frustration over the lack of international outrage against Hamas, wondering why a “unanimous chorus around the world” has not emerged to criticize the terrorist group’s prolonging of the conflict.
“[Y]ou hear virtually nothing from anyone since Oct. 7 about Hamas. Why there hasn’t been a unanimous chorus around the world for Hamas to put down its weapons, to give up the hostages, to surrender — I don’t know what the answer is to that. Israel, on various occasions has offered safe passage to Hamas’s leadership and fighters out of Gaza. Where is the world? Where is the world, saying, ‘Yeah, do that! End this! Stop the suffering of people that you brought on!’” Blinken added.
Blinken also emphatically denied the unsubstantiated notion that Israel has committed a “genocide” in Gaza. He argued that although Palestinians have suffered as a result of the war, the ultimate defeat of Hamas could present “the prospect of a much different and much better future.”“[E]veryone has to look at the facts and draw their own conclusions from those facts. And my conclusions are clear. I think as well, there is, in the wake of this horrific suffering — the traumatization of the Israeli population, the Palestinian population and many others — there’s also a light that one can see that offers the prospect of a much different and much better future,” Blinken said.
